By Obi Nwakanma
General Muhammadu Buhari, former military Head of state, has been many things: politician, statesman, soldier – and now he has added another plume to his hat: prophet. Come 2015, the General declared this week, there will be a showdown between the dogs and the baboons. That showdown will instigate a bloodtide never before witnessed in the annals of Nigeria. Buhari is an unlikely prophet, but I guess, these are unusual times. Prophecy is all the rage.

Some have even looked at the ancient Mayan calendar and discerned from its mysteries, that the world will end sometime this year, 2012. Last year, an American evangelical pastor caused many a heartbreak and much financial ruin with his prediction that the world would end, first in May.

When it didn’t happen, he peered closer at his Bible, read his divinations again, and said, “my bad! It was a miscalculation.” He put it finally, firmly on October 2011, when the world would end. I guess God’s clock is slower because we are still here. I do not mean to underestimate Buhari’s predictions, because it was not merely a prediction, it is prediction backed by a threat. It simply raises the thermal state of Nigerian politics.

The General is quite clear on his statement. He has accused the PDP of serial electoral fraud in the past. Let us also be very upfront with this matter: since 1999, the PDP has committed electoral fraud of the magnitude that endangers the democratic process.

The election that brought in Obasanjo in 1999 was a sham. The 2003 election was pure armed robbery. It was that election for which Adams Oshiomole, then president of the Nigerian Labour Council lost my respect because he stood bold faced, against the will of the electorate, at the swearing in of Obasanjo to justify fraud.

It was a betrayal of the people because truth be told, Obasanjo and the PDP lost that election so massively that any observer could immediately see that a PDP mandate rested on uncertain grounds. The 2007 election that brought in the late Musa Yar Adua on the same ticket with the current President Jonathan as Vice president, was equally massively rigged.

So terribly rigged in fact, that the Chief Electoral officer for that election, Maurice Iwu, has since become a national metaphor for electoral fraud. General Buhari has been contesting the national polls since 2003, and has been disputing every result using the legal methods.

In every situation, the courts have also failed to come clean with justice. So, let us face up to this fact, the General has a right to his anger. The most dangerous threat to the democratic process is unremediated fraud in elections that subvert the will of the people.

It is such a claim that Buhari makes. In the last elections, Buhari had many supporters. However, his strategy was weak, and it concentrated on capturing a “northern vote” and breaking the “southern front.” That strategy had a blowback because it sequestered Buhari and isolated him to the North. Goodluck Jonathan won that election fair and square.

He won because most Nigerians wanted something different from the old guard. He appealed to a wider national audience, particularly a younger generation of Nigerians who are increasingly unmotivated by ethnic and regionalist politics. Buhari’s strategy led him to seeking what many saw as a limited and narrow mandate; a mandate that makes him out to be a “regional leader” to quote Rueben Abati, President Jonathan’s spokesman. But Buhari has remained an angry and adamant man since that election.

Buhari believes very seriously that it was a rigged election, and that the results do not reflect the will of the Nigerian people. On the eve of the 2011 national polls, Buhari issued a very clear call to his supporters to make Nigeria ungovernable if the electoral results did not turn out to his satisfaction.

As the results were coming out, and as the polls were closing, mass revolt broke out in parts of the North and the violence was bloody. The pendulum of political violence had moved from the “wild west” to the frenzied north. Violence had from then, mutated to what we now call “Boko Haram,” the use of terror as a means of political negotiation.

There are many who suspect that Boko Haram is the military wing of an inflamed North – meaning, that “old north” with a political elite that feels like it is currently in some kind of political Siberia, without its traditional foothold at the epicenter of Nigerian power.

Their mood is bellicose. Their goal is to affect a realignment of power. And Buhari is leading the charge, playing brinkmanship, not statesmanship. How is this? Well, this past week, General Buhari declared that the 2015 elections will, as if we have not seen enough blood yet, come with a flood of blood if the PDP rigs it once again.

Buhari went on to suggest, quoting Ango Abdulahi, that there are three kinds of Boko Haram: the original Boko Haram, the Prebendal Boko Haram, and of course, the Federal Government – the chief Boko Haram. Buhari’s allegations rattled the cage so much that the Jonathan administration was forced to respond through the President’s spokesman, Dr. Rueben Abati, who stopped only short of calling General Buhari out on treason.

Buhari’s response was equally swift: he accused the Jonathan administration of a ploy to arrest him, and in fact dared the federal government to do so. It is here that it gets very interesting. I suspect Buhari is seeking political martyrdom – a sort of prisoner of conscience status.

Buhari was military head of state. In his time as military dictator, his statement to the press last week baying for blood against the state, would have earned him an immediate arrest, a show trial for treason, and execution. I mean, he authorized the jailing of Tunde Thomson and Nduka Irabor merely for publishing an Ambassadorial list. But this is a democracy – for which we fought the likes of Buhari.

One is glad that the General has the right today to free speech and other dividends of democracy. That is why I think it will not only be ridiculous and much folly for the federal government to arrest him for what he said. However, we also need to let General Buhari understand that liberty is not license.

Any acts – not merely speech – that incites and mobilizes a population or a group to commit felony lies under the jurisdiction of the state and Buhari can be arraigned if there is  iron-clad proof against him. The heavens will not fall.