Buhari, please talk to us here

President Buhari’s most sensational comments since assuming office have come from outside Nigeria — South Africa, the UK, Qatar and more recently, Poland. Unsurprisingly, most of the questions he has also been asked have been outside these shores. It appears he is too scared of the many questions that will be asked of him if he hosts a media chat or any other interactive session with Nigerians here or the press so he rather waits till his next trip abroad where he gathers Nigerians who only ‘hear’ in one room and tells them they ‘heard’ wrong.

He not only tells them that he also tries to put us on the offensive. He may actually be smarter than a lot of people give him credit for. The best way to escape culpability is to shift the blame right back at the accusers. Instead of highlighting the efforts his government has made at providing the three million jobs he promised yearly and shedding more light on how about 10 million jobs had been lost instead, he said most Nigerian youths were lazy and wanted the government to provide them with everything.

When his jobs weren’t forthcoming and a lot of Nigerians were leaving the country, he went to the UK to say they should stay back home where their ‘services’ are required because Americans and Europeans don’t want them due to too many being in prisons worldwide.

This is the very same President who said in South Africa shortly after assuming office he was happy wherever Nigerians were around the world, they will make both ‘positive and negative’ (Yes, negative) impact.

We really should be worried if we have a President who not only feels freer baring his mind outside these shores but one who has over time displayed a propensity to declare war on us the moment he lands overseas.

If ‘some Christians’ raising concerns over Buhari entering us into a Saudi Arabia-led coalition of Islamic states to help fight terrorism are not being told to go and fight Boko Haram themselves then Nigerians are lazy or criminals.

This is what I think we have done to piss off the President. We have asked too many questions. We are guilty of holding him to his campaign promises and bemoaning the sad state of the nation. We deserve better and we know it.

After the first and only media chat and the Buharimeter town hall meeting involving some ministers, President Buhari has refused to be asked any questions here. He would rather fly abroad to grant interviews to the foreign press and host Nigerians whose passing knowledge of the state of affairs is more to show off to other compatriots in the diaspora. Buhari is asked soft questions with little or no rebuttals to his answers.

On his recent trip to Poland, he chose to make a big deal of a question on whether he was cloned by adding to the answer and later tweeting on his handle that a lot of people hoped he was dead while he was receiving medical care in London and that they approached Vice-President to take his place when he eventually became President. Those of us here know there was never a time a ‘Buhari is dead’ rumour came up. There was a photo of him an average once every week. If his wife wasn’t visiting then Tinubu and other APC stalwarts were. Everybody back home is the enemy.

The only issue really worth talking about from that trip was his controversial claim that Boko Haram was in control of 17 local government areas when he became President. A claim we have heard several times over the last 3+ years. After the postponement of the 2015 general elections by three weeks to enable the Jonathan administration tackle the Boko Haram threat, a resurgent Nigerian military with the help of Nigerien, Chadian and Cameroonian troops launched an unprecedented offensive on the sect. As at April that year, a final countdown was on.

The media was feeding us updates of the exploits of the troops-4 LGAs then 1 in the hands of Boko Haram and finally none. Till this administration was sworn in, nobody from anywhere including Buhari’s APC queried these claims to our hearing.

Nobody in Poland probed him on his claims.

In as much as we will never apologize for asking the questions that need to be asked, we call on Buhari to answer our questions here first. Charity begins at home.

Umar Sa’ad Hassan is a lawyer based in Kano. He can be reached via Twitter:@Alaye_100 and [email protected]