The Buhari Euphoria Reminds Me Of The Sharia Excitement – By George Onmonya Daniel
I was an undergrad in Bayero University Kano in 1999 and witnessed the Sharia Law agitation and later implementation in Zamfara and some Northern Nigerian States. The excitement over Sharia was much more than the FIFA World Cup, yet the proponents of Sharia never explain to the masses what to expect after Sharia. Everything was imagination. I overheard the poor people discussing in commercial buses that the rich would give zakat to the poor and they would soon all be rich. In fact most people didn’t know the implication until after it was implemented in Kano. The Kano State government banned women from taking bikes, they banned women from sitting in buses with men, in fact in Bayero University Kano, we had an all female bus. Just one week after Sharia implementation bike ? men revolted. They were losing business and they realized it was to their own disadvantage. Within a month the Kano State government lifted the ban on women entering bike. When they couldn’t provide the necessary infrastructure for Sharia, it didn’t take a month before women and men started entering the same bus ?. In fact the Sharia crashed before it started because everything about it was anti-masses and the masses.
The poster men and women of Sharia were poor people who had nothing. A man who had his hand chopped up in Zamfara, women to be stoned to death for fornication in Sokoto, Katsina and Bauchi, even though it never happened. It all turned out to be foolish excitement. Nothing positive came out of it but it gave birth to a bigger problem, BOKO HARAM.
I see this euphoria again all embroiled in this excitement over President Buhari re-election in the North, excitement over nothing tangible. What is there to be excited about with this administration? Is it the killings by Fulani herdsmen? Is it the continuous killing of our army by Boko Haram? Is it a demoralized army that aren’t paid their allowances until they revolt? Is it the harassment and killing of Nigerians by SARS? Is it the harassment of Nigerians by the Nigerian Police? Is it the giving employment to children of who is who? What is the excitement about? Is it that the price of food has come down? Is it that the dollar is now $1 for N1? Is our healthcare system now better? Are our schools better than before? Why are people not learning from history?
This nonsense excitement reminds me of the Sharia excitement. Nothing good came out of it. The Buhari crowd are a bunch of excited crowd, most of them incapable of understanding reality, most of them not knowing their left from their right.
