Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet
The final Buhari Christmas?
By Chido Nwangwu
“It’s Christmas time, there’s no need to be afraid
At Christmas time, we let in light and we banish shade
And in our world of plenty we can spread a smile of joy”
Those are the opening lyrics of the 1984 globally acclaimed charity song written by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise money for the benefit of Ethiopia during the 1983 to 1985 famine crisis in the African country. It was performed under the banner of a congregation of artists called Band Aid.
In many ways, I believe that the inspirational words of those opening lyrics spoke to a different time and clime. It doesn’t reflect the current existential realities of millions/billions of citizens of different countries around the world.
For those, some of whom we’re familiar, these are scary times!
From Nigeria, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, to Venezuela, the experiences are largely woeful and very difficult — unless you have the funds for the escalated food prices and overall cost of living.
Instead of the colorful cadences, joyful gathering of families and merriment in celebration of the birth of Christ, it’s turned into a season of thunder, anomie, deaths and scarcity. Scarcity of hope.
Scarcity of salt and foods.Scarcity of fuel and gas and kerosene are loudly evident in these lands where those natural resources exist and could be better, optimally exctracted and refined to benefit its millions of hapless and traumatized citizens.
For millions of Nigerians and visitors to the perennially traumatized and patient-no-more fellows, these past few weeks, months and recent years of The Buhari Christmas have become a very dangerous season of insecurity and kidnapping — especially this 2022 season.
There’s fire on the mountain, burning into the early hours of 2023.… Few leaders and some incompetent personifications of the vulgarity of corrupt hijacking of public revenues, resources and mechanisms of government for personal aggrandizement and squandermania! No wonder, clearly some incapable but financially powerful masquerades who are already posturing as Presidents-In-waiting under the watchful pretense and immoral indifference of our wonderful Mr. Buhari have, again, taken their appetite for things across the Atlantic….
Before The Final Buhari Christmas, some Governors and civic leaders, defenseless women and children, unarmed men and political aspirants became targets of the new “kill and go” battallions and squads of “unknown gunmen”.
In Nigeria, millions of citizens are going through The Final Buhari Christmas season without seeing “a light”, and a “smile of joy.”
Despite all of his lofty campaign promises and sanctimonious posturing, President Muhammadu Buhari, a retired General and former military dictator has, in the practical realities of Nigerians and all sensate persons, failed to provide light/power/energy! Without near adequate power generation and distribution for the whole of Nigeria (which is far less than what Houston, one city in Texas, uses in 21 days only), it will be difficult to build a meaningful infrastructure for national development and sustainable production and progress.
From all the reports on the prices of garri, ewedu, rice, beans, babies’ nutrition milk, fura, yam, chicken, difficult times and choking levels degradation and pangs of poverty are expanding exponentially as millions of Nigerians, west Africans and other sections of the continent struggle into 2023. It is astonishing and crushing.
From physical abuses, State-sponsored terrorism and violence against some ethnic and religious /faith groups, and other forms of crimes, their Christmas is merely an apparition of hell on earth!
I know several dozens of Nigerian diasporans who did not want to risk being kidnapped and possibly be killed during The Final Buhari Christmas 2022. Most of those from the south east battlegrounds — especially within the acidic geography of 5 miles radius to or from the village of the embattled Imo Governor Hope Uzodinma.
Sadly, the great, old Orlu zone has become a wasteland, a killing field, the playground of evil doers, gunmen (known and unknown), local warriors and mercenaries across the borders….
So,many are not travelling home for The Final Buhari Christmas due to cautionary reasons and lawless impunity of the “unknown gunmen”, Fulani herdsmen and other bandits on freelance killings. •Dr. Chido Nwangwu, author of the forthcoming 2023 book, MLK, Mandela & Achebe: Power, Leadership and Identity., is Founder of the first African-owned, U.S-based newspaper on the internet, USAfricaonline.com, and established USAfrica in 1992 in Houston. He has appeared as an a nalyst on CNN, ALJazeera, SKYnews, and served as an adviser on Africa business to Houston’s former Mayor Lee Brown. Follow him on Twitter @Chido247
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