President Buhari needs a mirror

Last week should have been President Muhammadu Buhari’s best in office. From a heartwarming appearance at Mama Hannah Idowu Dideolu Awolowo’s funeral, a pleasant surprise for his vice president as I heard that he was not expected on account of his journey, to a dinner with our sybaritic senators with former governor Bola Tinubu in attendance, it was supposed to be his sunshine moment politically. Further, for those of us who live in Lagos, it was surprising that the president came to Ogun State and did not disturb us in the centre of excellence. Until most of saw the footage on television in the evening, we were not aware that President Buhari was in town.

Bit that was as good it could get for the president and his team until the folks at Sahara Reporters run by that enfant terrible, Omoyele Sowore, who in a moment of journalistic brilliance which caught those of us conventional journalists napping, reminded us that Buhari has a new moniker, junket-in-chief. In a perceptive piece which should get all Nigerians worried, Sowore and his team tells us “President Muhammadu Buhari has spent more than 40 days in trips to different parts of the world since he was sworn in on May 29, 2015. The president’s frequent foreign trips have come under scrutiny and criticism as Nigeria faces myriad crises, from intractable fuel shortages to terrorist assaults in the country’s northeast.”

So if our president has been in office for 180 days as at November 29, 40 of such were spent outside our shores and that tally did not include the latest trips to Malta and France (still to come as at the time of writing). Buhari has, therefore, stayed more than a month outside since he assumed duties as the leader of the largest black nation on earth with the hope and aspirations of about 140 million people. Viewed from another angle, if we divided the 48 months mandate Nigerians gave Buhari, an eighth of such mandate is gone with only 42 months remaining. It was more than a kick in the teeth and the feeble attempt of Mallam Garba Shehu in defending his principal’s peripatetic style of governance does not hold water. Whatever could be the gain or otherwise of those trips, Buhari should stay more at home and face the task of rebuilding the country.

Painfully too, the revelation came in a week when Nigerians were in the throes of another grueling fuel scarcity. From Lagos to Yenagoa, Aba to Makurdi, and Zaria to Minna, the enervating energy crisis continues unabated. Even while the minister of state for petroleum via populism declared that petrol should be sold free whenever a filling station is caught hoarding it, the crisis is not yet over. By the way, someone should remind Ibe Kachikwu that as an officer in the temple of justice, jungle justice should not be encouraged otherwise anarchy is the end product. Having left my car at office last Monday, I had no hesitation in paying N120 per litre for the product the next day so as to make life easier.

Regrettably, there was no official statement or explanation from anyone in government until Thursday when the NNPC spokesperson, Ohi Alegbe, told us that DSS officials and EFCC will henceforth be monitoring fuel supply and distribution. Perhaps with everybody that matter outside the country, Buhari expected us to be satisfied with the request to the National Assembly for money to pay importers the subsidy he told us during campaign does not exist. To show how bad things are for the president and his aides, our senators took time after inaugurating suggestion boxes at the National Assembly to hold a public hearing on fuel scarcity and even gave an order that the NNPC should slay the monster within two weeks. No briefing on what the government was doing to ease our pains but only to declare in Iran that some looters were already returning money.

This is typical of the president, making serious statements outside Nigeria more than when he is at home. A similar case was the ‘no minister until September’ while in the United States. Public communication experts and language analysts must surely have a lot to say about a president who says more important things to foreigners and outsiders than those he leads at home. By the way, to add more to the confusion in governance, the finance minister has said that the president was yet to give her the detail of the funds recovered so far. So, where is the money being kept, dear president? No one is asking President Buhari to fix Nigeria in six months, but there are low-hanging fruits he can pluck quickly. He should stay more at home, communicate better to us on what he is doing, and sell most of the planes in the presidential fleet immediately. That is why he needs a mirror so that he can see things more clearly.