Is Buhari president of Nigeria or the north?

I believe everyone has a redeeming quality. Yes, nobody is impervious to change and influence. This is the reason I have always given President Muhammadu Buhari the benefit of the doubt. I think he deserves it.

Before I go into the entrails of my opinion, let me take a traipse in the past.

Responding to a question from Dr Pauline Baker, the president emeritus of The Fund for Peace, at the United States Institute of Peace on 22 July, 2015, Buhari dropped a clanger, but I passed it off as a “misdemeanour” and not a “felony”.

Specifically, Dr Baker asked Buhari about his non-prioritisation of the issues of the Niger Delta in his first official trip to the US.

For the sake of perspicuity here is Baker’s question to the president.

“My question relates to another area of Nigeria that has not got a lot of attention during this trip and that is the Niger Delta. It is a challenge that you are going to face. I wonder if you would tell us how you intend to approach it with particular reference to the amnesty, bunkering, and inclusive development?”

Buhari’s response: “I hope you have a copy of the election results. The constituents, for example, that gave me 97 percent (of the vote) cannot in all honesty be treated as the same on issues with constituencies that gave me 5 percent.”

Now, when the president blurted out this gaffe, I rationalised his insularity. I reasoned he might have been on tenterhooks effectuated by a peering audience when he said it.

But with the statement of Jim Jong Kim, president of the World Bank Group, that Buhari asked him to focus the bank’s intervention efforts in the “northern regions” –  please note, Kim said: “northern regions”, not “north-east” – I am utterly gutted. This has stomped my rationalisation threshold. I have tried to find room in the crucible of sentimentality and political correctness to make excuses for the president, but the excuses are just baskets that cannot hold water.

The reason for my befuddlement is that every part of the country deserves laser attention and optimal focus. In terms of development, all parts of the country are disadvantaged. Nigeria, north or south is disadvantaged. The masses of the country both in the south and in the north are all disadvantaged. They all lack access to portable water, electricity, good food, healthcare, and roads. Hunger, starvation and disease are potent realities in every Nigerian constituency.

Already a prodigious amount of government funds is being funnelled into the north, and all major development agencies have set up shop in the region. Should the south be neglected? Besides, the south, which has become Nigeria’s beast of burden, will bear the full cost of repaying loans procured by the government for humanitarian interventions in the north. This does not obviate the essence of such interventions.

Again, Femi Adesina leaped beyond the bounds of sensibility and decorum when he described Nigerians criticising the president for the untoward statement as “ignorant, mischievous, and insidious minds”.

He did not make an effort to argue intelligently in an article he wrote to explain the president’s position; he only lined up and paragraphed woolly and insufferable sentences for nothing but condescension – as if he was issuing a decree to minions and lackeys. It was clear he did not want to make a point but a statement. Yes, “you are all wailers go and die” kind of statement.

In conclusion, I have not given up on the president. As I said earlier, everyone deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt. I still hang on to hope that he is redeemable.  His meeting with south-east leaders on Friday is commendable. The meeting, even if it is just for the bubbly, assuages sentiments, and rings trenchantly that the president is opening himself up for discussion with a region that has been divorced from his government.

The president should remember he belongs to everybody, and he belongs to nobody.

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