His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Lord of all the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular, was a rather interesting character back in the 1970s. Having seized power from Milton Obote and converted Uganda into a total dictatorship and a suffocating cult of personality, there were not many crimes he was not guilty of. Murder of political opponents? He boasted about it. Expelling hundreds of thousands of Asians after revoking their citizenship in a failed racial populist experiment? He did it.
Became immensely wealthy at the expense of the country which was falling into ruins around him? Definitely Idi Amin. Constantly had the military engaged in one expensively murderous wild goose chase or the other while he solidified his grip on power and frolicked with his vast personal harem? Of course. Responsible for hundreds of thousands of Ugandan and foreign deaths? Absolutely. The Last King of Scotland was objectively a terrible man; a genuine African abomination of the sort that usually only exists in scary late night stories told to wide-eyed children. Yet none of these high volume, high velocity atrocities ever actually made a difference to his political safety.
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Uganda in exile often bitterly complained that while they were real verifiable atrocities for the foreign press to talk about, they often spent their limited audiences with Idi Amin taking note of and reporting on his legendary idiosyncrasies and eccentricities. Idi Amin himself was confident that the diversion of his personality was enough to escape scrutiny. While hundreds of thousands of people died he reveled in his reputation as the lovable madman typified by the ridiculous title he gave himself mentioned at the outset.
And then one day in June 1976 that all changed.
Dora Bloch – An unlikely end to the Idi Amin Myth
Dora Bloch was a 74 year-old woman travelling on Air France flight 139 on 27 June 1976 on her way to New York for her son’s wedding. This was the flight that was famously hijacked and redirected to land in Entebbe, Uganda. Block fell ill on the plane and she was then transferred to Mulago hospital in Kampala. As a result she was not among those freed in the famous Operation Entebbe Israeli counterterrorism mission.
While the other hostages were freed, Bloch remained in hospital. Incensed by the failure of the Ugandan armed forces to hold off the Israelis, Idi Amin ordered that she should be killed. He dispatched his personal Chief of Protocol Nasir Ondoga, and head of the Ugandan Secret Police Farouk Minawa to murder the defenseless helpless seventy-five-year-old pensioner. They even killed the policeman who was stationed with her.
Objectively speaking murdering a 75-year old civilian was not even close to the worst thing that the Last King of Scotland had done up to that point. And yet this incident marked the beginning of the end of Idi Amin’s murderous regime. From that point international sentiment turned against him and he was no longer the friendly, lovable, slightly kooky African dictator stereotype. He was finally recognised as what he was – a heartless, disgraceful, undisciplined, cold-hearted murderer.
Less than three years later, he found himself out of power and in exile in Saudi Arabia. Until his death in 2003, he never saw Uganda again. If you were to have met the last King of Scotland in his prime, and asked him what incident he thought would have brought his regime to its knees, he might have mentioned in many tribal massacres that he sanctioned. He might have mentioned murdering and dismembering the corpses of his political enemies. He might even have mentioned destroying the economy of Uganda by ejecting hundreds of houses of the economically active Asians.
What he almost certainly would never have thought to mention was the casual murder of a nondescript random 75 year old woman from Tel Aviv. This is the beauty of geopolitics and international relations. 10,000 deaths is a statistic, but one death is a tragedy. And over here on the Western side of the African continent, Idi Amin’s contemporary looks set to discover just how this weird dynamic works.
To a dictator, nuance does not exist
Major General Muhammad Buhari like his Ugandan agemate, has a litany of atrocities on his record. If you were to ask him which of these atrocities he thinks could permanently destroy his legacy he would look at you and laugh. Pogrom of Igbo military officers in July 1966? He was involved. Genocide of the Igbo ethnic group, euphemistically known as the “Nigerian Civil War?” He was there. A military coup in 1976? He was there. Another military coup in 1983? All him.
Served under General Abacha’s incredibly murderous regime? Unapologetically. Took up a role as an ethnic champion following the return of electoral democracy? It was expected. Blatantly stirred up his supporters to go on a murderous post election rampage that killed over 800 people in 2011? Na him. Refused to apologise at any point for this? Of course. Oversaw the murder of over 300 Shia muslims from the Islamic Movement of Nigeria in Zaria barely five minutes after coming to power? Buhari all over. Oversaw the mass and piecemeal slaughter of IPOB separatists in Aba, Enugu and Anambra for years after coming to power? Who else?
So to this guy, sanctioning the military to carry out cold hearted, premeditated murder against innocent unarmed civilian protesters in probably Nigeria’s single most visible and recognizable urban location is just plus ça change. Lekki, Aba, Owerri, it’s really all the same to him. Us lesser civilian life forms will cry and shout for a few days, after which we will shut up and move on like we always do, after all.
As his disdainful 12-minute address last night showed us, Major-General Buhari genuinely does not understand why on earth we should not cry grateful fears of joy that he permits us to breathe air, eat, sleep, copulate and generally exist from the undeserved benevolence of his heart. Why on earth would it matter whether he shoots a few of us every now and again? Do ants complain when you unintentionally step on them and end their lives? Such impudence, he told us verbatim last night, “will not be tolerated.” It is over, and now it is time for the ants to disperse before his metaphorical can of military insecticide changes its mind.
This ultimately, is what will be General Buhari’s downfall. He will, of course, finish his term as president because nobody cares to suggest that shooting down your own young citizens in cold blood should ordinarily be a clear basis for immediate resignation or impeachment. Such things simply do not exist in Nigeria. Far be it from an ant like me to suggest that a can of insecticide like General Buhari will receive justice and recompense for a lifetime of wrongdoing. He is above such things, as we know by now.
The real twist however, is that amidst his vast collection of bodies and destroyed lives, it is the events of October 20, 2020 that will henceforth begin and end how Buhari is remembered. The foreign connections that were hitherto happy enough to be seen with him will stop calling. The Nigerian establishment, even as it tries to keep up it’s hilarious pretense of normalcy, is already incrementally putting vast amounts of optical distance between themselves and General Buhari. He has of course, fully lost all legitimacy in the minds of the population, and force will henceforth become his only tool.
The entire myth of General Buhari as a fundamentally well disciplined, ascetic, well-intentioned and morally pious individual was comprehensively destroyed in a few seconds on Tuesday night. The pitiful efforts by the Nigerian military afterward to gaslight the entire world into doubting the proof of their own eyes had absolutely no effect whatsoever. Buhari is now the 78 year-old equivalent of an ugly baby with an overflowing diaper that nobody will touch except it’s mother.
In this case, said ‘mother’ will be his ethnic support base and the minority within the armed forces who approve of what he did on Tuesday night. Beyond that, Buhari’s 78 years of carefully curated optical illusions have completely crumbled into nothingness, like the scene at the end of Avengers Endgame. Idi Amin’s politically fatal mistake was murdering an innocent 75 year-old woman.
Muhammadu Buhari has just given us his.
