By Farooq Kperogi
A man by the name of Dr. Bello Inua Anka, who is married into the Muhammadu Buhari family, is threatening me over the PUBLICLY available video that I—and thousands of other Nigerians—shared on social media showing de facto president Mamman Daura celebrating his 80th birthday with (more than 30!) family members and government officials in a posh London hotel while people starve to death in Nigeria. (See screenshots of his threats).
He asked me— and reached out to a valued friend of mine to prevail upon me— to take down the video on the excuse that his children are in it and that they’re being endangered. How? As I told him, I haven’t seen anyone say anything about any child in the video. Everyone’s focus is on the hypocrisy of closing the borders at home, insisting that traumatized, poverty-stricken people live within their means, using security agencies to physically humiliate and harass poor people for eating foreign rice, etc. while Buhari’s family members, and a few favored ones, live off the fat of the land at home and abroad, even going so far as to celebrate the birthday of Buhari’s nephew in London— with ministers and senators in tow. Not even Jonathan was this insensitive and hypocritical.
I didn’t shoot the video. It isn’t exclusive to me. In fact, it had already done the social media rounds before I shared it on my social media handles. The video was shot, edited, and shared by a member of the Buhari family. Why should I edit or take it down? He said, “Your page has more exposure than most, there are security issues involved here. A lot of people with a grudge or another will always pay a visit to your page to feed off what you write.” Huh?
Anyway, if his threat is limited to suing me in US courts where I live and work, I’m waiting for him. I’ve already notified my lawyers here. But there’s something darker and more sinister in the threat “I promise you won’t get away with this.” I’ve received countless threats from supporters of Buhari’s fascist monocracy. Someone even called for my execution—along with Chidi Odinkalu and Ahmed Salkida— on Twitter last week. I dismissed it as the inconsequential overzealousness of a faceless Buhari Media Center (BMC) troll.
But Dr. Bello Anka has a name, a face—and a place in the Buhari family— that can be held to account if anything happens to any member of my family in Nigeria because he knows he can’t do anything to me in the US. Interestingly, this same witless, power-intoxicated buffoon used to fawn over me when I held Goodluck Jonathan’s feet to the fire before 2015. Now that the “spoon” is in his mouth, he wants me to let him and his parasitic family members to get away with their unexampled corruption, nepotism, cronyism, and impunity. Ain’t gonna happen!
