President Muhammadu Buhari is not in an
enviable position right now. Just a year ago, Nigerians were chanting
“FeBuhari” and piling their mountains of soteriological expectations on
him. In about six weeks, it would be one year since he won the
presidential election and if anything, Nigeria has proved tougher than
what body language, or mere force of the President’s much touted
incorruptible personality, can successfully heal.
For a man who became President by
surfing on the wave of democratic discontent lunged at his opponent, it
was clear from the start to any perspicacious observer that his
administration would be weighed down by the burden of proof: to show the
crowd of fawning admirers, supporters and believers that he was in
charge, that their truth in him was not misplaced, and that he was
indeed winning the war against bad governance.
One way to do this was to ramp up mundane government activity and milk it of its highest propaganda value.
I have been an adult citizen for a while
but I cannot recall any other government that ecstatically wallows in
pornography of propaganda like this present one. Everywhere one turns in
Nigeria these days, it seems there is a loud raucous noise of
government officials emoting over the President’s successes in the past
months, a pesky din aimed at drowning dissension, reason and
well-meaning criticisms.
In the past few weeks, in a bid to share
testimonies of government magic, we have been treated to exaggerated
claims of government efficacy, larded with what the late Ola Rotimi
would have referred to as “terminological inexactitudes.”
One example is the claim that the
government has saved a whopping N2.2tn in three months, a feat owing to
the Treasury Single Account initiative. Let me acknowledge that all
governments in the world routinely lie to their citizens but the nature
of the lie, and the depth of thought that enshrouds it, shows the level
of respect they have for the citizens. I will not dismiss the N2.2tn
story as an outright lie but consider the remote possibility that the
truth exists somewhere but only as a thin film of truth that is being
overstretched to the point of illogicality.
How does a country that can barely pay
salaries save so much in such a short time and yet nothing still changes
in her fortunes? Did they mean they save some existing money from being
spent or that sum is the amount that could have been wasted if they had
not been so diligent? How does this government begin to even convince
us that it saved the nation such exorbitant amount when her 2016 budget
is replete with errors, duplications and frauds so massive that reading
through the items analysed by various media made one tremble in shame at
the outright lack of attentiveness that was invested into its
preparations? How can you be so grossly incompetent in one aspect and
then claim you are opposite in another?
For a President who embodied the image
of military discipline and asceticism, this budget deconstructs and
demystifies him. From the way the budget was presented and withdrawn
amidst lies and denials, a lot has been going wrong suggesting poor
administrative capability. Buhari owes Nigerians an explanation and an
apology for the inferior effort that went into this budget preparation.
Rather than outsource the blame, he should take responsibility for it.
In a sane society, whole heads of department would be tendering their
resignation by now. One is tempted to ask how Nigeria got to this level
but then, has our national existence not been characterised by such
slipshoddiness?
Rather than continue to peddle
propaganda and spread false cheer about the progress we have made, I
think it is time we admitted that our systems are warped, unwieldy and
unsustainable. Like the budget itself, Nigeria was designed to sustain
the mechanisms through which corruption operates rather than advance the
nation. We do not need the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai
Muhammed, to come up with another excuse to cover sheer incompetence.
The lies told by this government are not helping anybody – neither
government nor citizens. What it does is to further erode our collective
integrity and the will to transcend our shortcomings. Telling lies
about defeating Boko Haram in order to overshadow the fact that we are
fighting a resilient war with largely analogue methods has not as much
as deflated reality, so why not try tell the truth for a change? Rather
than the hysterical claim about some officials “sneaking” in huge sums
items into the budget, we need a more introspective look at how these
things happen. We need genuine answers based on sincere analysis of the
problem, not more lies or excuses exonerating themselves from these
glaring failures.
How is it possible for anyone – mafia or
not – to sneak items into the budget? What of items that were not
sneaked in -such as the huge sums allocated to running facilities in Aso
Rock at the expense of poor deprived citizenry? What level of oversight
went into the preparation that a number of items escaped scrutiny? This
is a part I do not understand: Is the budget manually prepared? I mean,
do civil servants compute the national budget through manual
calculation or they take the smarter, efficient route of using modern
computer software, customised for Nigeria? The scale of fraud and
shoddiness in that budget suggests that there are too many human
interventions in the process. How does a nation progress when it
micromanages itself?
For a while, Buhari’s government has had
it good with Nigerians who keep extending it a long rope of excuses.
Now, the length is enough to hang everyone. Rather than throw up our
hands and jump on the same old gravy train of blaming previous
administrations, or mouth the same set of impotent excuses of
corruption, the government should look inward and admit to itself its
own lack of preparations for the huge task that Nigerians handed to it
in 2015. There are many days when it seems that the All Progressives
Congress was never prepared for the reality of victory until it was too
late. That is why they have been floundering, weighing every day of
their administration against the unpopularity of their hapless
predecessor.
For people who were ushered to power
mouthing some of the most outrageous promises ever, their days in office
should have exposed him to the cold stinging harshness of reality. They
– like many of us – would have learnt that there are no easy solutions
to Nigeria’s many problems. Our problems are many, twisted, unending but
not insurmountable.
One only needs to pay attention to
President Buhari himself to realise that he is overwhelmed and probably
privately haunted by the scale of challenges facing his government.
Lately, in a conversation with members
of the Nigerian community in the United Kingdom, he stated that he had
wondered to himself why fate would deal him an unruly hand – making him
President at a time when the nation’s fortunes were plunging; that he
prayed for Nigerians who would suffer the consequences of the
circumstances. These words, when taken up by the most fanatical of his
followers, will expectedly be misconstrued as a testimony of his
honesty. Underlining it however is the ruminations of a man yet to
understand why he was chosen to occupy office at such a time like this.
Buhari has never been a philosopher-king but his private cogitations
like this one, voiced out, are less than inspiring. By now he should
have known that great leaders are not made in good times. Rather, they
are forged in the crucible of dwindled fortunes. Coming into office at
the time oil rate is falling is not the problem; not having enough
imagination to confront what looms ahead is what dooms us.
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