By Farooq Kperogi
No president in the history of the world has been able to hypnotize citizens of a country with as much roaring success as Buhari has in Nigeria in the last 7+ years. Not even Adolf Hitler comes close.
For example, like clockwork, every petrol price hike in Nigeria since 1966 used to be met with mass protests, but Buhari jacked up petrol prices multiple times by steep margins (the latest being last week) without as much as a whimper from citizens.
In fact, Buhari’s first petrol price hike was greeted with demonstrations of joy by poor people in the Northwest who threatened to kill anyone who opposed it! That was a first. I called it self-annihilating stupidity.
Nigerians have made peace with every fall in the index of social, economic, and political progress that has occurred in the Buhari regime.
I saw a video of terrorists savagely whacking poor, defenseless abductees in their captivity and was drained emotionally both by the suffering of the people in the video and by the knowledge that no one will hold the Buhari regime accountable for its dereliction of its duty to secure the lives of Nigerians.
It appears that diasporans like me whose relationship with what Nigerians are undergoing is more vicarious than experiential are more worried than Nigerians are. I’m emotionally fatigued.