I was just delving into some dangerous psychological regions this evening because as a writer, one need to have some learning in that area of study for the purpose of characterisation in fiction writing. There, I came to lightly study and build up Buhari supporters.
Most of Buhari’s supporters, the chronic versions, are still under a spell of infatuation. They cannot forget him, they remember him every passing day no matter what harm he does to them and the people. The thought of him is a manic obsession, ever pressing upon them. No psychiatrist can dwell upon the details of their oppression, or retail any special or peculiar way his personality, his being, his existence, his integrity… affects their lives. Yet, his existence dominates their lives for no particular reason, never fading, as if his being would melt like spiritual wax upon them. Even when they are hungry, they get reminded by his dominance which fill them with some incomprehensible longings. Some have been in trances since 2015, and might never recover till their dying days. Some are Sai Baba, that sad inventive of some lesser beings.
They still think of him as that over-hyped general that was once said to bore an enviable reputation for integrity and discipline. Others opinions and his recent actions and inactions mean next to valueless to them, they have not alone decided to die with their over-idealization of him, but are determined to do so. (Remember the last German soldier with Adolf Hitler in the Third Reich?)
Psychologically, Buhari controls a feeling in them as a person or gift appreciated beyond its real value and they proudly exhibit him in their thoughts as a trophy.
To them, Buhari is one of those few men who are called the salts of the world, in a class with Ghandi and Martin Luther. Oh his cheerfulness is unbounded, matched by his goodness of heart, his broad charity and common sense… If ever the fusion of two sets of mankind into one has been accomplished on earth, it is surely the union of Buhari and his attached blind followers. They give exaggerated importance to any little of his achievements, as little as being able wear his shoes rightly. They are keenly interested in his presidential errors and take them as norm.
But deep down and inside of them, they feel depressed, as it is when your hero dies or when your house is set on fire or when your your landlord calls for his rent and you have to hide under the bed in the presence of your children… They have their regrets, their conditions of life is not something they would have loved to be fitted to. But you can’t see these pains except you query their inner weariness and dissatisfaction with some medical probing. You would be moved by a kind of commiseration for them – a pity for that kind of life that seem without any colour or form which never carry its sufferers beyond the region of blind contentment, which no single moment of anguish would ever live their souls, in which they would never be dissociated from illusions, delusions, hallucinations and delirium to which there is no known cure.
Elempe Dele\
