RESIDENTS of Borno state capital, Maiduguri, on Wednesday, jeered at President Muhammadu Buhari as his convoy passed through the city, a recently circulated footage has shown.
“Ba mu so [we don’t want]; ba mu yi [we are no longer interested],” a crowd of residents that lined the road repeatedly chanted in Hausa.
@MBuhari jeered in Borno where he won over 90 percent votes in 2019 polls
Read here: https://t.co/cd3fTOwrar#Nigeria #Buhari
Video: Social Media pic.twitter.com/s4CCGfSGvG
— The ICIR (@TheICIR) February 12, 2020
Checks by The ICIR showed that the video has not been previously uploaded on the internet, so it could not have been fake. Using the pedestrian bridge visible in the clip, we were able to place the location of the incident to be Kano-Maiduguri road in front of Ramat Polytechnic, Maiduguri.
Buhari, who was just returning from a state visit to Ethiopia, had paid a “sympathy visit” to the state following a recent terrorist attack by Boko Haram, which led to the killing of about 30 people and abduction of others.
Babagana Zulum, the Borno state governor, blamed the Nigerian military for the lives lost during the Sunday incident.
“I am being pushed to the wall to say the truth,” Zulum said on Monday. “Since my inauguration as the governor of Borno State from May 29th to date, Auno town has been attacked for about six times now. And the reason is that the military has withdrawn from Auno town.
“We have made repeated plea to the military to re-establish a base in Auno since it is one of the flashpoints of the Boko Haram, but nothing has been done to that effect.”
The disapproval of President Buhari by Maiduguri residents comes only less than a year after he got 91 per cent of all the valid votes cast in the 2019 presidential election, according to results announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
Out of a total of 919,786 valid votes cast in the state, Buhari’s All Progressive Congress (APC) received 836,496 while the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) got 71,788 votes.
'Kunle works with The ICIR as an investigative reporter and fact-checker. You can shoot him an email via [email protected] or, if you're feeling particularly generous, follow him on Twitter @KunleBajo.