Buhari the Dead and His Body Double, By Festus Adedayo
..Rumour is also a potent weaponry in political discourse and communication strategy. Negative rumors about an opponent are more fatal than a blow in the heart.
In Oyo State, politicians call it ibon oselu – political gunshot, the mortal blow from which a victim may never recover. Allegedly pioneered by the enfant terrible of Oyo politics, Lamidi Adedibu, when then incumbent governor, Adebayo Alao-Akala received his own mortal shot in months leading to the 2011 elections, parceled via the tale that the food he distributed to school children had caused the death of some of them, Alao-Akala limped into the election mortally wounded by the rumour. When a wall of his house in Ogbomoso fell and killed someone, the rumour of his voodoo sacrifice of persons to actualize his re-election became a mortal sting akin only to a snake’s venom.
None of the above has the scary implication as the current rumour in which Buhari is subsumed. Even though that rascally youth, Nnamdi Kanu claimed to own the patent of the rumour, it actually crept out in 2017, immediately the Nigerian president emerged from a UK infirmary for treatment of an undisclosed ailment.
Many actually suspected it was cancer. Widespread permutations had reckoned that he would lose this health battle. Buhari arrived, lean and gaunt but acknowledged that he was indeed sick and transfused with blood. Subsequent incoherence in his words, a terribly receding memory and feeble grip of power, fueled the rumour that the recent Buhari was a body-double of the square-shouldered General.
On November 10, 2018, Kanu made what he called a broadcast from Israel, his latest fugitive refuge. Therein, he had stoked the insinuations. According to him, Buhari collapsed on Tuesday January 17, 2017 and was immediately rushed to London via Casablanca “where his presidential jet made a stopover.” In his words, Buhari stopped breathing and the plane had to make an emergency landing in Casablanca to pick up a life support machine and then flown to London. In the hospital in the UK, said Kanu, the President was declared brain dead on the 20th of January, 2017 but the life support machine was switched off on January 27, 2017 and Buhari pronounced dead. Pursuing this further, Kanu said Buhari’s corpse was then flown to Saudi Arabia on January 28, 2017 for internment. The procurement for a replacement for Buhari then began, said the youth, and a .Jubrin, Sudanese, made to undergo plastic surgery in London, to become Buhari’s look-alike, was made. Confirming his thesis, Kanu claimed that the Jubrin has a different earlobe from the original Buhari and that the Jubril has a full set of hair unlike the bald Buhari, among other alleged inconsistent physical characteristics.
While Kanu’s allegation, as bombastic as it may sound, may look literally ambitious, it has variants in history and is provoked by some incoherent manifestations of the man, President Buhari. Indeed, political decoy is a long-standing concept in use to impersonate politicians for the purpose of drawing attention away from the real person and for political or espionage purposes. For instance, for intelligence purpose, soldier M. E. Clifton James was used successfully to impersonate General Bernard Montgomery in World War II. It was only after Adolf Hitler’s death that it was found out that he employed a body double, Gustav Weler. For the purpose of attending public functions after World War 11wherein he feared he could be assassinated, Joseph Stalin, Soviet leader, is alleged to have made use of a “Rashid” as his double. Saddam Hussein, Henry Kissinger and Boris Yeltsin were all alleged to have also used body-doubles.
One major noticeable trait today that is at variance with Buhari who was a military Head of State, is the deviation from his dour and tough hombre persona. Except the humour he is said to inject into discussions today, you cannot but agree with that snide comment allegedly made of him by America’s Donald Trump that the figure he saw in Buhari was “lifeless.” The Buhari of today lacks grits, is most time askance, disinterested in virtually everything, unnaturally withdrawn, with a receding memory and acts like one being propelled like the cartoon character, Fido Dido. Witnesses to this came from some Nigerians who held a parley with him during his recent trip to France.
However, there are so many holes in claims that the present Buhari in the Aso Villa is a body-double. First is that Nigeria is too porous for such a secret to endure. Second, the secret must be in possession of virtually all world leaders, especially the voluble Trump, that it wouldn’t take long for it to bounce back home; third is that those who have interfaced with Buhari and his current impersonator would surely spot the difference. My haunch is that Mr. President’s manifestation of acute withdrawal, austere energy of governance and other indices is a withdrawal syndrome associated with sufferers of the kind of ailment that he battled, who is probably manifesting the effects of exotic drugs administered on him to keep alive. You will recall that his memory loss and incoherence have been manifest before that infamous trip to the UK for treatment. His mis-pronouncements of the name of his party, the APC and Osinbajo’s, for instance, predated his travel to the UK. But why some people won’t allow this gentleman rest at home is my major bother.
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