Taxing Poor For Buhari Daughter's Enjoyment By Erasmus Ikhide

Since Major General Muhammadu Buhari frauded his way into power with the integrity mantra, some of us, who supported him initially have been stoically beating integrity into his integrity-challenged head and government. Regrettably, all such laudable efforts, setting the agenda for his ethnically-induced regime fall into deaf ears.

Buhari's failure to address the malady in this regard has nothing to do with his personal deafness or his delicately impaired hearing challenge for which has been roundly treated in the United Kingdom, but his deliberate obsession for impunity, banality, ethnocentrism and corruption. This is the third time I would be broadly addressing his presidential air fleets heist that signposted the country as a nation of jesters.


Without mincing words, Buhari has become the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. That's the way of all tyrants who seek to control everything but themselves, at the expense of the downtrodden masses. Bruce Coville had the like of Major General Muhammadu Buhari in mind when he said: "Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of dictatorship".


In 2015, Mr Buhari deceptively manipulated the people's minds and votes by deriding President Goodluck Jonathan's fraudulent acts of profligacy by keeping a dozen of aircrafts in the presidential air fleets while the masses are having their brains scoop on federal government death trap roads. But his minders wouldn't agree that the president is the worst example of how not to be pretentiously corrupt. Ms Hanan Buhari's use of one of the aircrafts for his personal engagement further reveals the poverty of his regime and his corruption plagued government that has been masquerading the Next Level of fraud.


A cursory check at the budgetary allocations since Buhari came to power revealed that a humongous some of N5.19b was budgeted for the maintenance of the presidential air fleets in 2015; while the of N3.6 was budgeted in 2016, as N4.37bn disappeared in 2017, N7.26bn vanished in 2018, N7.29bn misappropriated in 2019 and N8.51bn would go the same way in 2020 budget.


Outside the fact that the president's daughter has been overreaching herself with entitlements outside her constitutional rights, what explanations can Buhari's sanctimonious regime offer for allowing Hanan to fly presidential jet paid for with tax payers' money while millions of Nigerians students can't be given similar treatment?


Aside that, what moral justification does Mr Buhari have for keeping nearly a dozen aircrafts while virtually all federal roads are not motorable? Why budget nearly N40bn in the maintenance of Presidential Jets when hospitals are in decrepit state and millions of Hausa Fulani kids are begging militantly in the streets of Buhari's Katsina home state and all over Northern part of the country without basic education?


The most debasing aspect of the whole presidential jet impunity didn't come from the president image makers' in-your-face preposterous statement that it's Hanan's rights to use the presidential jet, but Hanan reckless and impulsive tweets that she's looking forward to using the same aircraft when necessary! Available records have shown that Hanan had actually used two presidential jets in the past to visit Kebbi State for her BA project on the Gwandu emirate. That's how Buhari's family has mindlessly 'Moluerized' and ‘Okadarized’ the country's presidential jets as an emperor with a fiefdom.


If Hanan could use the Department of State Services' attack dogs to visit terror on Anthony Okolie, a law-abiding citizen of Nigeria for using her old SIM card legitimately sold to him by MTN, then Nigerians should prepare for more presidential brigandage and banality such as replete in animal kingdom.


That's what you get when a narrow minded clicks and oligarchs, who never thought of amounting to anything in life found themselves in power, gloating and floating with oil wealth of another region, trusted upon them to fritter away for their vanity and destruction.


Email: ikhideerasmus@gmail.com

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