The Muhammadu Buhari government is housed in a glass tent. It is a big tent regime of scented defecators. Living in a glass house makes you very vulnerable. And this is not just about not throwing stones. It is also about your nakedness. Transparent glasses hide little of beauty and of ugliness. It bares all. The Buhari government is like a lady in a skimpy skirt. It struts the landscape and leaves nothing to the imagination. We have a government that is opposition unto itself, rolling from one self-induced controversy to another. Geoffrey Chaucer warns that if your wall is made of glass, don’t throw stones at your neighbour. How about the spectacle of a riotous glass house family stripping one another for their neighbours to watch? They defecate right there and fling the mess for their neighbours to smell and run.

With this Buhari government, you do not have to be a fantastic investigative journalist to get a great copy. All you need is the eye of an eagle. There are enough angry creations in the troubled forest to shoo out your game for you to catch. For the first time since Independence, we now know that the first family suffers the ailments of the village household. Doing what Trump does on Twitter, a presidential daughter would complain loudly about the State House clinic. The hospital eats billions every year but cares little about giving care to the sick. Not a dose of paracetamol is there! While the journalist tarries and plays careful of possible social media hackers, the mother of the house steps forward and erases all doubts. The clinic stinks – or rather does not stink of the distinctive disinfectant smell of the real hospital. It has no syringe but has doctors and nurses. It has more than health workers – there are perennially engaged construction workers there. No one forced out these bits of information. The first family is just very transparent. It says it the way it sees it.

There is a Dr Munir in that ineffectual infirmary called State House Clinic. He is the officer in charge there. What does he have to say? The journalist needs not struggle to get anything. Whatever he needs is online already. It is a government of transparency. Nothing is hidden to anyone who has eyes and can hear the voice of leaks. An internal memo dated 3rd October, 2017 addressed by that doctor to the Chief of Staff to the president details everything anyone would want to know about the sickness of the State House Clinic. “The State House Medical Centre (SHMC) has been faced with several challenges involving drugs and consumables since year 2016,” the doctor says in the memo. He proceeds to add figures to his frustration: “In year 2016, the approved budget for the hospital was N3,890,629,221.00. However, the only amount expended for the purchase of drugs for the year was N25,983,620.00.” In 2017, Dr Munir continues, “the approved budget for drugs and consumables is N290,455,312.00 and the amount expended on drugs so far is N14,786,736.00 and N15,000,000.00 for consumables.” The hospital has an average of 800 patient visits per week. Who leaked the memo and why? But is it not nice that we now read freely how our lives are run by those we hired to make it better. Your village hospital is still a “mere consulting clinic” as General Buhari described it on December 31, 1983. Stop complaining. The Villa clinic is worse than your village death (health) centre.

A glass house would normally not have glass as its roof. But this Buhari tent of glass is entirely see-through. What does a reporter need that operatives of this government won’t upload online? You, of course, have been following the Baru-Kachikwu expose. Persons in government would feel that Kachikwu said too much in his eight-page letter. The reporter would thank him for helping him do his work. It was almost given that whatever else anyone needed on that case would be readily provided by the other side. And the other side did exactly that. It even gave more than the expected. It gleefully announced that the president took sides, that he asked Baru to reply Kachikwu. Some bosses take sides in internal conflicts between subordinates but they don’t flaunt it. And, I do not think Buhari intended to make a show of his dislike for Kachikwu’s “facts” and his aluta style of protest. But that hidden order was announced on the rooftop by Baru’s NNPC. It said: “…the president ordered the Group Managing Director (GMD) and management of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to consider and respond expeditiously to the allegations.” An unusual government! Even if the president asked you to blast one of his ministers, must you disclose it? If a child suffers what Kachikwu suffered with that Buhari order, how would he continue to “see” that father? Parents everywhere are not expected to wear their love or bias on their forehead when dealing with their feuding children. If they do, they lose not just their esteem but the control of the marginalised.

This Change is strange. It mutates and makes itself confounding to its apostles. Unlike the opaque, darkroom regime of Goodluck Jonathan, there will be no shock after Buhari’s tenure. We now have a fair idea how it is operating. Leaks have become a defining feature of the regime. It is not only the roof that leaks. The glass walls have added cracks to their see-through. And you don’t have to ask if the man enjoys it. Nobody likes being violated. The Donald Trump government has also suffered terrible leaks. But we’ve heard President Trump speak in condemnation of those behind the disclosures. Have you heard any complaint from our president on these documents flying about? A leaky roof provides shelter for no one. It drenches both the good and the bad in good and bad places. Why these leaks and who are those behind them? If they are insiders, do they understand the meaning of bringing the roof down on everyone? A frustrated Samson did that in the Bible – he finished his tormentors – and himself, too! And if the leakers are not exactly inside this government of change, could they be doing what that army officer said after destroying a Vietnamese community: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it”?

But then, someone said it is the Eleda (the Creator) of the dispossessed Nigerian people that is not sleeping. He is the one infusing the leakers with the spirit of anger and rebellion. He is also the one stopping the president from doing away with persons who are defecating right inside his tent of integrity. Why? They remind me of a certain US President who found it safer to keep a powerful destroyer in house. J. Edgar Hoover was the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) under President Lyndon Johnson. He did his work “so well” amassing so much potentially damaging dossiers on everyone, including the president himself. And he was so good at his work – he tested his weapons on a few close to the big boss with devastating effects on their careers. The president was asked to fire him. President Johnson smiled and told those asking him to do it: “It is probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than (to have him) outside the tent pissing in.”

At least, for now, every rebel inside our own President’s tent still fears the big boss. The pissing shots have not (yet) reached the General.