By Douglas Anele

As I was saying last week, given the large amount of money
set aside in the budget for the comfort of President Buhari,
his family members and the top echelons of the presidency,
he is not on a moral high ground to put pressure on members
of the National Assembly to drop their silly plan. Hence,
another headache for Buhari is his gradual but steady loss of
the much-needed moral authority that can compel positive
attitudinal change among high-ranking public officials,
including legislators.

Sometimes I sympathise with the President, because he
might genuinely be interested in changing Nigeria for the
better. But the physical and mental infirmities associated with
increasing old age, entrenched military habits of thought, and
conflict of interests between him and key members of the


















Northern establishment who fanatically supported his
presidential ambition - all these constitute real obstacles for
the President on the road to actualising the kind of change
we need at this time. On top of that, he still has to grapple
with the daunting challenges of increasing poverty,
unemployment, preventable diseases, deepening economic
and security issues he inherited from his predecessor.
Unfortunately, APC leaders and government officials, instead
of honestly acknowledging that they grossly underestimated
the enormity of problems left behind by the immediate past
administration and did not have any well thought-out plan to
deal with them, are still blaming former President Goodluck
Jonathan for every bad thing happening in the country right
now and insisting that Nigerians should continue to be patient
with Buhari because it “would take a minimum of eighteen
months to revive the economy.” Special Adviser to President
Buhari on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, recently
reminded us that the President promised change but
Nigerians want magic.

The change would come, he says, but it would follow a
process and it would be enduring. Things deteriorated in the
sixteen years PDP was in power, and this is the ninth month
of the present government. Adesina claims that Nigerians
want everything to change for the better immediately, but that
is unrealistic. Furthermore, “Nigerians have always
complained, and we should learn to stop complaining and
believe more.

What government needs at a time like this is cooperation and
support. If you have elected government because you believe
it can bring change, and you have not allowed it to isolate
what the problems are and articulate what the solutions
would be, and you begin to have all these complaints, I think
it is not natural. There must be realistic expectation, and
realistic expectation will demand that people are patient,
supportive and encourage the government. This government
is working for the people. Rather than complaining, let us
cooperate, support and encourage.” Femi Adesina is a
thoroughbred professional doing his job to the best of his
ability.

However, I disagree with the “sermon on the mount” he
delivered at Radio Continental for the following reasons. First,
it is not completely right to blame PDP alone for the
deterioration in quality of governance since 1999. Of course,
as the ruling party at the federal level until May 29, 2015, PDP
bears the biggest burden of blame for mismanaging the
country in the period under consideration. But politicians in
other political parties, including those that came together and
formed the APC three years ago, failed in their responsibility
to use the National Assembly as a platform to ensure that
PDP Presidents performed their duties creditably.

Instead, federal legislators from these parties connived with
their PDP counterparts to despoil the country. Besides,
unless one is operating with the false assumption that
corruption, mediocrity and ineptitude exist only in the PDP,
the decay in governance was not restricted to the federal
level. Before the last elections that swept the PDP out of
power, many non-PDP states and local governments were
poorly governed. Thus, when Buhari and his lieutenants
blame PDP for everything that has gone wrong in the country
since 1999, they conveniently ignore the role politicians from
other political parties played in entrenching corruption,
impunity, nepotism and mediocrity at the three tiers of
government.

In addition, Femi Adesina is blaming Nigerians unfairly for
expecting magic from the new government. Now, responsible
leadership is about service delivery, not about wishful
thinking or uncritical belief in the exaggerated reputation of a
single individual. Buharimaniacs should be reminded of the
Igbo proverb that says, “He who brings gay-infested
firewood to his house has invited the lizard for a visit.” Has
Adesina forgotten so soon the fantastic promises made
repeatedly during the presidential campaign rallies nationwide
by Buhari and prominent members of the APC, and how they
completely dismissed Jonathan as “clueless” and
“incompetent,” with the pledge to bring about rapid
improvement in the economy, security and job creation if
Buhari wins?

Because Nigerians are yet to experience the rapid
improvement promised by APC after about nine months in
office, with no sound economic blueprint for rebuilding the
economy, it has become fashionable for public officials with
more than enough resources to escape the brutal effects of
expanding jaws of poverty to blame Nigerians for having
“unrealistic” expectations from government. They are
condemning Nigerians for trusting Buhari, for believing he is a
man of his words who would not deceive them by making
promises he knew he cannot or would not fulfil. Anybody who
accuses Nigerians of complaining too much, of expecting
President Buhari to perform magic should go and re-read or
listen again to the campaign speeches of Buhari, Osinbajo,
Bola Tinubu, and Lai Mohammed.

The President promised, inter alia, that Boko Haram would be
defeated by the end of December 2015; but Boko Haram is
still carrying out wanton destruction of lives and property
mostly in the North. APC promised that if the party wins the
presidency, the federal government will give free meals to
pupils in public primary schools nationwide and pay
unemployment benefit of five thousand naira to twenty-five
million jobless Nigerians. It also pledged to eradicate fuel
queues and smash the wicked cabals responsible for fuel
subsidy fraud and recurrent fuel scarcity in the country. Not
only has none of these promises been fulfilled, the President
himself has disowned some of them.

Many Nigerians now think that during the electioneering
campaigns, chieftains of APC completely obsessed with
capturing power from the disorganised PDP were willing and
prepared to say anything, promise everything, to actualise
their objective. Now that Buhari has won, the party is in
serious dilemma because it cannot deliver on the promises,
an object lesson to the effect that it is very easy for
politicians to promise heaven and earth when seeking for
votes but much more difficult for them to deliver on those
promises after they assume power.

In a sense, Femi my friend is correct. Most Nigerians are
gullible; they tend to believe what they hear repeatedly from a
“big man” or “thick madam,” especially if the individual in
question is from their ethnic group or belongs to the same
religion with them. That is why APC’s propaganda machine
was effective in making Buhari’s supporters believe that he is
the messiah to rescue them from the existential condition

E.M. Forster described as the “slough of despond.”
When Femi Adesina accuses Nigerians of complaining too
much even when the government is trying “to isolate what
the problems are and articulate what the solutions would be,”
he forgot that the same invalid argument was used to justify
the unnecessary delay of Mr. President in forming his
cabinet. At that time, we were told that Buhari was taking his
time to select the very best and avoid making mistakes in his
choice of ministers. Judging by the antecedents of some of
the people in the ministerial list when it was eventually
announced, the five months delay was in vain. Similarly, it is
still quite possible that very little will change in the lives of
suffering Nigerians after Buhari and his team have “isolated
our problems” and “articulated solutions” to them.

Consequently, President Buhari must be prepared for more
headaches from now until the end of his tenure. After all, he
went round the country asking Nigerians to put the load of
being President on his head, when he should have continued
looking after his farm in Daura quietly out of public scrutiny.

Who'd read this epistle?

Very level-headed analysis. Op pls send to vanguard and punch. Kudos