APC, Buhari And The Harvest Of Deceits
By Etebong Akpan
The Nigerian electorates could be regarded as the most gullible in the world because they are open to be fed lies that cannot churn the stomach of reasonable people. And reasonable people are few in Nigeria They are worst than the legendary plebeians in William Shakespeare’s, Julius Caesar who chose to be swayed by each speaker as they mounted the rostrum to speak for or against the murder of Caesar. When Brutus talked they nearly rose against Caesar but when Mark Anthony mounted the rostrum later, the same plebeians moved against Brutus and his co conspirators.
During the build up to the last presidential election in the country, the then president, Dr, Goodluck Jonathan warned Nigerians against voting for the rival All Progressive Congress, APC not for any other thing but that they may continue to enjoy the freedom that characterised his administration. The electorates, having being fed basins of lies mostly from the elites and the opposition propaganda machineries chose to ignore the warning from their humane leader. After countless betrayals, deceit and barefaced lies, the Nigerian electorates just like their Jewish counterparts in the days of Jesus Christ preferred Bannabas, a thief to Jesus and God like Pontius Pilate gave them Buhari instead of Jonathan and washed His hands off their plights thereafter.
General Mohammed Buhari now President Mohammed Buhari assumed power on the pretext of lies and myths woven around him like most despots tending towards an apotheosis. Buhari’s mythopoeia preceded him into office and the fantasies of a no nonsense military general who abhors corruption and will perform magic with the economy immediately he gets into office was effectively employed by the then opposition party to rail road him into Aso Rock. His adoring followers have long believed in him with faith akin to religion which is one of the best tools in binding hopeless people together. His image handlers did a perfect job to the extent of robbing reality as they knitted fantasies and myths about him like pink pills which when swallowed regularly eases the reality of the demystification that inevitably occurs when real governance takes place during the PDP era.
Parts of the many lies APC through its apologists like Babatunde Fashola was that immediately PDP is kicked out of Aso Rock, Nigerians will begin to enjoy 24 hours of steady power supply. The gullible masses like most mob never asked how that was feasible neither did they the then ruling PDP bother to tell them that those gist like many others were nothing but mere propaganda. As God will have it, Fashola became the APC and Buhari’s minister for power and more than one year after the inauguration of their government, Nigeria has not added a single mega watt of electricity to its grid. Rather APC is still blaming Jonathan and the past government for not getting Nigeria to the needed ten thousand megawatts of electricity after sixteen years in power. Not only has the APC federal government not been able to provide electricity to Nigerians as promised, they have increased the tariff on the little PDP gave Nigerians almost for free. Fashola and the APC are not done yet with the blame game even after one year of their directionless government. After the blame the Jonatha for our failure policy seems to be out of fashion they have now resorted to blaming the Niger Delta Avengers as the reason why APC cannot cure simple headache. The activity of the militant group is now the excuse for the non performance of Fashola and the power ministry. It is either the Avengers have caused gas shortage that could have powered the generation plants or water has dropped at the various dams used for power generation. The simple truth is that the present government has not added a single megawatt of electricity to the national grid since it assumed power more than a year ago and it does not know how to go about doing that.
Another lie that was woven around the campaign of President Buhari by the APC spin doctors was his promise to make the dollar at parity with the naira. Either Buhari was and is still a complete fool with no capacity to follow modern economic trends or it was raw mischief for a leader in the 21st century Nigeria to hood winked the citizenry into believing that can ever happen. The value of any currency in the international market is solely determined by market forces rather than any voodoo manipulation. My high school economics teacher, the late Mr. E J Etim , an American trained economists taught us far back then in Lutheran High School, Obot Idim that ‘money is what money does’. Instead of the naira exchanging as APC promised, one dollar was exchanging for about four hundred naira to a dollar at the parallel market.
The president had to swallow his pride and reconsider his stance on the devaluation of the naira when it dawned on him that the issue of the naira is not about the ghost of Goodluck Jonathan but a reality he has to accept that Nigeria is a mono economy that depends on oil exports for her foreign currency. With the global drop in oil prices one wonders how the APC voodoo economists headed by Buhari, a man who knows next to nothing about the economy would have stayed in the back desert of Daura to fix the value of the dollar against the naira.
But once he encountered the country’s dire economic problems and saw and also felt its magnitude, his voice began to weaken and his steps falter. From bemoaning his advanced age and the inevitable weakness it brought with it, to accusing the immediate past president in particular of completely wrecking the economy, the president slowly moved away from talk of parity to sustaining the status quo. Finally, after loathing any talk of devaluation consequent upon the fall in national revenue, and describing the naira as the proud symbol of the country’s patriotic and nationalistic outlook, which everyone must embrace, the president has consented to market forces determining the naira’s realistic exchange rate or value. President Buhari and APC have finally met their change, and change has worked its wonders on them.
If anyone was astonished by that clear volte face, it was because they were yet to hear him speak candidly and honestly about the economy and the modern principles that undergird it. In his numerous interviews with the Nigerian media to mark his one year in office, the president responded to a question on the kind of economic advice he was receiving by declaring that most of the time, the economists spoke above his head when they explained why the economy was experiencing turbulence. He would submit to their advice, he said plaintively, because both the problem and the economists had overwhelmed him and he was wary of being seen as the obstacle to the country’s economic revival and transformation. Surely change is working.
One of those who spurned the Buhari can do all myth was Professor Tam David West. West was Buhari’s petroleum minister when the man who presented a Government College, Katsina O’ Level statement of result with a kaftan school uniform was a military head of state . He boasted that the retired general will give Nigerians petrol at forty naira a litre. Today, one year after APC entered Aso Rock, petrol is selling for one hundred and forty five naira per litre against the eighty seven naira it inherited from the alleged clueless Jonathan administration. David West, a professor of virology who claimed to be incorruptible but accepted flashy gifts like rolex wrist watch from big friends is no where around to help his former boss give Nigerians fuel at forty naira per litre. Instead it is the subsidy removal regime he campaign against that he has implemented to save his face. Real change indeed.
In addition, during his campaigns, the president ridiculed Nigerian leaders for allowing the refineries to run down. Once elected, he would look into the matter of the refineries and wave his magic wand yet again. He had done it before, he said exuberantly, and could do it again. To prove he was serious, the president in interviews within and outside the country suggested he knew so much about the refineries and was a leading participant in building one or two of them. He gave the impression it was a cakewalk to build refineries. But after one such interview, and without directly referring to the president, an incensed ex-president Olusgeun Obasanjo roared that anyone who said he could rehabilitate the refineries was merely engaging in wishful thinking. On his own, the rather burdened Minister of State for Petroleum, Ibe Kachikwu, has vacillated on the topic in a manner that sees him torn between the president’s fantasy and the economic reality and nuisance of decrepit, money gobbling machinery.
To escape from these blushes, the president has to eat his words and sought out his brother, Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote to come to his rescue. Dangote is set to commence work on a multi billion naira refinery in Lagos. The idea was mooted by the PDP led Goodluck Jonathan administration but Buhari then and his APC co travellers were busy condemning the then president for running an economy that produces the richest man in Africa but Nigerians were the poorest people in the continent.
As recently as his last media chat and thereafter, the president had promised to make the Niger Delta a living hell for pipeline vandals and regional activists and militants interrupting the flow of crude oil sales. He would treat them the same way he was treating Boko Haram insurgents and achieving results, he fumed. A few weeks after the last of such threats against the militants, especially against the Niger Delta Avengers who had brought crude oil export down by more than 700,000 barrels per day, his government opened negotiations with the militants, and even appeared desperate to get every miscreant in the region involved. This is a clear departure from the rigid I know all Fulani Muslim fundamentalist who feels Nigeria is a gift given by Allah to them through the British. His seeming show of remorse forced the militants to agree to a ceasefire announced by the federal government. One wonders why the APC government who feed gullible Nigerians with having the solution to the economy has to call for cease fire with a group his loquacious transport minister, Rotimi Amaechi alleged are criminals and should be treated as such.
Opinions were divided in the Niger Delta on the propriety of negotiation, but a significant part of the country and the rest of the world thought the government could not win the creek battles it appeared eager to court and wage. And so to peace talk, which he had forsworn, went the president, a changed and considerably chastened man. As the Avengers were about to listen to their elders, the Department of State Services, DSS flew a kite to test the waters on the strength of the group. They claimed to have arrested some members of the group who were trying to bomb gas pipelines in Delta state. The group distanced itself from those arrested and described them as ‘sleeper agents’; miscreants used by security agents to penetrate organisations they claimed are hostile to the interest of the nation. These people the group alleges are those the security have presented as their members to rubbish them and the peace talk. As prove of their potency and capacity to inflict injury on Nigeria’s crude facility at will, the group bombed chevron Facility in Delta state last Sunday. The government is yet to respond to that. This is the same Buhari and APC then as the opposition party that condemned the PDP for its weakness in offering to negotiate with the Boko Haram insurgents. This is the real paradox of change and who will be surprised if Buhari and APC will not be completely changed by their change before 2019
The enduring paradox of the Buhari presidency is that he came into office on the altar of deceit; but he is fast becoming the deceit he and APC manufactured. President Buhari is still holding out in many ideational redoubts, but if that paradox is real, and if the observations of many analysts are not far-fetched, he will be unrecognisable by 2019 because before then he will be consumed by the reality of the modern complexity called Nigeria. Only last week, he still spoke intransigently of the Biafra agitation that has resurfaced in the Southeast. Its campaigners, he sneered, were not born when the civil war raged and so did not experience the privations many victims had to endure. Agitation is cheap; the president seems to conclude, when you campaign from the comfort of your rooms. It remains to be seen whether he will enter into discussions with pro-Biafra agitators or not if the agitators up the ante somewhat disconcertingly.
The problem with Buhari is that he is still living in the fantasy of the pre and post civil war era. Nigeria defeating the Igbos in the civil war then does not mean that it has the capacity to do it today. The indices have changed. Then the coastal states never supported the Biafra cause and oil was not produced in commercial quantity in the country. Today with the Avengers and other militants in the creeks and a Biafra uprising, Nigeria is in for a rough ride coupled with the facts that the arms market in the international community is far liberal than what it was years ago. At the moment, the kind of weapons displayed by militants is alarming and in the case of a civil war, there is the capacity that the war could be taken to Nigeria instead of the reverse as it was then. After all , the saying that those who defeated my father cannot do same to me. The Igbos from my analysis are better prepared and are prepared to sacrificed once and for all to regain their manhood except there is an urgent restructuring in the polity. A position some northern politicians like former vice president Atiku Abubakar are canvassing.
Finally, during his first anniversary media interviews, the president responded to a question on ex-president Goodluck Jonathan’s national conference and the imperative of restructuring. He barely concealed his disgust, not to say his fury. He had not looked at it, he said dismissively, promising it would end in the archives where it truly belonged. Like his other viewpoints on key national economic and political matters, the president is fairly anachronistic. While it is true Dr Jonathan used the national conference issue as a red herring, the structural problems the country faces have defied solution outside the framework of political reengineering. Dr Jonathan reluctantly, and perhaps mischievously, yielded to the convocation of a national conference. There is nothing to show that President Buhari would not reluctantly also yield to a national conference or its variants. Once he does, his change, begun with floating the naira, would become complete, making him the putative master of change transformed by policy summersaults into the servant of change.
But what is truly worrisome about the president’s change induced wavy thought pattern is not his seemingly easy surrender to his deceits, the subsumption of his old and unworkable ideas under the modern and practical imperatives of new economics and new politics, but the subliminal spin off. The problem is that he appears to be ruling the country by yielding very reluctantly and immethodically to ideas that war against his instincts and constricted experience rather than ruling by a careful and structured architecture of modern ideas designed for today and the day after tomorrow. The country would profit from robust and well-grounded ideas of how to govern a modern state. Instead, the president has instituted ad holism on such a horrifying scale that he has no impression he should be laying the foundation for Nigeria’s future and democracy. Surrounding himself with crude and illiterate relatives from Daura for fear of a repeat of 1985 is nothing but a pointer to the picture of a recluse who still lives in the past.

This article first appeared on 12 August 2016 in the Pioneer newspaper

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