Buhari and the future of Nigeria

If this narrative sounds like a postmortem on the Buhari administration to the reader, that is the idea.

In a couple of days President Buhari will be inaugurated for a second term in office. He will notice that unlike in 2015 when Nigerians greeted his election and inauguration with great enthusiasm and hope, the mood this time is markedly subdued and indifferent nationwide.  And it is not difficult to see why.

The reason is that three action platforms which drove the policy direction of the administration have not yielded the desired results that Nigerians expected. Thus the experience of most Nigerians under the Buhari administration especially in the last one year of his four year first term has tipped the scales of the stoic tolerance and hopeful expectation invested in him.

The security policy which had the defeat of Boko Haram terrorist insurgency in the north east as its main emphasis has now been overwhelmed by the incidence of banditry, kidnapping, sectarian crises and their other manifestations all over the country.

Nowhere is this worse than in Katsina the president’s own state of origin.

As I write Katsina, state has been gripped by bandits who are on a wanton killing, kidnapping, extortion and destruction spree across all the local government areas of the state. Just last week, villagers from several villages organized a protest march to the Emirs palace in Katsina and the Government house carrying scores of corpses of those killed by bandits in their villages.Indeed in the president’s hometown of Daura, it has been over three weeks now since the Magajin Gari (titled official and among the possible heirs to the throne of the town)was abducted in broad daylight in his home without any trace so far. It is so bad that the Emir of Katsina the preeminent traditional ruler in the state had cause to dispense with royal protocol in public speech for traditional rulers by pointing out bluntly and publicly to a visiting team of Federal Government officials led by Agriculture Minister Audu Ogbe in the state to flag off the planting seasonthat the government having failed to secure the lives and properties of the people could not expect much farming to be done this year.

As for the administration’s much vaunted fight on corruption the renewal of Central Bank Governor Godwin Emiefile”s appointment for another term in office is the highest watermark so far in the contradictions( hypocrisy if you like) that have plagued this crusade. We recall that it was president Buhari himself who disclosed to Nigerians that the CBN governor was the main disburser of the humongous amounts of money severally to officials and cronies during the Goodluck administration in a bazaar like fashion, most times without due process. Under the Buhari administration, several cases of corruption by his ministers and other appointees have come to light which the president wilfully and studiously ignored.

Nowadays when the president makes pronouncements on fighting corruption, Nigerians struggle to either stifle a yawn or snigger at his statements; nobody but president Buhari believes that a genuine fight against corruption is going on. Even the president in the inner recess of his mind knows that it is all a sham. The renewal of Emefiles appointment underscores that President Buhari is aiding, abetting and rewarding corruption contrary to what he tells us.

On the economy and the promised diversification to agriculture, the situation that stares us in the face is of farmers forced to abandon their farms and villages to the rampaging bandits. As the Emir of Katsina stated above, what farming can be done under the existential conditions in the farming communities not only in Katsina but all over the country?

As for the economy, President Buhari himself, his finance minister, state governors, and the central Bank governor have all come out to state variously and warn of tough economic times ahead for Nigerians. If the Buhari administration ever had any real economic policies worthy of its name this is the clearest indication that they have failed.

The clear and unmistakeable picture that president Buhari’s Nigeria presents is of an administration listing like a ship that has taken in much water, and a people disappointed, disillusioned and despairing of what the future holds. As a country that has many current germane issues to resolve and several necessary milestones to achieve on its way to full nationhood, president Buhari’s provincialism and lack of an overarching vision for Nigeria are in themselves existential dangers to the country. To many Nigerians therefore the inauguration of president Buhari to a second term is a non-event as they have seen and experienced enough under President Buhari and his administration to conclude that nothing will change fundamentally for the better. With president Buhari we are where economists call the backward leaning supply curve.

Objectively and realistically of the four years of his second term even if he were to experience a Damascene transformation from his present ponderous, lethargic, contradictory, dysfunctional and clueless style of leadership, president Buhari has just two years to make a difference.  It is normal to expect that the last two years of every administration will be devoted to politicking as the next election circle nears. With the high stakes that the 2023 elections holds owing to the fact that president Buhari will not be on the ballot and a new president will be elected to replace him, nothing much by way of positive governance should be expected. Indeed in this regard we have seen the principal political gladiators feverishly scheming to secure strategic political positions within the incoming government and the party.

But for the sake of mother Nigeria and its future we must keep hope alive.

The first necessary step in this direction having recognised that President Buhari lacks the capacity to take Nigeria further than what currently obtains under his watch is for Nigerians to begin to envision a post Buhari future for Nigeria now.We must go back to the political trenches and revive the activism that saw us roll back political military adventurers in the country.We must pursue the goal of constitutional democratic revolution to rescue Nigeria from the dangerous state of self-perpetuating political stagnation which the political elite have fostered on the country.  This has yielded nothing but stunted democratic and development growth; creating an elite that dwells on a dubious sense of entitlement, and restricts issues in the political space to those that promote narrow parochial interests at the expense of national growth. We must insist on a politics of new frontiers of inclusion, diversification and leadership selection based on vision, ability, merit and cosmopolitanism.

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