Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts
Growing up, young ones are encouraged by elders to dream dreams because they are the essential impetus for personal development…they often signal healthy ambitions. However, whenever elders are hard put to interpret your dreams, they ask if you have been having a fever. If yes, they often conclude that your hard-to-explain dreams are malaria-induced and ought to be ignored.
That appears to be where President Muhammadu Buhari’s dream of bequeathing a better Nigeria than he met belongs. Recently, PMB told a bewildered audience in Kaduna that he would leave Nigeria better. His audience must have wondered how possible, whether the President knew what he was talking about since even using Kaduna alone as a yardstick, Nigeria is not better now than in 2015.
Voicing that dream 17 months to the terminus of his 96-month ride on the presidential saddle, his second in one lifetime, PMB must believe in miracles to be able to realise his dream.
Having spent 79 months, mathematically speaking, the President can rightly claim that he has seen enough to predict what the end will look like, meaning that what he has achieved so far is enough to guarantee the delivery of his statement.
However, going by what we all know and feel about the state of the nation now and someone is saying it would take 17 more months to make it better, it looks more like the truth is taking a flight somewhere. It is either the President is playing politics which he shouldn’t at his age and period he spent in power in this country as a soldier or as a civilian or he is completely out of touch with the reality about his regime.
Owning up to his government’s shortcomings will attract more sympathy for him than blatantly and provocatively trying to turn colours around before everybody’s eyes.
Before we go into interrogating the President’s 79 months “in power and in office,” [apologies to IBB] which he hopes will make Nigeria better than it was when he came in, it would be good we give a highlight of Nigeria before Buhari.
Nigeria before Buhari was bad and agonising. Many Nigerians felt then that anything but Goodluck Jonathan was better, hence the ouster of the People’s Democratic Party, PDP.
The main opposition party then, the APC, was not enjoying any credible record as a political party; it was seen just as a gang-up of rabble-rousers and strange bedfellows for the main purpose of grabbing power. Yet Nigeria wanted anything but Jonathan and PDP for a change. The APC presidential candidate, General Buhari had no previous record of good governance, going by his immediate post-Shagari era. But people got swayed by his tough-talking stance and anti-corruption posture added to his past no-nonsense military action against Islamic militants, that is the 1983 Maitatsine uprising in the Adamawa capital. It was assumed he would replicate the riot act and wipe off the menacing Boko Haram that was and still harassing Nigeria. Jonathan could not muster the courage to tackle BH. But being a Muslim, Northerner, and retired general, nobody could have doubted his suitability for the challenge.
It was perhaps against that backdrop that there were jubilations across the country when he won the election in 2015. In a demonstration of excitement, some people had a long trek from various locations across the country to Abuja. Some bathed in the mud in jubilation. The jubilation was infectious as even those who didn’t vote for him joined in the belief and hope that the messiah had arrived. Who knows how many of such people are still alive.
Before Buhari acceded to power, two things were Nigeria’s main headaches, corruption and Insecurity. Nobody at that time doubted the qualification of Buhari because he had postured as the man to fix corruption in high places. Again as a retired general, he possessed credentials that were not in doubt about tackling the Boko Haram menace.
After 79 months, it’s going to be hard to get the same excited people to show signs of the fulfilment of dreams being realised or plans to come through.
Before Buhari came into office we were living with local Boko Haram in the North East as the only major security threat, but 79 months after, Nigeria is rated as among the most fragile nations heading to the failed state status. BH in the North East has spread to other regions of the North bearing different names. Before Buhari, Boko Haram was localised, but under his watch, they became internationalised with the notorious Islamic State, (ISIS) creating its West African branch with Nigeria as its headquarters.
Under Buhari’s watch also the terror group operating in the country has grown significantly from herdsmen to banditry and spread to the three regions of the North. The other political terror group the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra, IPOB, was no-existent before Buhari came to power.
It could even be safe to say that IPOB and its leader Mazi Nnamdi Kanu are now in the custody of the federal government and all their accompaniment are creations of Buhari.
It’s even defensible to say that Buhari’s actions and inaction inseminated agitations leading to the creation of a Kanu and a Sunday Igboho, among others. There were visible cases of marginalisation in the country before Buhari came to office. It has become more pronounced in this dispensation. The depth of nepotism witnessed in this regime even to the embarrassment of the beneficiaries in the last 79 months has significantly helped to manure the quest for the self-determination struggle.
On the economic front, the situation in the country couldn’t have been ever imagined by anybody. The fuel subsidy wahala continues with N1.15 trillion paid as subsidy in 2021 alone with pump price of petrol products in all high including gas. Petrol is now N165 per litre while it was N87 in 2015. Even at that, indications are strong that in the last 17 months of the regime the fuel price is going to go further up.
The currency has also suffered greatly under Buhari’s watch in the last 79 months. In 2015 it was less than N100 to one dollar but today it’s N567. Unemployment has become worse alarming as this regime has virtually not employed the teaming youths anywhere because much of the industry and factories are all moribund. Few available government jobs are reserved for the children of the politicians. Booming crime rings have converted hitherto factory workers to their trade with a large army of unemployed youths worsening the nation’s social challenges.
On corruption, with all the high expectations, the nation’s rating today remains unprecedented.
If in 2015 it was PDP people only that were corrupt, today the list has swelled with more APC members.
The scenario is that one year to the next election if you visit media records of 2014 one year ahead of the APC coming to power, you will see a striking resemblance of what you see and hear today of this regime even more.
All the marble talks from the President and all other APC leaders against the then ruling PDP have been brought up and they fitted into today’s situation that nobody in this government has an answer or a good response.
So, drawing from the foregoing, it can be stunning hearing President Buhari tell the nation that he will hand over a better Nigeria than he met, meaning that in the next 17 months he would do the magic that will erase all his regime minuses and even add to it to make it better.
The curious presidential statement has been treated casually probably because politicians have unwittingly been granted the privilege to tell lies, to say that they built bridges where there is no water or gully and be allowed to move on. But the truth which Buhari must accept, whether he likes it or not because it’s empirical, is that he is leaving the country worse than he met it in all ramifications. Anybody telling him otherwise must be a sycophant or praise singer who usually contributes nothing in making great leaders.
But there is still a window left for President Buhari to turn the table around and have his name put in the good book of democracy. Even as Jonathan was rated low in governance before his exit in 2015, for conducting a free, fair, and credible election and for voluntarily accepting defeat and handing over power smoothly, today he is Africa’s number one democracy torchbearer.
For Buhari, conducting transparent elections in 2023 may even be easier for him because he is not going to be on the ballot like Jonathan. If he does that and allows Nigerian people to choose their leaders, a lot of his shortcomings in governance will be easily forgotten by Nigerians whose forgiving spirit on political failings is easily wiped away by one good deed.
To do otherwise in addition to all the other evidential poor governance deliveries will place Buhari’s name on the wrong page of history permanently. The choice is his to make and it starts now in guiding who emerges as presidential flag bearers.
May God help Nigeria.
