Renowned Nigerian columnist and blogger, Farooq Kperogi, has alleged that President Muhammadu Buhari doesn’t bear his father’s name and he’s not from Daura as most people believe.
According to Kperogi, Muhammadu (which his teachers spelled as “Mohamed” when he was in secondary school) is his first given name and Buhari is his middle name, not his surname.
The media scholar said President Buhari was named after prolific ninth-century Persian Hadith compiler by the name of Muhammad al-Bukhari who was born in a city called Bukhara in what is now Uzbekistan.
Kperogi stated that, “Bukhari isn’t a personal given name; it’s a demonym, that is, a name given to people who come from a particular place, such as Nigerian, Briton, American, Lagosian, New Yorker, etc. Bukhari simply means a native of the city of Bukhara in Uzbekistan, a West Asian nation that used to be a part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
“In Muslim and Middle Eastern linguistic traditions, the letter “i” is usually added to the end of the names of villages, towns, cities, and countries to form demonyms. That’s why someone from Pakistan is called a Pakistani, someone from Israel is called an Israeli, someone from the UAE is called an Emirati, and so on. If the demonym of Bukhara were to be given in Hausa, it would be Danbuhara. In Yoruba, it would be Omobuhara. In my native Baatonu, it would be Buharagi. (My last name, Kperogi, is a demonym, and it means someone from Kperu, the short form of my hometown’s name, Senru Kperu, but which Yoruba people call Okuta).”
The 48-year professor at Kennesaw State University in the United States added that Muhammadu Buhari became known by his names because of the immense reverence that Muhammad al-Bukhari enjoys among Sunni Muslims. “Muslims have historically honored him by naming their children after him, so instead of just calling them Bukhari (which they may literally not be since they may not be natives of Bukhara in Uzbekistan), they typically combine the man’s first and last names: Muhammad Bukhari.
“Most Nigerian languages, including Hausa, don’t have the phoneme “kh,” which sounds almost exactly like the sound you produce when you are discharging mucus from your throat. The closest phonemic approximation of that sound is “h,” which explains why “Bukhari” is rendered as “Buhari” in many African languages.”
Kperogi further stated that Buhari’s father who gave him the Fulani bloodline he brandishes (his mother is Kanuri) was called Adamu Bafallaje (or Bafalle in Hausa).
He alleged that Buhari’s older brother who died in a car crash in the late 1980s and whose Buhari-lookalike son, Fatuhu Muhammad, represents the Daura/Sandamu/MaiAdua federal constituency in the House of Representative was called Mamman Danbafalle. (Danbafalle means son of Bafalle in Hausa, and Mamman is the Hausa domestication of Muhammad. It’s common in Muslim families to have many siblings named Muhammad, but they’re often differentiated with their middle names).
Digging further into the President family background, Kperogi stated that Buhari is not from Daura. “His hometown, where he was born and where his father lived and died, is called Dumurkul. It’s a sleepy roadside village in Katsina’s Maiadua Local Government Area, which is about three kilometers from Daura and about five kilometers from the last village in the Niger-Nigeria border.
“Dumurkul is a Fulfulde word, which means “‘settlement for herders’, especially for those who stay for at least a year.” After his father’s death when he was little, Buhari lived with his mother’s Kanuri relatives in Daura and adopted the town as his hometown.
“But he hasn’t severed his umbilical cord from Dumurkul. During this year’s Sallah festivities in July, his nephew and PA, Musa Haro, was knighted (or “turbaned”) as the Hakimi (or district head) of Dumurkul even though the village wasn’t officially a district.
“In order to reconcile the contradiction of making someone a district head of a non-existent district, on July 27, 2021, Buhari’s village was mysteriously upgraded to a “district” and taken out of Koza District of which it was a village after “an emergency plenary to consider the request from Governor Aminu Bello Masari” was convened!” he added.
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