If you make me a “Wailing Wailer” for objectively criticizing PMB’s government, you are an “Ailing Hailer” – Sayo Aluko

A crop of creatives made by a consistent statistics firm in Nigeria, BudgIT, containing some alleged but fact-based and figure-backed discrepancies in the budget presented by President Muhammadu Buhari, surfaced online earlier in the week. I was in the company of some learned friends with whom I saw the creatives…I became a bit livid, and naturally inclined towards the line of thought put on the creatives.

These BudgIT guys have done a great job raising this needed dust and we should take it in from there with the hope of getting answers or keep tasking with asking till some tenable clarification is made, so I felt.

But, to my utter surprise, 3 of my friends became gaga in their animated defense of Buhari and the budget, tagging the alleged facts as faux-naif, and they kept summarizing all their self-acclaimed sense of patriotism in one puerile line, “…..wailers gonna wail, haters gonna hate, potatoes gonna potate…”, repeating it like a frenzied jingle.

All the while, I looked bemused.

These 3 friends of mine had friends on the social media too; I logged in to see many like them who were just hooked on Buharijuana, obviously oblivious of a right sense of patriotism that tasks a citizenry to make their elected governments accountable by asking questions.

During past governments, we lost the ability to ask questions when government actions and policies that seem unclear and fraudulent were made…we lost that ability while we didn’t even know we possessed it. If we were a nation where citizens practiced the act of asking questions without the risk of being tagged as a wailing opposition by shenanigan supporters, it’s a no-brainer that we’d have been better by far as a country.

Unknown to my friends above, like them, I voted for the Buhari mandate out of a conviction too. That even unlike them, some like myself went a step further to work for the campaign assiduously; more importantly, unlike them, I know that my vote wasn’t a mere support, it is an investment, one that gives me the full right to know how well or otherwise it’s doing.

One of our bane as a country is that, apart from the cheap emotions of a majority of the citizenry, most of us Nigerians are emotionally unintelligent. If only we all knew that our votes for a mandate is actually an investment of our conviction that knights us with a responsibility to ask questions, that it is more than being a mere ounce of ‘support’, gaskiya, awa lives for don beta tey tey…

Of course, we all have a right to our opinions, as varying as possible; but, when we hurriedly throw away an opportunity to be objectively opinionated about this government and replace that with knee-jerk name-calling at every turn, it shows that our mindsets have Zika virus….innately defective.

If you think asking the right questions (and even the emotionally intoned question or the one borne out of paranoia) makes one a Wailer, you are an errorist, and you are just one ‘T’ away from being a bokofied Haram.

If you think I’m a wailing wailer when I employ commonsensical patriotic wit to ask questions about dodgy details in this budget that are statistically up to the tune of a trillion, you are a bemusing Ailing Hailer.

If you think I’m a wailing wailer when I say that this Buhari government can do more than wield just a “fighting-corruption” policy, you are an ailing hailer.

If you think I’m a wailing wailer when I decry the illogicality and insensitivity in Buhari’s perennial foreign traipse and jet-fleeting while Dalori for example is on fire, you are an ailing hailer.

If you think I’m a wailing wailer when I say it’s insensitive, wrongful timing and a lack of good-faith when this government raises, places and/or hikes tariffs, taxes on the same citizens that just endured a Jonathanian era, you’re an amazing ailing hailer.

Make we stop dia first…If you look at these BudgIT creatives and you don’t feel any natural urge and deserved right to task and thirst for a tenable clarification from your government, and rather switch to “defend Buhari” mode, oh boy, you’re an awesome ailing hailer, SEEK HELP!