By Eyo Akpan
If Nigeria must make any progress, we as a people must shed the weight of our foolishness.
We must purge ourselves of the correctness in showing respect for the dead, who while alive were people that deserved none.
I really would not have bothered about making any comment on the death of Kashamu Buruji, an individual I find not deserving of one, except for the pathetic show by Reuben Abati on Channels TV, shedding tears in respect for a man who at best, should be happy death was better than serving time in a US jail.
Just last week, I questioned the tributes and honour given to Ismaila Funtua, only to have a worse example of celebrating the dead pop up in Buruji, a man of questionable character and whose extradition was filed by the US in 2018 over drug trafficking charges.
Buruji as I will continue to call him, because he does not earn my respect to call him Senator, has no immunity, but has fought his extradition to go clear his name.
Like most Nigerian “Tokunbo Criminals” who are elected officers today, he claimed it was a case of mistaken identity.
But isn’t going over to America to answer to the charges, the best way of clearing the issue and name?
Buruji fought to make that opportunity impossible and while living under the cloud of being a drug baron, the society celebrated him.
The National Association of Nigerian Students, honoured him with its Man of the Year Award and he served out a full term in the Senate.
You would have thought that with his past, he should have been left to live out his life in the shame of being a wanted man, but no, not in a society like ours where we must give opportunity to revere criminals and immortalize their criminality in flowery tribute.
Honestly, if not for Reuben Abati, I would have let it go, but to see him shed tears for Buruji and call him “mentor” really stuck in my craw.
So Buruji is now the measure of who and what we should aspire to be?
I can understand NANS seeing Buruji as a role model , after all a lot of them aspire to being drug barons or whatever else it takes as long as “kin sa ti l’owo”, but my heart sank hearing the words uttered by Reuben Abati.
It was doubly numbing because it evidently was not a simple matter of correctness, in not speaking ill of the dead, but he really meant it.
Thank God, people like Reuben are not Him, because if they were, Buruji would not only have escaped jail, but would have cheated death too.
