KAYODE FASUA
Last Tuesday’s racy protest to the Aso Rock seat of power in Abuja, by virtuously eccentric musician, Charlie Boy, is a calibration of national despondency in the mishmash of sundry paranoia.
Amid controversies on the true state of health of President Muhammadu Buhari who ails and is away to London for medical attention, comes also, the need to sincerely assess the performance of his administration, which turned 2, last May.
Buhari, though physically enfeebled by reason of his health challenge, patently makes up in some giant strides that include fighting corruption, enthroning frugality as a state art, and keeping the rambunctious Boko Haram insurgents at bay (at least up till about three months ago).
Right from the outset of the grand incursion of the All Progressives Congress into the political firmament of the nation, it could be safely concluded that the country was set on the threshold of a radical transformation of its governance. Awed by the daily bad news of mass slaughter in the North-East on account of insurgency, and the widespread belief that corrupt politicians stalked top places in the country, the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan was widely derided for not taking charge.
Again, it was the consensus of critics that the Nigerian economy under Jonathan was nose-diving and could land in the abyss with irreparable consequences, having put tap on high cost of fuel per litre that shot up to N89 and the rising cost of commodity goods, especially rice, which had increased from N7000 to N8000 per bag.
Jonathan, mocked in the circles of detractors as a weakling and a President being remote-controlled by his wife and some powerful cabinet members, was pilloried in January, 2012, when he sought to remove the subsidy on oil, leading to a nationwide economic paralysis tagged, ‘Occupy Nigeria.”
Egged on by chieftains of parties in the opposition, who later formed the grand party now known as the APC, rights activists and bellicose politicians rallied the masses and virtually made the country ungovernable for the President; a situation that made a harried Federal Government to beat a hurried retreat.
In the final analysis, the Jonathan men lost their popularity and inexorably yielded the control of public opinion and affection to the opposition. Three years afterwards, the Jonathan reign under the umbrella of the Peoples Democratic Party was brought down, to give way to an era of the APC, rabidly accorded the sobriquet, ‘Change.’
Buoyed by the seething political relevance of Buhari who had vied for the president twice without success, former Lagos governor and Yorubaland’s political dynamo, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, wisely enlisted the cooperation of prominent political figures across the country’s six geo-political zones, who included former President Olusegun Obasanjo, retired General Ibrahim Babangida, and former Vice President Alex Ekwueme, to capture the federal level.
Buhari was thus brought on board, saddled in tow, with a lorry-load of electoral promises, some of which Buhari would later deny knowledge of. The APC promised, in tandem with its Change tantrum, a lot of changes to mark it differently from Jonathan’s PDP, a party that was no more than a lame giant, at the period.
Some of the 81 promises the APC made to the electorate then included non-blinking, 24-hour power supply within six months; ban on all government officials from seeking medical attention abroad; revival of moribund Ajaokutal Steel Company; creation of a social welfare programme by paying N5000 monthly to 25 million poor and most vulnerable citizens; provision of three million jobs per year; giving free, balanced diet meal to school children, and timely payment of retirement benefits to the superannuated citizens.
But two years along the road to a four-year stretch, a supposed scale covering the eyes of the unwary public fell, to open up disappointment of unmitigated proportions. As for power supply, the energy sector’s situation, two years on, is akin to the misfortune of a man delivered from a few demons, only to be re-possessed by a legion of virulent gnomes. In the Jonathan years, the country’s energy supply dropped from about 3000megawatts to 2,500; but these days, you can at best hear of supplies fluctuating between 1,600 megawatts and 1, 800. Lachrymosely, the masses look on in awe, wondering if they had made mistakes.
In respect of the party’s proposed ban on government officials from travelling abroad with the aim of forcing radical improvement in the health sector, the laughter is hilarious. A Buhari in the London hospital has brought the promise to fulfilment!
As for the promise of paying N5, 000 to the country’s teeming population of the holoi polio, the wretched of the earth, on monthly basis, the government itself, through its minister for Labour and Productivity, Dr. Chris Ngige, had long reneged on it. A theatrically concerned Ngige asked a benumbed populace to tell him the country where such free money was given every month. As they say, God dey o!
In yet a promise of this government’s party, two years back, to provide three million jobs, sorting for the possible, or near fulfilment of that promise can only be concomitant with searching for a virgin among nursing mothers! Across the country, the despondent army of the jobless, both young and old, variously take to lottery betting, internet frauds, fakery, pocket-picking, full-scale robbery, kidnapping, prostitution and the like.
Talking of the meal to pupils in public schools too, two years on, the children are still salivating, waiting in what is gradually turning to a mirage, of the genre of literary Castle in the Air, of the Alice’s Wonderland fame. In tow, news keep flickering of the aged citizens across the country collapsing, and even sometimes slumping to death, while on long queues in vain expectation of their respective pensions and gratuities.
As remarked earlier, President Buhari, in replying to posers on some of the APC promises, tactically acquiesced himself from blame, saying they were plans thrust forward by his party, not by him; and he, as such, could not be held accountable for failure to implement them.
Understandably, two forms of alibi come in handy, to extricate the Buhari government from total blame in executing his party’s electoral promises, two years on. The first can be farmed from the words of Abraham Lincoln as American President in the early 1880s, when he said, “I don’t control events, but events control me.” That is explainable with the fact that wishes are not horses. Buhari might have meant well for the nation, but on getting to power, he, against his expectation, met an empty treasury, forcing his series of initial probes, arrests and prosecutions.
Again, upon assumption of office, the price of oil, Nigeria’s economic mainstay, came tumbling at the international market. And who is to blame?
But above all, indubitable indices have shown that apart from exposing corruption, the Buhari administration, two years on, has fallen short of expectation in raising the living standard of the masses, upon whose back it rode to power. The remaining two years of its mandate is only an opportunity for redemption, and possibly, to make great impressions.