Former military Head of State and President-elect General Muhammadu Buhari must have contended with his worst criticism before and during the just concluded general election. Two major aspects of his antagonism that appear intertwined in nature were the attempts to paint him as an uneducated person – though having risen to the zenith of his military career and the other being his branding as a media hater particularly because he promulgated decree four back then.
The two demeaning counts came handy for members of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), who vigorously attacked the former military leader as though he is an 'uneducated brute.'
No doubt, Buhari and his party were quite uncomfortable with the trend. Several frantic efforts were made to disabuse the minds of Nigerians from believing the negative branding, which were targeted at reducing his acceptance amongst the voting mass of the people.
In fact, after several attempts to deny some of these aspersions, at a point, during an interview with Aljazeera, he was compelled to say "Whoever does not like Buhari for what he did as military Head of State could vote for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) or any other smaller parties." Whilst that sounded arrogant in a way, it turned out his way of containing the deluge of attacks coming his way.
Buhari eventually won the elections, a pointer to the fact that many Nigerians were not bought over by some of the orchestrated campaigns designed to cast shadows of doubts over his ability to lead a democratically-elected government, the truth is, Buhari is one leader who believes in knowledge and relies greatly on the news media as a way to feel the pulse of the people.
He gets information about everything going on in every aspect of the society by perusing the news – politics, economy and even the sports segment of the newspapers.
The former president is one avid newspaper reader, who picks practically every newspapers he could lay his hands on in the early hours of every new day and reads them very religiously from the front page to the back page.
Even where he is unable to finish up the reading at home, he carries the everything with him wherever he is headed and ensures that he finishes reading them as a way to updating himself about the state of affairs in his country and beyond. Those who are close to him know this for a fact. Those who hate him know too do. They know he is a man who does not court the idea of executive briefing of the dailies in forming his opinions about important issues and this seeks to explain why some his lovers and haters compete for his attention through the media.
One would easily recall the death wish advert by the Ekiti State Governor, Dr. Ayodele Fayose, which attracted international condemnation in the build up to the presidential election.
Buhari's fanatical inclination towards the newspaper contents and the understanding of the effects on his public image perception therefore explain why he reacts whenever he is misrepresented in some of those publications and has the tendency to fight back, especially where he is able to establish that the pieces of information churned out were not correct.
Added to his passion for reading newspapers, is his unquantifiable love for his family. He is by every standard a family man; he passionately loves his wife and children, but more importantly, he shares splendid time with his grandchildren.
Though it is not certain if he would have as much time as he used to share with his family now that he is coming in as president, one can say for sure that newspaper reading has become a way of life that hardly anything can change.
Culled from Thisday
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