Spare a thought for Buhari

A man and his dog 

So a man buys a dog and call him Buhari, as an ode to Mr president...a man he “respects and admires so much” for his "doggedness" (pun intended). He loved his dog so much that he shaves the dog's torso and writes Buhari on both sides of it then walks his dog past his neighbour from Niger Republic whose father apparently is also called Buhari (like there are no other names to bear) and the neighbour demanded an explanation as to why Joe Fortemose Chinakwe a.k.a Joachim Iroko decided to name his dog Buhari which led to an altercation and subsequent police intervention.
Unfortunately for Joe…what started as a police intervention soon graduated to an arrest and charge for “conduct likely to cause breach of the peace” under section 249 (d) of criminal law of Ogun State and Joe has since then been sent to prison. As usual this has divided opinion across the nation, some argue this is a violation of fundamental human rights to freedom of speech and others argue that Joe deliberately goaded his neighbour by his action.

What about Buhari

Unfortunately, in all of these, nobody seems to care about poor Buhari or his whereabouts. Joe’s neighbour allegedly killed the innocent dog because they saw it as an insult to name the dog either after the President or after his Dad, so killing Buhari was the best option as far as they are concerned. People have been going on about rule of law etcetera, but who is going to bring Buhari’s killers to justice?? When is animal rights going to be enshrined in our constitution and more importantly in our minds.
Buhari never asked to be bought by Joe…he never asked to be shaved, hell his original name was bully before Joe decided to name him Buhari either for the reasons he stated i.e. out of admiration for the president or perhaps he was being cheeky and trying to goad his neighbour, this poor dog had nothing to do with all of these, yet he’s been brutally killed and no one is being arrested for that.
The Nigerian police have one more arrest to make…Buhari’s killers must be brought to justice and the Senate and house of representatives need to be up and doing regarding animal rights legislation, after all you can tell a lot about a country based on how they treat their animals.

And what about Lucky?

If everybody who bears the name Lucky was to take offence by the fact that 1 in every 20 dogs is called Lucky, then how many people will be in prison for breach of piece? If Joe wanted to upset people, he succeeded and hopefully learnt from it but what sort of precedence are we setting under this Government? After all Patience Jonathan was called a hippopotamus and a chimpanzee and her husband Goodluck Jonathan the former president had a goat named after him and heaven did not fall over, so why can’t I name my pet parrot Aisha or my pet monkey Lai without being worried I might get locked up and this is 2016 and a supposed democracy.


Let us spare a thought for Buhari and use this unfortunate incident as a turning point to start treating animals fairly and consider the fact we have a duty of care to our wildlife, maybe…just maybe we might start treating each other better.