Buhari’s serial rape of Nigeria’s Lady Justice, By Festus Adedayo

If a Zapiro sketches that cartoon in Nigeria today, replacing Zuma with Muhammadu Buhari and those groveling assembly with fawners of the current administration, he will more fittingly be describing the serial rape of our country. Buhari has raped virtually all institutions and systems in Nigeria to a point that they lack energy to saunter on.

Though it looks harmless, political cartooning can be nerve-racking, provoking the bile of political office holders and triggering a huge political umbrage in the process. In February 2021, an award-winning political cartoonist with the Daily Trust newspaper, Bulama Mustapha, sketched a cartoon flake of a framed photograph sitting majestically on Nigeria’s Aso Rock presidential seat. It looked like an effigy filling space. It was the photograph of President Muhammadu Buhari with a mirthless and expressionless face. Cosseted on both sides by all the paraphernalia of office – Nigerian flags and coat of arms, Buhari himself was nowhere to be found. Bulama’s cartoon sought to portray a presidency by proxy.

Earlier on September 7, 2008, an award-winning cartoonist with the Johannesburg-based Sunday Times, Jonathan Shapiro, whose cartoon identity was Zapiro, triggered a huge ball of fire in South Africa. The cartoon, instantly named Rape of Lady Justice, had then leader of the African National Congress (ANC), who was to later become the South African president, Jacob Zuma, loosening his trousers’ zippers for a sexual romp. He had a shower tap placed on his head. An impish but salacious smile lit his face. Before him, flung on the bare floor, was a blindfolded lady with a lapel inscribed, “Justice System” hung on her chest.

Four hefty and menacing-looking men knelt by the Lady Justice’s side, holding down the “wench”, whose skirt was half peeled off. They were political surrogates of Zuma in the ANC, which included Julius Malema, then leader of the ANC Youth League; Gwede Mantashe, a key leader of the ANC; South African Communist Party (SACP)’s General Secretary, Blade Nzimande and General Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), Zwelinzima Vavi. The scale of justice had fallen down beside the Lady Justice, with Mantashe smilingly beckoning on Zuma to clamber her for a rape binge, “Go for it, boss!”

That cartoon shot Zuma into a fit. Indeed, he immediately sued Zapiro for the sum of £700,000. Massive reactions followed it, ranging from the condemnatory to the laudatory. The ANC, SACP and ANC Youth League pilloried it as “hate speech,” “disgusting” and “bordering on defamation of character” and then petitioned the South African Human Rights Commission for redress.

All over the world, the Lady Justice is sacred, representing the divine order, law, and custom. It is also an allegorical persona depicting the moral force of the judicial system. Originating from the Ancient Roman goddess called Justitia, her attributes are a blindfold, scales and a sword. When a leader is depicted to have raped this personification of justice, he has violated the deity of goodliness in society.

As the Bulama cartoon interpretatively represented a Buhari who was a mere decorative effigy in the presidential office, effete and absent in the life of the ordinary Nigerian, in his own cartoon, Zapiro depicted the rape of the South African justice system, as well as other institutions, by Zuma. “He (Zuma) is raping the justice system and they (Zuma’s political allies) are complicit in that,” said the cartoonist in an interview. By this time, Zuma, a notorious polygamist who had six official wives as president, many more by unofficial account and 22 children from the liaisons, was a kingpin of lechery. The court had recently discharged him of a rape romp with an HIV-positive AIDS activist, who was the daughter of his friend. Though Zuma pleaded that the sex was consensual, he however admitted that he had unprotected sex with the lady. He then stunned the world when he maintained that he had “showered afterwards to cut the risk of contracting the infection.” The shower tap Zapiro placed on his head represented this bombastic claim.

In 2016, Buhari presided over a literal rape of Lady Justice. This he did through a nocturnal raid and assault on the homes of Nigerian judges, spearheaded by goons of the State Security Service (SSS). Hiding under the façade of fighting corruption and protecting “national interest,” at the end of the raid, seven judges, including two of the Supreme Court, were arrested. Recently, similar attempt was made on Justice Mary Odili of the Supreme Court.

If a Zapiro sketches that cartoon in Nigeria today, replacing Zuma with Muhammadu Buhari and those groveling assembly with fawners of the current administration, he will more fittingly be describing the serial rape of our country. Buhari has raped virtually all institutions and systems in Nigeria to a point that they lack energy to saunter on.

In 2016, Buhari presided over a literal rape of Lady Justice. This he did through a nocturnal raid and assault on the homes of Nigerian judges, spearheaded by goons of the State Security Service (SSS). Hiding under the façade of fighting corruption and protecting “national interest,” at the end of the raid, seven judges, including two of the Supreme Court, were arrested. Recently, similar attempt was made on Justice Mary Odili of the Supreme Court.

Reacting to the 2016 raid, Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka linked Buhari’s 1984 autocracy and current civilian dictatorship, freezing the time and space between them. “Here we go again! At his first coming, it was ‘I intend to tamper with freedom of the press’, and Buhari did proceed to suit action to the words, sending two journalists – Irabor and Thompson – to prison as a reward for their professional integrity. Now, a vague, vaporous, but commodious concept dubbed ‘national interest’ is being trotted out as alibi for flouting the decisions of the Nigerian judiciary. President Buhari has obviously given deep thought to his travails under a military dictatorship, and concluded that his incarceration was also in the ‘national interest’.”

Either as surrender, disdain or a cold reaction to this rape, Nigerians no longer complain about the pains they undergo under Buhari. They seem to have given up. In the process of terrifying their victims, narcissists display cold indifference. Could we have offended Buhari so terribly by rejecting him at the polls, three out of the four times he attempted to be Nigeria’s civilian president, and as recompense for our sins, in seven years, he decided to give our sufferings a narcissist’s cold shoulder?

This can be the only logical rationalisation of his brutal indifference to the pains of Nigerians. As we speak, Nigerians are going through an orgy of excruciating pain of monumental proportions. Fuel scarcity has become a national affliction, forcing citizens to live the prehistoric life of apes, while scavenging for fuel. In Lagos, this weekend, an absurd package of a few litres of fuel as souvenir to guests became a fitting icing on our cake of shamelessness. Nigerians, owners of one of the world’s largest extents of soil in which crude oil is found, go to church to testify to the goodness of the Lord for providing fuel to power their cars. Electricity is as scarce as the proverbial excrement of the masquerade. The president is absent in their lives and doesn’t seem to care a hoot.

Except perhaps during the Nigerian civil war – please let me know if I am wrong – Nigerians have never felt this acute level of governmental rudderlessness. I have this terrible hunch that Buhari enjoys our sufferings and pains. Did Nero do anything worse when he courted global disdain for fiddling while Rome burnt? The decadent and unpopular Emperor Nero, a music connoisseur, not only fiddled with his accordion while his people suffered, he was renowned to be an ineffectual leader in a time of crisis. Nigeria has its Nero in Buhari.

Since 2015, like Zapiro’s cartoon on Zuma, he has raped the Nigerian Lady Justice serially by inflicting unjust suffering on the people. While engaged in the romp, the Lady Justice’s hands are held down by a coterie of political, social and economic accomplices. For every Julius Malema, Mantashe, Nzimande and Vavi complicit in Zuma’s rape of the Lady Justice, you have Yemi Osinbajo, Bola Tinubu, Abubakar Malami, Godwin Emefiele, Lai Mohammed, the governors, ministers and a legion of regime supporters…

Last Tuesday, as the pains of the fuel scarcity entered its third week, with no end in sight but scurrilous bites on the people and their personal finances, the only official responses being the endless vacuous promises of intervention by government, the Minister of Petroleum jetted out of the country. His trip took him, first, to Kenya to participate in the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), from where he was initially scheduled to proceed to his London infirmary for two weeks. Queer as it may sound, Nigerians don’t even know what ails their president and only God knows how much of their patrimony has been pumped into repairing the cracks on his health. Without any explanation to anybody however, the president suddenly jetted back home on Friday. Media reports said he will jet off to the infirmary today. And all of us have been and would live happily thereafter.

To Nigerians, Buhari seems to be a festering sore on the foot, whose sufferer is getting used to. Since 2015, like Zapiro’s cartoon on Zuma, he has raped the Nigerian Lady Justice serially by inflicting unjust suffering on the people. While engaged in the romp, the Lady Justice’s hands are held down by a coterie of political, social and economic accomplices. For every Julius Malema, Mantashe, Nzimande and Vavi complicit in Zuma’s rape of the Lady Justice, you have Yemi Osinbajo, Bola Tinubu, Abubakar Malami, Godwin Emefiele, Lai Mohammed, the governors, ministers and a legion of regime supporters paid pittances to shout his Hosanna on the social media.

The fate of Nigeria and Nigerians under Buhari has continued to sink. In 2015, Buhari met the dollar at N197 but it is N573 today; and N250 to a pound sterling, which is now N750. The North-East was a challenge that brought him into office and chased Goodluck Jonathan out; but right now, Buhari has deregulated and democratised insecurity across all zones of Nigeria, so much that if you are moving from one point to another in Nigeria, you must fast and pray to return to your original location in one piece.

The Nigerian economy is in its worst shape ever. People are doing unimaginable things to stay afloat, including pawning their children for cash. Experts say that the naira is as worthless as the Zimbabwean dollar. No thanks to Buhari, death is the cheapest commodity on sale in Nigeria today. A grim warning to U.S. citizens on the country’s Nigerian embassy’s website should explain the precarity more succinctly. Apart from warning citizens not to travel to Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa States in the North due to terrorism and kidnapping, Americans are also told to avoid Bauchi, Gombe, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, and Zamfara Atates due to kidnapping, and to refrain from visiting the coastal areas of Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, Delta, and Rivers States (with the exception of Port Harcourt) due to kidnapping and maritime crimes. The U.S. has also warned its people that  “violent crime – such as armed robbery, assault, carjacking, kidnapping, hostage-taking, banditry, and rape – is common throughout the country.  Kidnappings for ransom occur frequently, often targeting dual national citizens who have returned to Nigeria for a visit, as well as U.S. citizens with perceived wealth. Kidnapping gangs have also stopped victims on interstate roads.”

So, where do we go from here? It looks like we both have given up; Buhari on the possibility of his being able to administer Nigeria successfully and Nigerians, on his ability to provide any modicum of leadership. A pointer to this may be his speech in Nasarawa State, a couple of weeks ago. There, he said that he was in a hurry to become an ex-president. With the assemblage of fawners queuing to take over from him, there doesn’t seem to be any hope that we will not be the victims of another rapist of the Lady Justice, post-2023.

Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist.