Online petitions are piling up for Nigeria’s new president, Muhammadu Buhari, claiming that a more open and democratic society promised in his presidential stump speeches has failed to appear.
One petition is already demanding President Buhari’s resignation over his alleged failure to abide by international law.
Nigerian-born Ndubuisi Anukwuem and “Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), in their petition, called for “a total boycott of British-Nigeria … a rogue terrorist state that tramples on every conceivable human rights, particularly, the rights of the beleaguered people of Biafra and IPOB.”
Another petition, directed to Amnesty International, bore the title “Free Edmund Ebiware”, who, the petitioners claim, “was wrongly convicted for foreknowledge of the Oct. 1, 2010 bombings in Abuja.
Ebiware, an activist during the period of amnesty for ex-militants in the oil-rich Niger Delta region, denied he had any part in the Oct. 1 (Independence Day) bomb blasts that killed 12 people.
In fact, he said, he was even threatened by members of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) after urging the MEND leader to accept amnesty.
Ebiware was sentenced to life in prison in 2013 and has been serving his sentence since then in solitary confinement at Kuje prison.
But perhaps most troubling to Nigerians and the international community is the persistence of corruption, bribery, kidnapping, and the victimization of ordinary citizens by security officials.
Noted Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, recalled the kidnapping of her father earlier this year. “We reported the kidnapping immediately, and the first shock soon followed: Security officials in my home state asked us to pay for anti-kidnap tracking equipment, a large amount, enough to rent a two-bedroom flat in Lagos for a year. This, despite my being privileged enough to get personal reassurances from officials at the highest levels.
“How, I wondered, did other families in similar situations cope? We made endless phone calls, helpless and frustrated… To encounter that underbelly, to discover the hollowness beneath government proclamations of security, was jarring.”
Writer Bayo Oluwasanmi, writing in Sahara Reporters, expressed similar disappointment. Candidate
Muhammadu Buhari, he observed, was no Barack Obama. “Buhari didn’t electrify the way Obama did. But the earnestness is remarkably similar. After soaring through Nigeria’s political stratosphere on the promise of killing corruption before corruption kills us, Mr. Buhari was overwhelmingly elected president.”
This month, in his New Year’s Message, President Buhari restated his pledge: “Our crackdown on corruption will continue to be vigorously undertaken. I urge the courts to support our efforts and help in the recovery of stolen funds by speedily concluding trials and showing that impunity no longer has a place in our country.”
