By Ali Abare

Nowadays, news fly in nano seconds. I was participating in a webiner, the 17th Wole Soyinka Centre Media Lecture Series organized to mark the 91st birthday of the literary icon, when the anchor broke the sad news.

Though I am a bit under the weather for a couple of days, I found it necessary to celebrate a leader and a father, Muhammadu Buhari, who even at death, remains a hero.

My early memories that got me attracted to the person of the late Muhammadu Buhari, stems from a newspaper report about the late president joining the queue to buy fuel in Kaduna. It was one of those moments of fuel scarcity. Later, when the public realised it was him on the queue, they became excited. They went to his car, carried him shoulder high and compelled his driver to move out of the queue in order to be served immediately.

This level of humility is really rare. In a country where public office is seen as a means to acquire wealth, here comes President Buhari, who has remained frugal, accountable and shining example of discipline, integrity and unfettered commitment to the general good of the people and country.

In the year 2014, I was elevated to head the politics desk, as Politics Editor at the Peoples Daily. It wasn’t difficult then for the newspaper to become a vanguard for the Buhari campaign. My bosses at the time, the late Rufai Ibrahim and Malam Ali M. Ali, found it necessary to summon a meeting in order to weigh our decision to throw our support behind the late Muhammadu Buhari.

At a point in time, to make it even merrier, I was drafted to cover him as a reporter and have to be on ground to report his campaign activities. As usual, the Buhari campaign team was frugal, not attractive for a reporter especially in a city like Abuja. One day, I missed out as I couldn’t join the campaign team. My senior colleague Sule Yau Sule reasoned my welfare needed to be attained and I received a small token of cash. But as it turned out, my other senior colleague at the office was posted to the presidential villa and a vacuum was created at the Senate which I gladly took over to become the Senate correspondent of the Peoples Daily.

But I remained a staunch supporter and believer in the progressive governance being championed by Baba Buhari. When he was eventually declared winner of the 2015 presidenial election, there was merriment at the office. I could remember vividly receiving accolades from my senior colleagues for leading the campaign to ensure Baba’s victory. At a point in time, the then President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan was courting favours from media houses, dishing out various sums of money to media organisations. But not Peoples Daily because of our open support for Baba Buhari.

When in 2019, when in 2019, former governor of Abia State, Senator Orji Uzor Kalu, stirred the hornet’s nest by claiming that Baba Buhari does not own a personal house in Abuja. That statement led journalists and media organisations to investigate the claim.

Their revelation was rather startling, especially that Baba Buhari was oil minister, military head of state, PTF chairman and elected president for eight consecutive years.

Journalists obtained his asset declaration form he filed before the Court of Conduct Bureau, revealing that Baba Buhari had a total of five homes and two mud houses in Daura.

According to the document, Baba had two homes in Kaduna, one each in Kano, Daura (Katsina State) and in Abuja. One of the mud houses in Daura was inherited from his late older sister, another from his late father.

And that he borrowed money from the old Barclays Bank to build two of his homes. He also had two undeveloped plots of land, one in Kano and the other in Port Harcourt. As at that time, he was said to be still trying to trace the location of the Port Harcourt land.

The CCB document also stated that in addition to the homes in Daura, he has farms, an orchard and a ranch. The total number of his holdings in the farm include 270 heads of cattle, 25 sheep, five horses, a variety of birds and a number of economic trees.

The documents also showed that the retired General uses a number of cars, two of which he bought from his savings and the others supplied to him by the Federal Government in his capacity as former Head of State. With the rest said to be donated to him by well-wishers after his jeep was damaged in a Boko Haram bomb attack on his convoy in July 2014.

For crying out aloud, Godwin Emefiele was only governor of the central bank and viola! Checkout the controversies surrounding him and his tenure at the country’s apex bank, including the confiscation of 753 houses in Abuja. And unfortunately, it is people like Emefiele that are being celebrated as heroes. People who deliberately and falsely corner public funds for their personal use, denying us portable drinking water, good roads, and functional hospitals. In a somewhat demented society like ours, people like Baba Buhari are not celebrated. Instead they are seen as villians, clogs in the wheels of greed and aggrandisement.

Throughout the years of his public service, Baba Buhari had demonstrated uncommon penchant for integrity and probity. He was not motivated by primitive accumulation of wealth. Even the media, at a point, ran endless commentaries about how certain cabals have hijacked Baba at the villa, it was more out of sensationalism than facts.

No one dared approached Baba with a deal under the table. His character and disposition was not in tandem with briefcase politicians out to make the quick buck. Baba was avast to anything linked to corruption. He came to address the issue of corruption in the system but discovered that corruption has become engraved and is part of the system.

Indeed, Baba Buhari is human. Like every human being, he was not perfect. He had his shortfalls. But as far as public trust is concerned, no individual could raise a finger against him.

We should not be like Sowore and people like him, who in their conceited ignorance are daring to mock God, the giver and sustainer of life. Once you come into this world as a human being then your life is like a burning candle. Once the wax runs out you are gone. It is not by any of his efforts that Sowore is alive today. Once his wax runs out, his candle of life will flicker and no amount of conceit can deter him from the call of nature.

Buhari served as the Chairman of the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF), a body created by the government of General Sani Abacha, and funded from the revenue generated by the increase in price of petroleum products, to pursue developmental projects around the country. A 1998 report in New African praised the PTF under Buhari for its transparency, calling it a rare “success story”.

Certainly, from his days as a young military officer to his emergence as Head of State in 1983 and his subsequent return as democratically elected president in 2015, Baba served this nation with deep conviction, a sense of duty, and love for country that transcended personal ambition.

That is the more reason why as Nigerians, we should hearken to the call from our bereaved mother, Her Excellency, Hajiya Aisha Buhari, who immediately after the news of the passage of the former president, asked Nigerians to forgive Baba Buhari. I for one, I have forgiven you Baba. It’s our collective prayer that God the Almighty will forgive your shortcomings and grant you Janntul Firdaus. Adieu, Baba, my hero even at death.

For me Baba has defeated death as his life and legacies, which are legendary, would continue to remain evergreen in the minds of Nigerians yet unborn. We have lost our father, leader and hero but his character and disposition to life, particularly as it relates to public office and public trust will remain with us until Sowore and all of us join them in the journey of no return.

BaAbare writes from Lafia, Nasarawa State.