Buhari in London: The devil and the demon disgracing democracy-Bala Ibrahim

My dictionary describes democracy as a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives. This definition is not in conflict with late President Abraham Lincoln’s description of democracy, viz:  a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Both definitions have an unmistakable ambition, that permits the people to exercise power directly, through their elected agents. Anything to the contrary is undemocratic.

In exercising such powers, the system of democracy does not reckon with rudeness or recklessness, because almost always, and in all cultures and religions, they are acts that are seen as synonymous with irresponsibility.

Pursuant to President Muhammadu Buhari’s present medical visit to the UK, where according to his spokesperson, Femi Adesina, he would be staying for about a fortnight, I’ve seen about three different video clips circulating in the social media, all of them looking evidently sponsored.

One was recorded at the Northumberland street office of the Nigeria High Commission in London. The second and the third were recorded outside the Abuja House in West London, where the President is officially residing.

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While the first video did little in upsetting me because I know under democracy, the right to peaceful and non-belligerent protest is properly permitted, the second and third have combined to hack me off, because they came with personal insults on the person of the President, and harmful prejudice against some people, including yours truly.

The actions of the sponsored actors are clearly outside the ambition of democracy, as they characterized the works of the devilish and disgruntled demons in the society.

Led by Reno Omokri, a former aide to ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, some protesters went to the Abuja House in London, chanting rude and disrespectful words against the President, with the most discourteous coming from a lady speaking in Hausa, addressing the President by his native name, and insulting him directly.

Whatever may be the primary reason for such a lady visiting the UK, her attitude has given her away as the uncultured, the ignorant and visibly the uneducated. She may be right to lament about the inadequacies of Nigeria’s health sector, but has she the guts to ask her sponsors, how the country got to where it is?

The lady and her co-travellers were expressing empathy through misguided anger, because of the feelings of their demonic sponsors, but for people like Omokri, who dined and wined with the likes of former Nigerian minister of petroleum, Diezani Alison Madueke, they ought to be knowledgeable about the meaning of Sympathy, especially where a patient is involved.

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We may not all have an equal sense of compassion or similar feeling of pity to the sick, but regardless of what, or who we worship, we are expected to entertain emotions, as reflections of our circumstances.

Even the mood of the most wicked, changes when confronted by the circumstances of the sick, and the way and manner he or she expresses such mood, he or she could be a subject of pity because of the lack of piety.

If the meaning of democracy is to permit the smooth running of the government of the majority, I can’t understand how a man, who garnered 15.2m votes, can be continuously harassed by few scoundrels, under the guise of freedom of expression.

Every time President Buhari visits the UK for his medicals, a ritual he has been doing long before he became the President, some misguided Nigerians, almost always less than 20, would be deceiving themselves that they have the power to reverse the verdict of the majority. I think they are the sickest of all the patients on earth, because theirs is mental illness.

Before this visit, a similar thing happened when the President visited the UK about two years ago, as a nameless pressure group staged a protest outside the same residence, calling for him to return home or resign as president.

The group was even courageous enough to synchronize the protest with another one in Nigeria, titled, “Resume or Resign”.

The objective is simply to humiliate the President, using the excuse of the freedom of speech in a liberal democracy. But the time has arrived for Omokri and co to know that, much as the world sympathize with him on the grouse he wants to grind with Buhari, for taking the feeding bottle off his mouth, everyone is looking at him as the devil dancing for the demon, under the guise of democracy.

And he must borrow a lesson from the saying of Napoleon Bonaparte, that: “Rascality has limits; it is stupidity that hasn’t.”

Ibrahim, a media advisor writes from Abuja.