Re -The passing away of Brother Muhammadu Buhari. May he be granted Firdaus
Cornelius Hamelberg
Brother Muhammadu Buhari
It was Mazel Tov, Mighty Congratulations, Ẹ ku ajoyọ ọjọ́ ìbí yin oni because July 13th 2025 was Wole Soyinka’s 91st birthday whilst on the other end of the emotional scale the mood swung from joyful celebration and thanksgiving for Nigeria’s premier man of letters to sorrow and mourning on the passing away of our Presidential Brother Muhammadu Buhari at 4.30 pm on that same day, in London.
My family’s condolences to Brother Buhari’s immediate family, and to the great nation of Nigeria on this painful loss - Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala being the true judge, we do not appeal His decrees or His final judgments and therefore the ritual expression Baruch dayan ha emet …
On Joy and Sorrow by Kahlil Gibran
Brother Buhari’s passing away was tersely reported on this forum, by Ojogbon, among us in this dialogue series, he himself the greatest composer of funeral dirges and writer-enunciator of eulogies - as the archives plentifully attest - but since his formal announcement of the obituary, the forum has been mysteriously & uncharacteristically silent ,not at all eloquent on the mournful event of Brother Buhari’s passing,,,
In connection with the passing of Brother Muhammadu Buhari, T.S. Eliot could have well asked “ Do you feel nothing?”
Within a few hours I had - by phone, commiserated with a few Nigerians and I had also - as directed - to my own mortification -taken a look at what one Moses Ochonu in his irreverential departure from African traditional cultural mores had to say on Facebook - and he too seemed to have been horrifically outdone by another enfant terrible, none other than Omoyele Sowore as posted on Shola Adenekan’s Facebook page - and - mind you, I have seen worse - e.g. when Chairman Arafat died , in response to the notion / unwritten commandment that “thou shalt not speak ill of the dead “ - one of the rabid, terrorist, rag tag Zionist Israeli settler rabbis thought that he would once again circumvent that kind of unwritten law or convention by saying ” Arafat is dead. Good” but, I thank God that relief was just round the corner in the person of the Knight in shining armour : Femi Fani-Kayode’s eulogy titled The Passing of a Mighty Warrior
For some of the passionately unfulfilled and miserably disappointed disparagers their rule of thumb was excised straight out of Mark Antony’s funeral oration and that’s why they would like to see all the good things that Muhammadu Buhari accomplished , completely buried, put out of sight…
As I told one of Bother Buhari’s interlocutors over the phone, for me, Brother Buhari’s trajectory began on New Year's Eve , on 31st December 1983 -on the morning of 1st January 1984, when I arrived at Port Harcourt, by boat, from Bakana, the bloodless coup was already a fait accompli; two weeks later the Muhammadu Buhari -Tunde Idiagbon duo were in full swing : by 14th January civil servants were starting their Happy New Year by being paid six months arrears of salaries they were being owed by the by then defunct Shagari NPN administration.
By January 21st the garbage heaps at Mile One Market in Port Harcourt had been cleared, by military decree - another marvellous illustration of the phrase “good riddance to bad rubbish”…
Buhari-Idiagbon then launched WAI - war against indispline…and eventually in the spirit of the MIGHTY WARRIOR that Femi Fani-Kayode was praising, subsequently declared the War Against Corruption….
Yes, Brother Buhari was democratically elected in 2015 and 2019 by the vast majority of Nigerians….at least you could grant him that?
Cornelius Hamelberg
According to Islam, a man is judged by his niyat ( intentions) and to that end
The Chinua Achebe Foundation interview of Muhammadu Buhari in December 2005
gives some clear indications of Muhammadu Buhari’s intentions back then on his steady
road of perseverance, for indeed, our Muhammadu Buhari was a man of perseverance
Re - my inadvertent reference to the one who believed himself to be witty, circumventing the dictum “ don’t speak badly about the deceased “ by responding “ Arafat is dead. Good”, I’d like to disabuse anyone who might mistakenly associate Brother Muhammadu Buhari with belonging to the same clan as former PLO jihadist turned peaceful Nobel Peace Laureate Yasser Arafat who most lately mused about “the peace of the brave, not the peace of the grave” - I’m trying to clarify this because there are some Nigerians who erroneously believe that a cardinal point of Islam is to hate Christians, perhaps because they are unaware of the Quranic verse Surah Al-Ma'idah - 82 which says,
“Thou wilt find the most vehement of mankind in hostility to those who believe (to be) the Jews and the idolaters. And thou wilt find the nearest of them in affection to those who believe (to be) those who say: Lo! We are Christians. That is because there are among them priests and monks, and because they are not proud.”
Not unexpectedly, this is one of the facts of life: Declare a war on corruption and you’ll find that overnight, all the miscreants (the lootocracy etc) become your enemies , and will fight tooth and nail / by hook and by crook to overthrow /depose you and even when you’re gone will have not even one good word to say about you.
So, in his early declared war against corruption , leaving no stone unturned, Brother Buhari did execute the radical decision to enlist the assistance of Mossad in the noble cause of abducting and bringing Umaru Dikkko to justice…