I do not envy General Buhari. The treasury is empty, so much has been left undone, so much is expected from him and so many traps have been set for him. Will we have an understanding and patient followership under the APC government? I seriously doubt it. This is why those who have run our country aground must go to jail. We need to start again by gaining independence all over again, an independence from the slave masters who called themselves our leaders!
From the beginning of this race, when General Buhari was elected as the APC’s flag bearer in Lagos, I had been very anxious. I had hoped that the anxiety would cease upon the declaration of a winner after the elections, even if he had lost, but somehow, I have seen that my anxiety has increased beyond the normal interest I should have in the polity. The last time I was interested in whatever was happening in Abuja was when the cabal refused to allow the then acting president Jonathan to assume power, and the Save Nigeria Group and other well-meaning Nigerians would stop at nothing to ensure the constitution was respected. We all know the full story.
I have decided not to be optimistic with my expectations from the new government. To be fair to them, one has to be modest with these expectations. Interestingly, General Buhari had hinted at Chatham House by implying that he was “afraid” of the negative potentials of the so many youths in the country who looked up to the new government for solution. He had said he was afraid of disappointing them, hence the motivation for him to perform. He just can’t afford not to perform. The Economist Magazine, in an article had “endorsed” Buhari for presidency, but had ended the article with the following statement: “We are relieved not to have a vote in this election. But were we offered one we would—with a heavy heart—choose Mr. Buhari. Mr Jonathan risks presiding over Nigeria’s bloody fragmentation. If Mr. Buhari can save Nigeria, history might even be kind to him”.
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Yes, History will not be kind to General Buhari if he is unable to save Nigeria. He stands the risk of being heavily criticized within a few months in power if he is unable to wield the magic wand that will solve all the problems. The reason for this is because a lot of Nigerians (I mean the common man and majority of the middle class) have come to believe he is our “messiah” and thus have so much expectation, hence, an attempt to give the impression that he was over-rated would make these supporters immediately lose interest in him and in his government. This will also amplify the negative press he had suffered in the run-up to the elections. He won’t like the things he would hear. A lot of us didn’t expect much from the Jonathan government as he was a man who found power dropped on his lap and on a platter of gold. He didn’t know what to make of it and he didn’t act like the leader he was meant to be. All we needed to do was to wait for his tenor to end, combined with the right mix of forces ranging from the merger of the opposition parties to form a stronger opposition and the technologies deployed by the umpire to ensure our votes counted, at least to a large extent.
Nigerians do not need so much to be impressed by any government. Once they have at least 8 hours of electricity per day, at least one full meal a day, and have fuel to power their generators and vehicles, I assure you, they are fine. We have lived with this situation for many years; many of us were born into it and have now grown to know it as the only way of life (barring those of us that have witnessed sanity in western countries, where you have no power failure, nor have to bore a hole to create your own water treatment plant!). What the Jonathan administration has succeeded in doing is to reduce us further to lesser animals. The Jonathan administration has reduced us to beggars in our own country. We had assumed that a man who was not born with a silver spoon would understand our plight, but he chose to enrich the rich further, he chose to align with the corrupt and the criminals. He may not have been a bad person in reality, but he forgot those for whom he was called to service, regardless how he ascended to power. We have learnt our lessons now that a man’s ethnic or religious background may have nothing to do with his performance in office.
One thing I have observed in the world today is that most of the world leaders have a degree in law, politics, economics or philosophy. You can check Barrack Obama of USA, David Cameron of Britain, Tony Abbott of Australia, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Heinz Fischer of Austria, Hassan Rouhani of Iran, Ma Ying-Jeou of Taiwan, Helle Thorning-Schmidt of Denmark and so on. Perhaps we have had to cope with ill-educated rulers who had no grasp on the realities of the modern world.
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Be that as it may, we have found ourselves in the hands of General Buhari whom Professor Wole Soyinka said this about: “I am very, very cautiously optimistic. I think that Buhari has a sense of history. He knows that he must make a mark, a very positive mark, on Nigeria to be able to live with himself, or die with a clean conscience. We must make sure that Nigerians are not allowed to forget his past. They should not think that the messiah has finally arrived. I think we stay on guard and continue to do what has needed to be done for the past 20 years or so.” This quote is on point. Perhaps we have made the same mistake again. I hope the General will attempt to prove us all wrong.
To drive my point home, I will highlight some of the key issues that are bedeviling us as a nation and which I think General Buhari must do something about, otherwise, we would be pouring water in a basket. First, the issue of our source of revenue, crude oil, should be a source of worry for any serious government. One must ask, how many barrels do we produce in a day? Why are our refineries not working? Where did all the money pumped into the overhaul of the refineries go? Why did our oil minister tell us our refineries would work in a matter of months in 2012 during the occupy Nigeria protest, yet we are still importing heavily after 3 years. Why should NNPC be allowed to spend what they earn then remit whatever is left to the federation account? Is this not an open cheque to corruption? There is so much secrecy in the management of our oil resources, why is this? Why is there so much doubt about the viability and transparency of the subsidy regime? Why have the oil marketers been made so powerful that they can ground our nation to a halt and our government would be at their mercy? The marketers have suddenly become more powerful than our government, giving our government deadlines and torturing us all with their brazenness? Why has there been government ineptitude in the oil sector regardless the suffering of Nigerians every now and then? This situation is a shame on all our leaders past and present, none excluded! Anyway, by their actions, we have seen that they have no shame; hence the likes of Diezani, Okonjo-Iweala and Moro would have resigned.
Secondly, the power sector has received a lot of investment in the last decade. I got very angry when I heard President Jonathan say that his administration has improved the power generation to 6,000 megawatts. I am forced to say he must have meant megawatts of darkness! It is appalling the extent to which our government takes us for granted. Nigerians have been taken as fools that our government lies to our face and we sit down to swallow it like a baby forced to take the proverbial akamu. This is one of the reasons why I referred to us as slaves in our own country, slaves to our rulers. I do not remember the last time I had power for more than an average of 60 hours a month. I run two generators with a 1.4kva inverter, yet I still do not have my power cravings fulfilled. Presently, I do not even have anything at all as there is no fuel to power the generators which in turn will charge the inverters. I sleep in discomfort every day, in a weather that is very unfriendly. My child is awake most of the night crying because of heat. My wife cannot store food as the freezer has become a mere cupboard. We can’t even pump water from our bore-hole because there is no power to operate the pumping machine. We are at the mercy of the Hausa water vendors who fetch water from god-knows-where and sell to us at non-negotiable rates. These are things the average Nigerian goes through every day, even in the rich neighborhoods of Victoria Island and Ikoyi. Yet, my president is telling me he has given me power. Am I not a fool? I must be one! When Bartholomew Nnaji was minister of Power, things improved greatly. In the wisdom of the president, this man was edged out and since then, it has been one excuse or the other. Why is there resentment for performers in this country? We celebrate mediocrity and stolen money. General Buhari, Nigerians will not take prisoners on this issue of power. Whatever you have to do, what Nigerians want are results, not excuses!
Thirdly, corruption and impunity have become our second name in Nigeria. I will not exonerate myself from this as it has become something we have all been involved in whether knowingly or unknowingly; willingly or unwillingly. I heard that General Buhari informed his aids to obey traffic rules. This is the way to go. When leaders show discipline, their followers fall in line knowing that indiscipline will not be tolerated. However, we have seen our rulers go into embarrassing defense of anomalies where lower votes are superior to the higher ones. The Governors’ forum election should not be forgotten. It highlights our total disregard for civilized behavior. How on earth can 16 votes be greater than 19? Because we did not nip this in the bud, and President Jonathan endorsed the leadership of the Jonah Jang faction (the losing faction), it has now become the order of the day and this has served as a template for lawmakers to suspend or impeach whoever is a political threat against the dictates of the majority vote. We have seen this happen in Rivers State (5 lawmakers impeached speaker and suspended 27 lawmakers), Ekiti State (7 PDP lawmakers suspended 19 APC lawmakers), Edo State (9 PDP against 15 APC lawmakers), Enugu State (10 PDP against 14 PDP lawmakers) etc. Obviously, this has become a new trend in our polity and some shameless people will speak to defend this charade? Although we all know most of the reasons for the actions on both sides are not as a result of the love for the people, they are usually a means of settling scores or edging out the opposition. This is a bastardization of democracy. Nigerians have developed a reputation for turning the law upside down and circumventing the norm for impunity to gain selfish ends. What a shame! A minister of the federal republic was accused of purchasing vehicles at an exorbitant rate yet she still had the audacity to remain in position and not throw in the towel? What is a minister of aviation doing buying bullet proof vehicles anyway? My mother was a teacher in Oyo state for 35 years before she retired in 1996, today, the state Government owes her several months of pension payments (popularly called “I am alive”). You cannot imagine how much is due to her on a monthly basis, yet she can’t just get it and no one is sorry or made to be sorry for it! If she didn’t have children like me, she would have died like a fowl in a country she served so dearly. I assure you this money is sitting in a bank account yielding interest for a racket that has no heart. Yet some guy caught red handed with pension funds got away with a fine of N750,000. This is enough to provoke you to dump hard work and steal the living daylight out of whom ever you work for. Corruption in Nigeria has become intrinsic, we are born with it, we are it. You park your car in a bank premises and you want to leave, the security man says “happy weekend sir” – we all know what that means. In clear terms, he is asking for a bribe for doing his job! I was robbed in my home a few years ago and went to the police to report my ordeal. I requested that they follow me to the scene so they can observe what had happened as it affected the whole street. One of them called me aside to ask for Ten Thousand Naira before they could follow me. They didn’t even give me the log book to lodge my complaint. They also wanted me to pay them for a police report which I needed for the insurance company. They knew the insurance company would not pay me if I didn’t get a police report. I went home in anger and fixed my car with my own money. You go to a government office and you cannot see oga because you have not rogered. What is wrong with us? Are we insane? What happened to professionalism? Having a small car has become a crime and you see people who are not half as intelligent as you nor as hard working as you are in SUVs and big houses in choice areas. What do they do for a living by the way? If a man who has stolen money will be respected and celebrated and I who has worked hard with little to show will be condemned by the society, then is speaks volumes about our collective values and our national pride. We should all relinquish our national pledge and cover our faces in shame!
Fourth in my analysis is the issue of the economy. I will not speak too much on this issue so I won’t rub it in beyond the pain thresholds of my reader. However, I will mention that we need to know that the exchange rate of the USD is now hovering between N197 in the interbank market and N223 in the black market. I am surprised how Nigerians are still surviving, yet, not complaining to the government. Anyway, I will take the loss of President Jonathan in the election as an indication of the complaint of Nigerians. I think Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala should stop telling us that Nigeria’s economy is still strong. Now we can see what a gun can do in the hands of the wrong user. Okonjo-Iweala under Obasanjo gave us debt relief, but Okonjo-Iweala under Jonathan gave us N12 Trillion in debts! Now several states can’t pay salaries, the CBN could not defend the Naira any longer and they had to close the RDAS market. In my opinion and with due respect, I think auntie Ngozi has failed. One is not assessed by the laudability of the efforts and strategies adopted to achieve a goal but by achieving the actual results. The questions therefore are: Is the Nigerian economy the best in Africa today? Answer is no. Is our Naira strong? No. Are we producing anything into the international market? No, it’s infinitesimal. Do we have more Nigerians employed today? No. So what success are we talking about here? If we say we have the biggest economy in Africa, I am disappointed that they push this to us. The $500 billion being claimed as our GDP, how much of it is actually Nigerian Investment? What is our Gross National Product? Is our GNP the biggest in Africa? Infact, it was not as if it was the Jonathan administration that increased our GDP to what we are now shouting about. These items in the new GDP have always been there but unrecognized, so what the Jonathan administration did was just to recognize them. This they called rebasing so what is all the fuss about? If not for an illiterate population, who would wield that as an achievement. I really don’t envy the in-coming government. They better put on their thinking caps because I just don’t know how they will work this out.
Education in Nigeria is just a matter of certificate acquisition and not knowledge acquisition. The rate at which we are churning out illiterates is alarming. I was privileged to attend the University of Ibadan and I can tell you, if you read the write up of many graduates, your jaw will drop. I was once involved in an election while on Campus. I was privileged to be the chairman of the electoral committee of the Union of Campus Journalists. We had a five member committee and we had some candidates to screen. One of the candidates was vying for the position of PRO. It is expected that for you to vie for such a position, you should at least have a good command of English Language and be very eloquent being the image maker of the organization. When I asked a few questions during the screening, I noticed he was “shelling” so I asked him to write about himself on a sheet of paper in ten sentences. I took the paper and kept it as my evidence knowing what I would do. After the screening session we had to decide if we should disqualify him or not. Two members were for and the other two were against. My vote was the deciding vote, so I opted for the obvious, we disqualified him. On the day of the election, this young man mobilized members of Nnamdi Azikwe Hall and Faculty of Social Sciences against me. They wanted to beat me up for disqualifying a candidate from their constituencies. He had fed them with information that I was bias and didn’t like him, so they all came blindly to disrupt the election holding in Queens Hall. I had made over 200 copies of his write up, so I shared it among everybody present for them to be the judge. People saw what he had written and the state of his education. That was the end. He left embarrassed and I immediately converted his supporters to mine as no one could just defend the logic behind making someone who had no command of language or could not express himself the PRO of the foremost press organization of the premier university in Nigeria. He probably would have made it if he went for Social Director. This is replicating itself in our polity. We have a lot of square pegs in round holes. We find half educated people or semi-literate individuals in a lot of public places but how many people are bold enough to challenge them or educated enough to vote against them or even contest against them. Such is our plight. We are sitting on a keg of gun powder and if we do not address the issue of education as a matter of emergency, WE ARE NOT GOING ANYWHERE!
Furthermore, the state of security has worsened over the years. The police only protect those who will favor them financially. It is so bad that that you are involved in an accident bleeding and the police is busy asking you for a bribe. We have become so inhumane and brazen. Our military has been politicized and we do not see that drive we used to see in the days of ECOMOG. Our government couldn’t even acquire arms. We make our men face fire without equipping them yet we want to execute them for refusing to face fire. The military may have rules, but there must be a human face to everything. Tell me who is ready to die for Nigeria when someone is busy growing a pot belly from corruption. Ordinary people get kidnapped everyday. Those who carry arms now have the ears of our government and those who criticize them objectively are dubbed enemies. I think we really need to discuss how this country will move forward. How are we sure that Chad will not invade Nigeria successfully if Boko Haram can do this much damage. We should be afraid.
Finally, the state of our airports across the country is shameful. Are these not the same Airports our FG said they have transformed to ultra-modern airports? Perhaps we need to drive from Third Mainland Bridge to Oshodi, then to Ajao Estate, then to MMA. I really can’t explain this in any language but if you have been to O R Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg South Africa or Cape Town International Airport, you will know what I am talking about. The airport is the first point of entry in any country, and I assure you, if you are coming into Nigeria for the first time, you are greeted with a stench on arrival which leaves a sour taste in your mouth forever. This first impression you have is amplified by the bad road, untended grass, and street urchins creating a nuisance to everyone. I was in Benin recently and there was no computer in one of the offices where I was to book a ticket. The ticket was booked on a phone. There were standing fans everywhere. There are only two aircraft that come to that airport on a daily basis from Lagos, if you miss it, then you wait till the next day or just take a bus. For Christ Sake Benin should be the hub of civilization. We have not harnessed the potentials of other states in our country. There is so much emphasis on Lagos. We need to take a cue from Dubai. Tourism is now feeding that country and not oil. The country has a population of about 2.9 million but only about 400,000 are locals. We should spend more money on infrastructural development that will attract people to our country. These people will need services and our people are ready to serve them. Our youth have so much energy and if not well channeled, will be used for negative things. We are in dire need of a government that thinks, not one that approves contracts every Wednesday. We can’t even feel the impact of the so called contracts!
I can go on and on but I just have to stop here. I do not envy General Buhari. The treasury is empty, so much has been left undone, so much is expected from him and so many traps have been set for him. Will we have an understanding and patient followership under the APC government? I seriously doubt it. This is why those who have run our country aground must go to jail. We need to start again by gaining independence all over again, an independence from the slave masters who called themselves our leaders!
Tokunbo Adeyinka (@toxadey)
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