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And The Truth Shall Make President Buhari Free by Nobody: 11:45am On May 26, 2016 |
AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE PRESIDENT BUHARI
FREE:
By Reno Omokri
Having worked twice at the Nigerian Presidential
villa and once at the British Parliament, if there
is anything I have learnt, it is that it is
impossible to over inform a leader. You can under
inform him, but no matter how much information
you give a leader, you cannot give him too much
information. In today’s world, strength and
weakness are gauged differently than they were,
say in 1984. In the millennial age in which we live
in, information is power and lack of information
is weakness. My concern is that there are a lot of
weaknesses in Nigeria’s seat of power because
not enough information is being given to
President Muhammadu Buhari. I, like other
Nigerians, have heard or read reports of
ministers in President Buhari’s cabinet being
afraid to challenge him or disagree with him.
Perhaps unawares, the minister of state for
petroleum, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, corroborated these
reports in a recorded YouTube video now
circulating where he revealed that the President
ignores his ministers when they bring up issues
that he does not want to discuss. Having such
anodyne personalities around you just means that
you are living in a bubble, seeing things as you
want them to be and not as they are. On Friday
May 20th, 2016, Dr. Yemi Kale, the Statistician
General of the Federation and head of the
Nigerian Bureau of Statistics revealed that
Nigeria’s economy had not grown in the first
quarter of the year but had rather shrunk by
0.36%, the worst contraction in 25 years! Since
the announcement was made, there has been
various reactions with pundits pointing at this or
the other as being the cause of this setback. But
I am convinced beyond any reasonable doubts that
this negative trend owes more to President
Muhammadu Buhari’s utterances on our economy
and polity than to any other single causative
factor. The bigger problem is that even though I
suspect that his ministers know that what I have
just said is true, they would rather pander to
the President and like Dr. Chris Ngige, say that
Nigerians are lucky to have President Buhari
(obvious Ngige does not know the meaning of
luck). In the last eleven months, the President
had traversed the globe and has spoken about
Nigeria’s economy as if he was the chief
undertaker of our polity rather than the chief
marketer that he is meant to be. Of what benefit
is it to the President’s agenda or to Nigeria’s
economic well being for him to go to foreign
nations and instead of highlighting the positive
things that are happening in Nigeria, he begins
to regale his hosts with the most unsavory
stories about Nigeria. And some of the stories
the President tells are just that-tales. They are
not factual. At best they are arguable. You go to
India for a summit where other world leaders are
competing with you for the attention of venture
capitalists and foreign investors and while your
counterparts are talking about how great their
countries are, you tell the audience how
everybody in your country is corrupt except you
and oh, can they come and invest in your
country? Only a foolish investor would go and
invest in a country whose President thinks his
citizens are ‘criminals’ (as the President said to
the Telegraph of UK in February) and whose
officials are ‘fantastically corrupt’ (as the
President said in agreement with British PM David
Cameron when questioned by Sky News). The
President speaks on the Nigerian economy and
polity without any filters and his comments are
causing his chickens to roost with devastating
consequences for all of us. Never in the history
of Nigeria has there been such a divestment of
investment as we have seen in the past year.
Truworths has pulled out of Nigeria, Virgin
Atlantic has closed up shop, Iberia is pulling out,
RenCap is pulling funds from Nigeria, both
Alquity Investment Management Ltd. and Duet
Asset Management Ltd. are divesting their
Nigeria holding. Zenith Bank laid off 1,200 staff,
FCMB let go 700 employees, Ecobank sacked 50%
of its top management staff. The President of
the Abuja Chamber of Commerce and Industry,
Mr. Tony Ejinkeonye revealed that in just two
months 50,000 staff were laid off in Abuja alone.
The results are telling. A little over a year ago,
Nigeria was projected by CNNMoney to be the
third fastest growing economy in the world
behind China and Qatar yet just two weeks ago
the International Monetary Fund released its
World Economic Outlook and Nigeria is not even
among the top 15 fastest growing economies in
Africa let alone the world! And when you try to
raise the alarm, the refrain from the government
and its horde of unofficial spokesmen is that the
downturn is caused by the fall in crude prices.
Yet this logic is flawed. The government’s own
economic monitoring agency, the National Bureau
of Statistics itself reported that the exponential
growth Nigeria enjoyed especially from 2012 to
its 2014 climax (when our economy overtook South
Africa to be Africa’s largest economy) was
spurred not by the oil sector, but “this growth
was largely driven by improved activities in the
telecommunications, building and construction,
hotel and restaurant and business services” to
quote the NBS. Yes, oil accounts for something
like 90-95 percent of our foreign exchange
revenues but it only accounts for a mere 15% of
our GDP. The service sector and the commercial
and real sector are the engine or used to be the
engine of our economic growth. But these sectors
are heavily capital and technology intensive and
require cooperation with foreign investors and
when you consistently bad mouth your economy
and its regulators investor confidence tanks and
the result is what we are seeing today. I support
President Buhari’s anti corruption war but it
should not be a substitute for sound economic
ideas or policies. And the way the President has
carried out his anti corruption crusade is in itself
self sabotaging and feeds the narrative of those
who say that Nigeria is far too complex and
dynamic a country to be run by someone who
should be quietly collecting his pension. And
President Buhari’s behavior is flowing down the
pyramid. There is a contagious effect in the
utterances of major figures in his
administration. For instance, when Vice
President Osinbajo tells the world that the
Jonathan administration looted $15 Billion in
security contracts, many people in the West who
like to read such stories to justify their hidden
opinion that the Black man cannot govern
himself, will clap for him. Coming from the
nation’s own Vice President, the Western press
will report the news as a fact. At that level, such
a statement carries the weight of an admission.
But then ask yourself, what was the entire
security budget for the five years that Jonathan
was President of Nigeria? In 2011, defense and
security had a budget of ₦348 billion or just over
$2 billion. In 2012 it skyrocketed to ₦921 billion
or $5.7 billion. It grew to ₦1.055 trillion in 2013
or $6 billion. In 2014, ₦968 billion was budgeted
for defence and security or $5.8 billion. The 2015
budget was passed in April and President
Jonathan handed over to President Buhari a
month later so I cannot see how the previous
administration could have ‘chopped’ that money.
So of the $19 billion budgeted for defence and
security while former President Jonathan was in
office, how could $15 billion have been looted
when more than half that amount went to paying
salaries? Did Vice President Osinbajo think this
accusation through? The President and his vice
with their cabinet and their political appointees
are not a court. They cannot convict anybody. As
such when they speak this way, what it amounts
to is propagandized activity. In an anti
corruption war one must separate activity from
results. Results are convictions from a court
after due and diligent prosecution. And when you
look at it from that perspective, this
administration has been delivering activity and
not results. For instance, then candidate
Muhammadu Buhari and his party, the All
Progressive Congress, had called the subsidy
payments made by the Jonathan administration a
fraud! They claimed that the amount was too
high at ₦1.1 trillion in 2014. Well if fuel subsidy
had been a fraud, the first thing that should
have happened naturally when President
Muhammadu Buhari took over was that the
amount should have reduced, but it DID NOT
reduce. As a matter of fact, Nigeria spent over
$5 billion on fuel subsidy in 2015 and President
Buhari was in power for most of that year! The
point I am making here is that the elections are
over. President Buhari and his administration
should stop tarnishing the image of Nigeria in
the mistaken belief that they are rubbishing the
person of former President Jonathan. The
President should take in the big picture and
realize that you need to be below somebody in
order to pull him down. One year has come and
gone and has seemingly been wasted pointing
fingers in blame instead of at solutions. The time
for blame games have gone. Only last month,
President Buhari complained that the Sahara
desert was advancing southward. He should also
realize that that is not the only thing going
south. The Nigerian economy is going south at
perhaps a faster rate and blaming others for it
will never stem the tide. The President should
focus on marketing his plans and policies when he
travels abroad instead of de marketing the plans
and policies of former President Jonathan’s
administration. It has been said that if you want
a conversation with a habitual complainer to end
abruptly, just ask him how he intends to fix the
problem. That is the question Nigerians want
answered by President Buhari. Under former
President Jonathan, Nigeria’s economy exploded
and became the largest economy in Africa and the
24th largest economy in the world. Let it not be
said that under President Buhari that economy
collapsed like a pack of clouds because the hand
that should have steered the ship was too busy
pointing an accusing finger. Reno Omokri is the
founder of the Mind of Christ Christian Center in
California, author of Shunpiking: No Shortcuts to
God and Why Jesus Wept and the host of
Transformation with Reno Omokri. |
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