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(Published in the Nigerian Tribune on Monday, 16 August, 2021)
Twenty-four hours after paying an inter-infirmary visit to his co-Londoner, co-APC founder, comrade and power-sharer, President Muhammadu Buhari came back last week to meet his Nigeria as dying as he left it. Nigeria’s definition under him has remained sorrow, tears and blood. In his absence, unremitting mass murders continued casting very long shadows here and there and everywhere. Then he came back. And, on Saturday, 25 travellers were killed in cold blood in Plateau. Beyond issuing a knock-kneed statement, what else has the president done to still the war? The old man spent 18 days and 18 nights in London in peace and comfort while the nation burned. Only powerful people who are in government and in power do that without counting the costs. You and I, of course, know that the journey, his presence abroad and the absence at home were at no personal cost to him and all around him. The cost and the loss are for Nigeria to count.

While the president was away, a commissioner was abducted in Niger State. The very day the president came back, the man got his freedom from the kidnappers. He spent just five days in captivity, paid no ransom and was not rescued by anyone. He said he was, just like that, freed miraculously by his abductors. He said it was divine intervention, that it was his God that freed him. But before the president travelled, 134 students of an Islamic school in Tegina, in same Niger State, were abducted – and marched at gunpoint into the forest by bandits. That was on May 30, 2021 – seventy-eight days ago. They are still there in rain, in sunshine – like monkeys in the wild. Could it be that those children do not have God? That they are unworthy of divine intervention – unlike the powerful commissioner who just found himself in freedom. Or why is no one, spiritual and temporal, interceding for the children? The kids didn’t know that the president travelled, they still do not know that after 18 sunny days in Queen Elizabeth’s country, their parents’ beloved president is back. The president is not aware that 78 days and still counting, some parents have been weeping day and night, mourning children who are not dead.

While the president was away, the BBC, without permission, interviewed parents of the Tegina kids. One of them is Hadiza Hashim who had five children among the abducted kids. She said the two youngest, Walid and Rahama, who were just two and three years old were soon let go by the abductors because they were too fragile for the great trek into slavery. But Hadiza said the kids three elder siblings, the eldest just 13 years old, were still in captivity. She told the BBC that her children were being forgotten because they were poor. “People have ignored what has happened because they are the children of nobodies. If they were the children of somebody, they wouldn’t be left in the wilderness for weeks with no news. It wouldn’t be allowed,” Mrs Hashim said. She was right, poverty has politics; the poor are not citizens. Think about the fact that the commissioner spent just five days in captivity and Hadiza’s kids will soon mark their third month in Nigeria’s forest of a million demons.
The world all around us is sick and sad. But our Buhari has renewed his own health in London and is back, very happy in Abuja. Share on X