Buhari and signifying monkeys...
BY
I WILL borrow a title from Henry Louis Gate’s book Signifying Monkeys to describe the meaning of General Muhammadu Buhari’s recent comment on his project to Islamize Nigeria. This is in so far as that meaning is contained in Ferdinand Sassure’s idea of language as containing the "signifier and the signified", from which Gates apparently borrows to deal with the discourse of language and identity. For me every identity is a consciousness that is externalized in language. In this case, I will adopt General Buhari and his likes as the "signifying monkeys" of Sharia. But even more beyond this obvious fact, is the meaning of General Buhari’s recent statement.
But first, I wish to say that he is an intriguing man. Like most intriguing people, the basis of his personality is framed around deeper contradictions that are at once irresolvable, and at once constitutive of dramatic ironies. Spare and almost ascetic in comportment, there is a tendency to ascribe the word "disciplined" to the man, in the worn and tired lexicon of Nigerian journalism.
But of course, discipline is not an iron law; its linearity is merely a matter of selective values. If not, he would not have been associated with the story of an under age teenager, his daughter’s high school mate and friend, whom the General is reported to have acquired into his harem a few years ago, in spite of his first wife’s loud hoopla against it.
In more civilized societies, the kind of "liberated societies" that the general does not want, he would have appeared before a judge charged with statutory rape. But, no, this is Nigeria – the country designed by the general and his type. He came to limelight, not as head of state of the fractured Republic of Nigeria, but as Obasanjo’s Minister of Petroleum in 1977, in which the unresolved story of the missing N2.8 billion occurred.
The civilian president Shagari instituted the Irikefe Panel, which closed the matter unsatisfactorily as far as most Nigerians were concerned. That was why not a few people saw him as the ‘weak link’ in the government that emerged after the December coup of 1983. I will leave that bit to historians, but will raise my proposition from here: I do not consider General Buhari a true Moslem – he is a zealot who in his last statement on his Islamic vision indicated his stance on the path of war.
His notion of the conquest of Nigeria resonates deeply in his current utterances. People have seen his transformation from the secular general of the Nigerian Army who uttered his oath of allegiance to Nigeria to some new mullah intent on embarking on a new career as "commander of the faithful" as inconsistent. But this is not true at all, it is very consistent with the military career of this soldier, one of the key, young leaders of the 1966 pogrom, because the doctrinal basis of his professional life has been shaped by a fierce need to revive a dead inheritance, to continue where Attahiru stopped.
Of course this passion follows a misreading of history. But I propose that central to Buhari’s usurpation of the democratic governance of Nigeria in 1983 and his assumption of the role of maximus was his aspiration to Islamatise Nigeria, subdue the internal nationalities and subject them to the domination of the Islamic leviathan. In other words, the 1983 coup was a jihad and its prosecution was in that precise mode.
Buhari did little to hide these facts: it was programmatic and it was sustained in the nature and rapidity of the laws which he caused to be enacted in that period. Experts on legal history would come quickly to the conclusion that Nigeria was being guided on the organizing principle of the Sharia laws couched in military decrees. Which is why that era was so brutal. The public execution of Bartholomew Owoh in a retroactive law was the equivalent of a public beheading.
The internal disruption that saw General Buhari’s ouster from government was actually the result of the resistance mustered by a less rigid arm of the military oligarchy, opposed to his attempt at cultural annihilation, his master plan to subject Nigeria to his ideological will; and he was always a partisan to extreme Islam. But Buhari’s brand of Islam is couched more in the hyperbole of faith than in the truth of it. He is simply one of those who give that religion a bad name because he does not understand the true, humane teachings of the prophet.
Having arrived at this point, in which he conceives a decline, Buhari and his fellow travelers now seek a platform to renew that quest for the domination of Nigeria. That is the story behind the sharia rash in parts of Northern Nigeria. It is about generals realigning and seeking power. General Buhari’s conception of Nigeria is genuinely conquistadorial. In his last reported statement on this matter, he made it clear that his mission is to "start where the British stopped".
He urged his followers not to relent, or be afraid, because "there is nothing to be afraid of". He asked them not to be afraid to spread Islam and establish the system of sharia nationwide. The language is particularly subversive and even predatory in its temerity. But let me remind this general that he commands a ragtag army. The resistance to Sharia in the North in places like Kano, Kaduna and Bauchi is indicative of the leap into the future.
It is a backward system of laws, it is oppressive and soon the people themselves will rise and demystify the whole Sharia bogey. The Christians of the North will lead the fight against Buhari and his partisans. Agnostics like me will provide them fodder. The peasants of the North will free themselves from the clutches of men like Muhammadu Buhari who have used Islam as an excuse to oppress and impoverish the masses of northern people – many of whom neither subscribe to Islam, nor do many who do, subscribe to Buhari’s brand of dark age Islam – the rabid kind that is intolerant of people and their laws.
So, Buhari is in fact a signifying monkey of an era that is rapidly passing.