Yesterday Sunday May 29th marked the first anniversary of President Muhammadu Buhari’s APC-led administration. May 29th is also Democracy Day; a day when we re-commit ourselves as a country to the ideals of what the great American statesman Abraham Lincoln famously defined as “the government of the people by the people for the people”. To mark the occasion, today Monday 30th is also a public holiday throughout our great federation. My gentle and ever faithful readers would be reading this column most from the comfort of their home lounges. Great nation, good people!
Much ink has been spilled evaluating Buhari’s one year in power. Predictably, there are those who see it as a great success. They would point to the Single Treasury Account (TSA) which has served to consolidate our public finances while plugging the holes that perpetuate massive haemorrhaging at the federal level. The head of the dreadful Leviathan known as Boko Haram has been fatally bruised. Nigeria’s creeping pariah status is being redeemed among the comity of nations. The optimists believe we have made major landmarks in national transformation under the current administration.
By contrast, there are those who see the past twelve months as an unmitigated disaster. Such pessimists point to the long chaotic queues in petrol stations throughout the country, which did not abate for months until recently. Poverty, unemployment and destitution are on the increase. Ominously, electricity generation had relapsed into a frightening zero MW, placing the entire country, including our ornate Aso Villa, in a total blackout. They also point to the rampaging herdsmen which have been characterised as Boko Haram transmogrified. The mayhem triggered by these killers has been on a staggering scale that beggars belief. Never before have the divisions within our body politic dwindled to such bleak proportions. Militancy in the Niger Delta is back with a vengeance. Fearful communities are sharpening their machetes and waiting for the nightmare of the coming apocalypse.
Meanwhile, the economy has been on a tailspin, with negative growth averaging -3.8 percent over the last two consecutive quarters. Our community of economists is agreed that we face recession – some would say stagflation – staring us in the face. The capital markets have experienced a major haemorrhaging, with capital flight and disinvestment becoming the norm rather than the exception.
Indeed, a non-governmental organisation, the Foundation for Human Rights and Anti-Corruption Crusade (FHRACC), recently described Buhari’s one year in power as, “a mishmash of economic disaster, pirated propaganda of image laundering and democratic attrition. His eventful one year in office gives Nigerians a miasma of hope of the nation’s dangling future. Buhari’s first tenure is characterized with economic repression, ethnocentrism, lack of parity with the composition of the government, gross abuse of human rights, persecution of old time enemies and political rivals in the name of Anti-Corruption war as well as an abuse of democratic ethos thereby reducing Nigerians to collywobbles”.
Strangely enough, both the optimists and the pessimists have a point. Muhammadu Buhari took a good six months before constituting his cabinet, thereby losing valuable precious time. There is a feeling that he did not have a completely free hand in picking his ministers, having caved in to political pressure from shadowy party stalwarts lurking in smoke-filled chambers. On this score, he has hardly any sympathisers. In the presidential system of government, the buck stops with the executive. When a president fails, it is not the party that fails; it is he as a person and as a leader is deemed to have failed.
My suspicion is that Muhammadu Buhari and the APC were rather taken by surprise at their victory in last year’s March presidential elections. It seems they were never quite prepared for the arduous task of governing. Rather, they were expecting the elections to be rigged as had been the practice hitherto by the PDP,formerly known as the largest juggernaut rigging political machine in Africa. They were pleasantly surprised that the giant Goliath was built with feet of clay. But unlike King David who slaughtered the giant Goliath, they were not quite prepared for royal kingship.
Matters have not been helped by some of the utterances that spewed out of the inner sanctums of the High Magistracy. His inaugural address as president in May 29th 2015 was a rather polarising, poorly written speech. For the discerning, it set alarm bells for those who took the view that the man could never be trusted. While attending an OECD summit in Paris, towards the end of last year the President lamented that our country is broke. At another major event abroad, he towed the line of our foreign tormentors in describing our country as a land of scammers and crooks. Whilst at a conference in Cairo, he described the judicature as the single greatest ‘obstacle’ in the war against corruption. Clearly, the innermost circle of advisers are not helping this president the way they ought to.
In spite of his legions of detractors, I am of the view that Muhammadu Buhari will be a great president. Some of the important initiatives that have been taken recently – deregulation of the petroleum sector, commitment to a flexible exchange rate regime, consolidation of the TSA – will augur well for our future economic prospects.
For my part, I do not think anyone can deny that he is one of the most patriotic leaders this country has ever produced. He belongs in the order of Yakubu Gowon and Murtala Mohammed. In character and rectitude, he dwarfs everybody since cunning old fox Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. Whatever his faults, we cannot deny that he loves Nigeria and is committed to seeking its good and securing its future among the nations. He is certainly not the type that would squirrel away our national patrimony into foreign bank coffers for the benefit of himself and his family. Indeed, he has been appalled by the mess he found on ground when he took over the reins of power. He has, on more than one occasion, broken down in tears at the sheer scale of the corruption, rent-seeking and rapine perpetrated by members of the previous administration.
Some critics have faulted his anti-corruption war as amounting to nothing more than a vengeful witch-hunt aimed at settling old scores with enemies, real as well as imaginary. They point to the fact that corruption has been endemic across all party lines and that the focus on mainly PDP apparatchik casts a pall on the government’s anti-corruption war. That may well be true. My counter-argument is that Buhari is a human being and an African. In Africa it is considered grossly immoral to turn around and bite the fingers that fed you – in this case, the fingers that doled out the campaign dosh that swept him into power. Half a loaf is better than none, as far as I am concerned. It is better that he is at least starting with corrupt people from the other side than that he did not start at all. A more prudent attitude is to forebear with him and see how the whole thing pans out.
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The real challenge facing this administration is the fact that it imagines that government can be run without a plan and on the basis of good intentions alone. Buhari came into power with a humongous reservoir of moral capital. But they had little by way of intellectual capital with which to back it. In such circumstances, wisdom would have dictated that he builds a formidable and world-class brains trust that will help him manage the economy. He did no such thing. Instead, we have a confused diet of contradictory economic nostrums that have thrown the entire economy into a tailspin.
But all is not lost. What is needed, going forward, is more rigorous leadership based on a clear economic development strategy and a robust framework for economic policy management. We need a war-room approach to power and energy. Close attention must be given to human security and the provision of essential public goods. The naira must be saved. We must be ambitious enough to reinvent a central monetary authority anchored on development, with commitment to the creation of an increasingly convertible legal tender currency. But we cannot do so without the requisite integrity and credibility. We must aim to create a one-trillion dollar economy in less than a decade; with capacity to widen economic opportunities for everyone; above all, an economy with an ever-expanding welfare possibility frontier for the great Nigerian people.
The ancient Chinese used to say that running a country is like cooking small fish. It is a delicate act requiring statesmanship and statecraft of the highest order; including sensitivity, mindfulness and great care. It requires men and women of the highest excellence, not those whose mind-sets are steeped in the dense fog of the middle ages. History is a relentlessly unforgiving judge. We hope President Buhari will not waste another year chasing chimeras, but, will, instead, focus on governing and giving our people a great future. Even the legendary patience and forbearance of the long-suffering Nigerian people has its limits.
Obadiah Mailafiya
