Leadership Or Lack Thereof

I was a student in the United Sates when the civil war broke out in 1967. Although I came from the then Midwest Region that was adversely affected by the war, as the President of the Nigerian Students' Union at the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana campus, I fought tirelessly to keep Nigeria one. And so did General Buhari. That makes his current behavior even more perplexing. Let us admit for purposes of argument that Buhari's supporters in the South-East and South-South were disenfranchised. Why would it take the killing of the brothers and sisters of those disenfranchised voters to demonstrate his anger and disappointment?. It would seem to me that these supporters have actually suffered doubly. And, I am sure that they are still waiting for comforting words from their leader. Unfortunately, that leader is more interested in bemoaning his own electoral loss! It is unfortunate that after witnessing what has happened to Cote d'Ivoire these past four months because of the intransigence of the loser of the elections, Buhari and his supporters from parts of northern Nigeria would subject Nigeria to the same ignominy. If there is a good lesson to be learned from these tragic happenings, it is that Nigerians have decided purposefully that a candidate from a party that has no "national character" should rule them. There are more registered voters in the United States who call themselves "Democrats" than those that call themselves Republicans. However  during the last elections, voters who call themselves Republicans were energized and came out to vote in their numbers. The result was a landslide victory for the Republican Party. Nobody argued that more Democrats were registered.  Buhari's argument is that since more Northerners registered to vote, there was no way he could obtain less votes than his opponent. Did it ever occur to him that the voters from the South-East and South-South could have been more energized than voters from other regions? If General Buhari really claims to love Nigeria (and he fought gallantly to keep it one), he owes it to Nigerians to come out and publicly renounce what his supporters are doing to the Nation. Claiming that the party did not organize the riots is irrelevant.