Now that Major General Muhammadu Buhari
(rtd) has been chosen by the Nigerian people,
it is my duty as a patriotic Nigerian to help him
succeed even though my candidate was
President Goodluck Jonathan, a man to whom I
will always be loyal and appreciative.
General Buhari is about to mount the saddle
and I for one am in a very good position to tell
him some home truths because as a senator-
elect, I have a very fulfilling job awaiting me
and I do not need a job or favours from Buhari
so I do not have to play nice.


Looking at the personalities he has appointed
to his transition council, I am wont to believe
that General Buhari needs to expand his circle
of friends and advisers.


As a military strategist, the president-elect
must be familiar with the principle that the
people you use in subduing an opponent are
not necessarily the same persons you will need
in rebuilding the territories you took. I may be
using military terms, but I am sure General
Buhari is aware that politics is war by other
means and therefore many of the rules of war
and peace apply to politics.

The General will be best served if he thinks of
what is best for Nigeria rather than what is best
for his party, the All Progressive Congress
(APC), and its chieftains.
He must remember that in Nigeria’s subjective
politics, it was his person that the people voted
for not his party and he should therefore serve
the people the dish they are angling for.
And what are the expectations of Nigerians
from General Buhari? Definitely not business as
usual.


The president-elect ran on a promise of change
and while that change was not really defined
by its chanters, Nigerians defined it as a
change in their situation.
To borrow from the famously potent prayers of
Mountain of Fire and Miracle members, the
Nigerian masses defined change as a situation
where wealth and power must change hands
from the elite to the masses by fire by force
and they see General Buhari as the enforcer
angel that will bring about this change.
With this type of expectation, Buhari’s
honeymoon period with Nigerians will not last
very long if he does not take drastic steps to
adjust Nigeria’s economy to the realities of
falling oil prices and a dearth of buyers for the
Bonny Light Sweet Crude.


To put things into perspective, when the
United States started buying less and less of
Nigeria’s oil, we looked to China as an
alternative buyer of oil but it has since come to
light that whereas America spent $101 billion
on clean energy between 2012-13, China spent
$125 billion within the same time frame.
The above data should alert Nigeria and other
nations that look to China for oil markets to the
fact that China is even ahead of the West in the
search for alternative to fossil fuels as a source
of energy.

Buhari may wish he did not win the 2015
elections when the reality of our economic
situation sets in.
In his December 2014 Channels Television
interview, Buhari said he was going to “stabilise
the oil market”. The General will learn soon
enough that today’s oil market is a buyers’
market.


And the General’s choices are limited because
he cannot (unless he is extraordinarily brave
and politically callous) do the obvious and sack
civil servants. Yes, he will eventually have to
reduce the over bloated federal civil service,
but before he can do that, he has to build up
political capital by reducing the overhead of
the Executive and persuade the Legislature to
follow suit.


Austerity measures must start from Aso Rock.
This means that luxurious multi car convoys
must be reduced. The presidential air fleet has
to go, by way of being auctioned off or sold to
local airlines. Estacode allowances must be
slashed and the president’s entourages should
be lean while non-essential foreign travels
should be banned.


The president-elect should not underestimate
the big difference these small changes can
make and their capacity to buy him enough
credibility with the labour unions, the kind of
credibility that will see them accepting cuts in
the federal workforce and reduction in pay and
entitlements.


A small change like flying commercial instead
of by private jet saved Britain a whopping
£200,000 when the thrifty British Prime
Minister, David Cameron, flew to America to
meet President Barack Obama on a regular BA
flight.

Nigeria is in for very desperate times if we do
not tighten our belts while our major foreign
exchange earner is facing global challenges.
Russia, a nation that many will say is more
prepared than Nigeria for the shocks
occasioned by the drop in the price of oil
devalued its currency by 11 per cent in just
one day.

While Russia is taking these steps, the world is
watching to see if Nigeria will continue to
spend hundreds of billions annually sponsoring
its elite on pilgrimages to Mecca and Jerusalem.

I mean, no economist will get why a nation
with over 60 per cent of its people living in
poverty at the best of times, will spend almost
1 per cent of its annual budget sponsoring
pilgrimages for its elite who can afford to go to
the Holy Land on their own dime.
I for one do not get it. A pilgrimage is meant to
be a sacrifice of a believer. How is a pilgrimage
still a sacrifice when someone pays for you to
go? The Nigerian government is sending people
on holidays not pilgrimages!

I daresay that the money being spent by the
Nigerian government to airlift pilgrims to both
Holy Lands is enough to educate all the almajiri
in Northern Nigeria. Wouldn’t God and
humanity be better served if we looked after
the less privileged in our midst?
General Buhari has his work cut out for him
and he does not have time to be bitter about
who said what, when and where. He must let
go of any desire to pay any of his traducers
back whether they be from the last 16 years or
as far back as 1985.


Four years is only enough time to fix Nigeria.
Any time spent on other ventures is time taken
from this most important of assignments.
And let me say that General Buhari should not
allow himself to be pigeon holed by people who
dangle ideologies instead of realities. Yes, the
APC may have styled itself as a progressive
party, which in itself is a contradiction because

Buhari is a conservative, but Buhari should not
bother about that.
Whether the philosophy is progressive or
conservative or liberal or free market, he should
go with what works because as Deng Xiaoping
once noted: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is
black or white, if it catches mice it is a good
cat.”
And it is fitting for me to end with a mention of
Xiaoping. No other contemporary world leader,
in my opinion, closely mirrors Buhari as does
Xiaoping.

In 1966, Xiaoping was dethroned from his
powerful party positions by loyalists of
Chairman Mao as was Buhari in 1985 by
loyalists of his Chief of Army staff.
Xiaoping suffered house arrest, loss of earned
privileges and was consigned to political limbo
for almost a decade as was Buhari.


But then Xiaoping bounced back into favour
and became China’s leader in 1976 and
thereafter jettisoned his life long belief in Mao’s
Cultural Revolution and introduced the “one
country, two systems” policy that allowed
communism and capitalism to coexist in China.


This is similar to Buhari’s conversion from an
anti-democrat who believed power flowed from
the barrel of a gun to a democrat who
accepted democracy as the best form of
governance and capitalism as the natural
economic policy of a democracy.
But this is where Buhari has to learn from
Xiaoping. Xiaoping refused to demonise
Chairman Mao, his predecessor who had
purged him from power and placed him under
house arrest after stripping him off his
privileges. Instead of bitterness, Xiaoping
believed that Mao’s “accomplishments must be
considered before his mistakes”.

This is how Buhari must treat his predecessors.
He must not demonise everything that was
done by previous administrations and mark
those who served in those government as
persona non grata. He must take the bitter
with the sweet and make use of the best brains
Nigeria has to offer, for as he said on December
31st, 1983, “This generation of Nigerians and
indeed future generations have no other
country than Nigeria”.

Will read when I wake up.