The Yoruba say, “Do not speak ill of the dead.” The Yoruba say that during the reign of King Lagbaja, there was bounty; birds chirped, rats hissed, and humans spoke. In the time of President Muhammadu Buhari, my friends and I left Nigeria. It was two terms, two election cycles, and eight years of pestilence. Two years short of a decade, it was too long a time for a failing state to be rudderless.

In 2011, I voted Mallam Nuhu Ribadu for president. My polling booth was at Moremi High School on the outskirts of Road Seven, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. I was a final-year medical student, tired of being a student but enthused about voting for the first time. My friends who had taken four-year courses at the university were already in Lagos, counting money. I was writing poems, discussing Afrobeats at the New Buka every night, thinking about a near future where I would be addressed as a doctor. Ribadu lost to President Goodluck Jonathan.

The following year, the post-election violence sanctioned by perennial election loser but strong contender Rtd. General Muhammadu Buhari hit home when I served in Anambra State. I understood, in real time, what being a youth corps member meant. Ostensibly, you were a disposable human shield. A symbol of Nigeria dispersed into far-flung places where you are reduced to your paramilitary khakis, to one word: corper. This was why more than 800 people died needlessly in that post-election violence, many of them young, educated Nigerians doing their youth service. Their bright future was extinguished on bloodied ballot papers.

When President Jonathan fired all resident doctors in Nigeria during an industrial action in 2014, I was affected. I stayed away from the hospital grounds so that I would not be served the sack letter. What baffled me was our expendability. Resident doctors are the armed forces of a country’s health sector. Sacking that entire workforce was not only laughable; it should have been a parable of the sower on my impressionable mind, but trust a fast city like Lagos. It was bubbling like a pepper soup broth, slow-cooking surf and turf. I was distracted by the city’s seductive nightlife. Everywhere was effervescent with oil profits. Lagos was flush with cash. Afropolitan returnees who knew how to have a good time had been lured into town.

When Jonathan was up for reelection in 2015, I was partial to President Buhari’s campaign. Perhaps it was the vulnerability of a retired general’s tears. Or his tenacity, showing up every election cycle with renewed vim, requesting our mandate. It was not a rose-tinted decision. His appalling human rights record was clear. His anti-corruption stance was the lure. At the time, it did not seem like a simplistic solution: an anti-corruption czar in power, blocking leakages so that the economy floats. Little did we know. The first inkling was his inaugural speech. Next was his reluctance to set up his Cabinet. He quickly earned the nickname Baba Go Slow, whilst the Nigerian economy moonwalked into the abyss.

My friends began to leave Nigeria. I was initially reluctant to renege on my patriotism, but the longer I stayed within the porous civil service, the more apparent the rot revealed itself. Corruption had become an intangible heritage closely yoked to Nigerian culture. No institution, including religious, was exempt.  People aspire to every form of leadership to enrich themselves. Becoming a politician seemed like a twisted act of self-determination, where you used your position to amass personal material gains.

And to quote Fela, “Inside this no head no tail/same water no light still dey.” The Afropolitans fled with their foreign accents and passports. I began to contemplate my options, and in September 2019, I quit Nigeria. It was no longer a difficult decision to make; it was the pragmatic next step.

I suppose it will be difficult to talk about Buhari without mentioning the EndSARS massacre. Nigerian youth were killed and then disappeared. The government hid its state-sanctioned violence. Those who thought the old general was a democrat had elected to forget his brutal human rights record. Again, the bottom line for me was how the Nigerian youth was expendable, a bag of bones that can be torched, torn, and disappeared.

The Yoruba say, “Do not speak ill of the dead.” The Yoruba say that during the reign of King Lagbaja, there was bounty; birds chirped, rats hissed, and humans spoke.  In the time of President Muhammadu Buhari, my friends and I left Nigeria. This, of course, complicates how we receive the news of his passing. To be generous, his legacy was that he propulsively pursued his lifelong ambition to be president. He serviced it with the blood of Nigerians through several election cycles, and when he finally got our mandate, he installed his feet on a stool and picked his teeth.

The counterargument is: What is eight years in the lifespan of a country? Eight years in the life of a man is enough time to complete a family. Enough time to drift from shining star to empty husk. Enough time to lose faith in one’s own country. My friends and I entered the workforce shortly before Buhari’s presidency. Now we are dispersed across the world, being productive for foreign nations, and we are grappling daily with what it means to be a migrant in a world where migrants are scapegoats. Our parents also endured the albatross of military rule, particularly 20 months of General Buhari’s rule in the mid-’80s. A time when military might was deployed excessively to instill discipline, while the Nigerian economy fell off the cliff.

In our handling of time, we must think of the baby boomers and how they have centered themselves in our world. We must think of their stronghold, particularly on the nation-state of Nigeria. We are still under their watch as I write, these strong men with vaunted histories and a presence that stretches time like fictional superheroes. In the main, President Buhari was one of them. He will be remembered as a patriot, sent forth as a national hero. I suppose he, at least, deserves his rest.