Kperogi shared the thoughts in his article, "Nigerians Will Miss Tinubu After He Is Gone," where he reflected on the regimes of General Ibrahim Babangida to President Muhammadu Buhari, highlighting how each leader's tenure set the stage for the next administration to worsen conditions.
Farooq Kperogi, a Nigerian-American professor, has bemoaned the state of affairs in the country, saying it appears it's become a norm for each successive Nigerian president to perform worse than their predecessor.
Kperogi shared the thoughts in his article, "Nigerians Will Miss Tinubu After He Is Gone," where he reflected on the regimes of General Ibrahim Babangida to President Muhammadu Buhari, highlighting how each leader's tenure set the stage for the next administration to worsen conditions.
Kperogi clarified that people don't miss past leaders because they were good; instead, they miss them because their successors are often worse or because they're more aware of their current struggles than past hardships.
He used a vivid analogy, comparing it to choosing between the torment of a frying pan and the intense heat of a fire - both cause distress.
He acknowledged that his views might spark controversy, anticipating backlash from Nigerians.
Interestingly, Kperogi's article sparked diverse reactions. Some commenters expressed frustration and disappointment with the current administration, while others defended past leaders like Abacha, suggesting his investments in European countries benefited Nigeria.
"I fully anticipate that most Nigerians will figuratively call for my head after reading this headline. How could it be that a leader who has inflicted such profound and unrelenting hardship upon the populace, and who appears utterly disinclined to offer even the smallest relief, could ever be missed?
"But, one must ask, who could have ever predicted that Nigerians would miss Presidents Goodluck Jonathan or Muhammadu Buhari, to cite two recent examples? A video trended on social media about five weeks ago of a man who, on President Muhammadu Buhari’s last day in office, sunk to his knees and supplicated to God to never let Nigerians miss Buhari," he said.
“When Jonathan became our president, we were missing Yar’adua,” he lamented. “When Buhari became president, we were missing Jonathan. God, I use God to beg you, please don’t let us miss Buhari. May we not miss Buhari!”
"Yet, scarcely more than a year later, Nigerians find themselves missing Buhari—a reality that has led many on social media to joke that the man in the viral video celebrated Buhari’s departure too soon.
"Today, a great many Nigerians would eagerly return to the days of Buhari, which they had rightly described as a dark and suffocating snake pit of relentless suffering—the very same way they longed for Jonathan’s atrocious tenure under Buhari's rule.
"In 2018, when I said to someone that, as frightfully inept as Buhari was, Nigerians would come to miss him—not because of any merit in his governance but simply because his successor would prove to be even worse—my interlocutor reacted with outrage and accused me of cursing Nigeria."
He added, "He, like many others during Jonathan’s administration, vehemently declared that it was impossible for anyone to be worse than Buhari, and that anything more calamitous than the Buhari regime would spell the absolute collapse of Nigeria.
"Nigerian hasn’t collapsed even if it isn’t standing. It seems an immutable law of Nigerian politics that every successive president is invariably worse than their predecessor."
Recalling some articles he published in the past, Kperogi explained his postulation stems from the reality that nearly all potential successors—both within the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the opposition—are proponents of the same "poverty-inducing, soul-crushing, middle-class-eroding neoliberal economic policies aggressively propagated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)".
He noted that the disagreements between opposition politicians and Tinubu are confined merely to matters of method and timing, not substance or policy. "They uniformly endorse the removal of petrol subsidies and the devaluation of the naira (the two principal policies responsible for the current mass despair in the land), differing only in how these policies should be executed. Such distinctions are, ultimately, distinctions without a difference."
According to him, no nation has ever implemented these policies without wreaking havoc on its economy, "obliterating its poor, and decimating its middle class". He expressed believe that "if another neoliberal charlatan, masquerading as a savior, assumes power after Tinubu, Nigeria’s situation will worsen, and the people will inevitably yearn for the Tinubu era, wondering why they ever believed it was intolerable.
"Since neoliberal economic populism now enjoys mainstream acceptance in Nigeria, and since its proponents—including a cadre of uneducated and misguided youth—have succeeded in branding those of us who defend the merits of subsidies (absent corruption) as regressive, antiquated "commies" pitifully frozen in prehistory and have made old, discredited right-wing economics seem chic and intellectual fashionable, we must resign ourselves to watching from the sidelines as Nigerians experience the inevitable consequences. Perhaps that lived experience will be more instructive than our warnings.
"There is only so much an adult can do to caution a child who is mesmerized by the allure of fire. Sometimes, the child must touch the flame and suffer its burn to truly comprehend its danger. Experience, after all, is a far superior teacher than pontification," he added.