Biafra: Buhari’s biography, a poor attempt at image-laundering

By Kelechi Okorie

For Biafra Choice Writers

Nigerian President, Muhammadu Buhari, has very terrible image all over the world, and he knows it. It is common knowledge everywhere, even within his family, which was a reason his wife recently expressed fear that Nigerians may rise up against her husband.

It was therefore not a surprise that Buhari initiated several moves to launder his image. One of those moves was the writing of his biography which he commissioned one hungry foreigner by name John Paden, to write.

Pathetic Paden took the job, and went to work with lies and half-truths fed him by Buhari and his many sidekicks. When that book was eventually launched in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, what many who read it saw was a compilation of pernicious lies without rationality or facts. That led them to conclude that the book was nothing but junk, a fabrication to white-wash the Buhari’s stinking image in the most fraudulent way.

One of the observations of the book’s critics was that even when Paden tried to take on serious issues for treatment, he would tactically gloss over them without establishing any substance. Such was the case when he declared that “senior figures in the political and military configuration in Nigeria committed serious crimes and indulge in damning acts of corruption".

He refused to go into details as to who committed what and where, because he most certainly knew that Buhari was a chief culprit. Of course, he refused to tell the world that Buhari was among the worst of them who should have been tried for war crimes. Again, for anyone who is conversant with the events of Biafra/Nigeria war, the book showed Paden as dishonest and his book intellectual garbage. This is why for any intellectually-minded reader, the book lacked intellectual stamina.

For anyone who knows Muhammadu Buhari, he would wonder whether it was that blood-tasty, and genocidist infantry soldier of 1967 to 1970 that Paden was writing about. Without any shred of doubt, the real Buhari was one of the masterminds of the killing of over five million Biafran children, women and the aged during the 1967-1970 war. Even before the war, he was part of the perpetrators of the pogroms of 1966 – 1967.

None of these featured in the white-washed biography; neither did Paden acknowledge that the black-hearted terrorist leader, Buhari, overthrew a democratically elected government of Shehu Shagari in 1983. He did not tell his readers that the treasonable felon should have been in prison for atrocities, neither did he write about the hardship he inflicted on the people through his totalitarian rule after the overthrow. Paden did not write about Buhari’s one-sided conviction of southern politicians with his military tribunals, while sparing all the thieving Northerners that served in the same government.

The biographer did not tell his readers the current threat to peace that his principal Buhari posed in the abominable contraption called Nigeria by releasing members of his killer squad, Boko Haram. A good example was the release of Kabiru Sokoto who masterminded the Christmas Day bombing at St Theresa Catholic Church that led to the dead of hundreds Christian worshipers in Abuja.

Buhari’s atrocities in the current dispensation are legion, and any biography that fails to bring that in is a sham. Without mincing words, we declare John Paden’s so-called Buhari biography a sham; and a poor attempt at a rotten image-whitewashing.