Burna Boy indicts Buhari – Marijuana
Life is hard enough without sniffing drugs. Hard drugs appear in the horizon like golden gates of escape, but they’re traps in reality. Hard drugs are the chains that cripple freedom, the substance that splits the mind from the soul, the cord that ties sense with nonsense.
Powerful is music. The ‘m’ in music appeals to the mind. Music cured King Saul and cursed the devils tormenting his soul, caging them into tranquillity. Music pulled down the Walls of Jericho. Music is the food of love, it is the sound of joy that heralds birth and the song of sorrow that ends it.
We live in a star-struck world of superrich superstars luxuriating in superstardom, idolised by a fandom hooked on superhype, superhits, supercars and superficialities.
Now, singers don’t make music any more; they make noise. They have replaced rhythm with rubbish, they have replaced reason with rage, lyrics now drip only with sex, drugs plus alcohol and everyone in society – parents, guardians, government, clerics, schools, traditional rulers, unions – dances to the decay of our present and the doom of our future.
An uneducated monarch in the South-West was seen in a viral video wrapping marijuana, yet neither law enforcement agencies nor the civil society community has come out to condemn the atrocious act.
At the height of his glory, the most gifted and most radical Nigerian musician ever, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, never dedicated a song to Indian hemp, his stimulant pastime. Though his negative influence in the use of marijuana among musicians today cannot be proven empirically, many Nigerian musicians who smoke marijuana today see Fela as a demigod.
But, largely owing to the breath of sanity in the society and the big stick wielded by regulatory bodies in the 1980s through the early 1990s, murijuana musicians who wished to glorify igbo didn’t do so openly, they used euphemisms such as ganja, Indo, kush, Mary Jane, choko for Indian hemp to eulogise their love for the hallucinatory substance.
In 1984 when the sway of Major General Muhammadu Buhari’s swagger stick typified military swiftness, a Port Harcourt-born young lad wouldn’t have metamorphosed from Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu into Burna Boy, singing ‘I need igbo and shayo o’. Which studio would have recorded the offensive song?
If Burna Boy missed being tied to a stake and flogged naked in the open by soldiers, he surely wouldn’t have missed doing the time for his crime at Kirikiri. He would have been banned from holding a mic in private or in public for 250 years!
From the late Majek Fashek, who ordered the misty sky to ‘Send Down the Rain’, to Tuface Idibia, who professed love to his African Queen, to 9ice who prophesied that Gongo Aso, to Danfo Drivers, Ice Prince, Olamide, Flavour, Wizkid, Davido, Naira Marley, Seun Kuti, Terry G, Eedrees Abdulkareem, Portable and a host of others, the use of hemp and, or its glorification, is commonplace among Nigerian musicians. Aside from Hip-Hop, R&B, Rap and Reggae, musicians of other genres like Fuji, Juju, Apala, Highlife etc are well into marijuana use, also.
It’s true that marijuana is now being used as a recreational drug in some parts of the world. It’s not yet so in Nigeria, and so, it remains a crime for people to use, peddle or promote it. The use of hard drugs, especially Indian hemp, has been linked to the daredevilry commonly displayed by kidnappers, murderers, bandits, etc across the country. It is also a major contributor to the rise in the number of psychiatric cases in the country.
Between 1985 – when he was ousted from power – and now, Buhari has morphed from being a father to a grandfather and a great-grandfather, making the weight of parenthood on him heavier. Buhari of the 80s had a voice, and he spoke.
Today, what has changed? Who or what has taken Buhari’s voice? Why has the tough khaki-wearing father Buhari grown into a permissive agbada-wearing great-grandfather that watches his children and grandchildren nationwide take hard drugs without showing concern? Why?
My mind tells me the violation of values in about the last four decades is the answer. Even Buhari himself, the advocate of the War Against Indiscipline crusade, got caught in the web of moral conflict when he declared without shame that his benefactor, the Brainless Bandit called General Sani Abacha, never stole.