By Tayo Mabeweje
Like a shadow cast at twilight, a tale once whispered in corners and amplified by digital megaphones crept into our national consciousness — a tale so implausible, yet so persistent, that it momentarily challenged the very face of leadership in Nigeria.
It was called the Jubril of Sudan theory — a fabrication dressed in sarcasm, laced with satire, and served to a public both anxious and eager for the absurd. It alleged that President Muhammadu Buhari, following a period of medical absence, had been quietly replaced by a lookalike from Sudan. The real was deemed false, and the fiction, astonishingly, found believers.
But every storm eventually tires, and truth — like the sun — never remains hidden for long.
President Muhammadu Buhari stood firm through that storm. He neither fought shadows nor allowed their chill to distract him from the work of governance. He bore the lie with silence at first, then with the grace of humour. “It’s the real me, I assure you,” he said on foreign soil — and in that single phrase, dismissed the madness with presidential restraint.
Still, the myth lingered like smoke from a fire never lit — sustained not by evidence, but by a societal appetite for drama over dialogue, suspicion over substance.
Now, as the man long (and falsely) accused of being Buhari’s double is reported dead, it is a fitting moment to draw the curtains on this farce. The comedy has overstayed its stage. The satire, once perhaps amusing, has hardened into slander. It is time to close the Jubril chapter.
But more importantly, it is time to write the proper tribute — not to a ghost of conspiracy, but to a man who served his country, flawed yet faithful, mortal yet enduring.
Buhari, a soldier with silence, weathered not just illness, but insult. The burden he carried was not only administrative; it was existential — to convince some of his own people that he was who he had always been. Such is the tragic theatre of our political imagination: where statesmen are forced to prove their own existence.
And yet, Buhari did not retaliate. He ruled without rage. He responded without resentment. For this, he deserves not just acknowledgment, but respect.
The Jubril myth was never about Jubril. It was a mirror — reflecting our nation’s distrust, our fractured communication, and the speed with which the unbelievable becomes truth in the echo chamber of social media. It was also a cautionary tale: about the cost of misinformation and the ease with which a joke can become a knife.
As we turn this page, let us remember: nations cannot be built on riddles. Leadership cannot thrive in the haze of hoaxes. Democracy cannot breathe when rumour suffocates truth.
Let us close the Jubril chapter — not only to honour Muhammadu Buhari, but to protect the sanctity of fact in our national discourse.
The man they said was gone remained. The tale they told must now go.
Let us walk into clarity, and leave the shadow behind.