A wise man once told me: “Nigerians are mules, everyone
who can, kicks at them.” The thing is, the more things
change, the more they feel the same. In 1984, Major-General
Muhamadu Buhari as military tyrant diagnosed “indiscipline” as Nigeria’s national malaise.

The sexy power word in those days was “summarily.”
Buhari promised that the military government of which he was head would “summarily” deal with any Nigerian who was found wanting in “discipline.” He quickly launched a “War Against Indiscipline.” It caught on fire.

Nigerians were pressed to “behave.” They began to queue
for buses and other services in places like Lagos, notorious
for jumping queues. That was the greatest achievement of
WAI: Nigerians learnt to queue. Military governors
sometimes arrived the gates of government secretariats very
early, and waited for government workers who arrived late.

Late-coming civil servants were humiliated, made to kneel
down irrespective of their office or positions, or age, and
frog-jumped as punishment for coming late to work. In
some cases, they were “summarily dismissed.” Buhari’s government authorized armed soldiers to raid warehouses, and seize the goods of traders accused of “hoarding essential commodities.” That was in a period, of course, when
“ESSENCO”was very scarce.

Buhari’s War Against
Indiscipline, stemmed from his genuine convictions that
Nigerians were an undisciplined lot, and had to be forced to
obey the simple laws of the land, and of courtesy.

Recent evidence suggests that Buhari continues to believe
this as a fundamental problem with the Nigerian character.
Last week, our friends, Dr. Barry and Claire Mauer had us
all over for a party for Claire’s birthday at their College
Park, Orlando, home. We were all going at it, with a little
wine and sherry, and that good stuff, when Shanti, another
friend of ours said, “I hear your president say all you
Nigerians are unruly, and you need to stop being unruly!” I
too had heard that the previous day on the BBC.

It was big news for the BBC that president Buhari’s
Independence Day message to Nigerians was that Nigerians
were “unruly.” It triggered their fancy so much that they
made such an event of it. They brought a Nigerian, whose
name I do not now recall, and Ghana’s Elizabeth Ohene, to
talk about the “unruliness” of Nigerians as claimed by a
president who increasingly seems really disconnected from