By Afolabi Ige
President Muhammadu Buhari will always put the nation’s interest first and so is less bothered about politics and what the politicians feel or advised. Like most ordinary Nigerians, President Buhari has more phobia for politicians that for the first six months of his administration in the first term, he couldn’t come up with a federal cabinet thus relying on the civil servants who he believes are dependable. Alas, he became a victim of his trust as that year’s budget became embarrassingly compromised through duplication and padding.
Subsequently, the civil servants become the No.1 victim of the Buhari “CHANGE” policies. The civil servants will complain to high heaven that they have become more impoverished with BVN, TSA, TIN, NIN etc. Stealing is now very difficult except at the system design stages and frauds at that level will mostly embarrass the perpetrators when caught. Most of them wanted a return to the PDP years and they don’t hide it.
Most unfortunately, these civil servants are the same elements in cahoots with some ethnic irredentists in the Villa that sets and sell wrong timing to the good and well-intended policies of the government to the president for their own targeted return to status quo and the years of the locust. Governor Nasir El-Rufai captured it very succinctly and there is not much really to be added. They sold such dummy to the president and he bought it thinking about Nigeria’s future without considering the danger of the moment which was programmed to swallow the dreamt future. Were it not for the intervention of the progressive governors over the Naira swap policy, another EndSARS unrest would have unleashed on the country with the national elections coming as the first major casualty. It was first Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the presidential candidate of the APC at Abeokuta that first raised his voice for the suffering ordinary masses of Nigeria over the deliberate poor implementation of both the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) and the withdrawal of the old naira notes without a planned replacement policy. Now, the two policies have rendered the ordinary Nigerians very miserable on the eve of a national election with the ruling party set as the victim of the collateral political damage of the poor policy implementation.
For Nigeria as a country, one of the most difficult pies to chew by successive regimes is the issue of absolute removal of the petrol subsidy which has become an obvious albatross on the nation. Even where all the previous administration failed to lay simple legal infrastructure for this necessary move, the current administration of President Buhari broke the jinx by passing the Petroleum Industry Bill int0o law after almost two decades on the shelf of the National Assembly. It is therefore not unexpected that the PIA will be implemented with stakeholders’ consultation and a lot of deft management because of the immediate harsh effects it will have on the people.
Very undexterously, immediately the ruling party concluded its presidential primary and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu emerged as candidate, the next immediate programmatic action of the government was to launch the implementation of the PIA by hurriedly transmuting the NNPC into a private limited liability company (NNPC Ltd) with same management and board so familiar and synonymous with the scary rots in the industry. It was the first signal of the dangers ahead in an election year and subsequent rollouts from that flank no longer come as a surprise as the implementers were immune from the political effect of their actions in the present and as well guaranteed a place of special recognition in their orchestrated and targeted consequential change of regime.
As if that was not enough, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) whose governor Godwin Emefiele sought APC nomination all of a sudden and on the eve of the presidential election remembered that he kept more money outside the banking system than within it in a system he has managed consistently for nine years and the only time to do that is on the eve of the presidential election. Assuming Emefiele’s feet did not suddenly turn cold and by some miracle the APC ticket was thrust on him, how happy would he have been, seeing his successor implement this policy this same way he has implemented it against the holder of the ticket he so much coveted?
Imagine a man wanting to be anointed to govern Nigeria as a country failing abysmally in merely changing the colour of the Naira notes and regulating its supply in a structured and highly systematized environment like the banking system! Thank God for such disaster averted because Nigeria in outright desperation for political balancing could have thrust the ruling party’s ticket on Emefiele as a South-easterner and fiscal management expert looking fit outwardly.
I sympathize with President Buhari for the obviously overwhelming size of Nigeria’s burden. Most policy advisers around him knows how he loves Nigeria and wish for solutions to her problems at the expense of politics and hence took advantage of that soft spot to paint him as an enemy of his party and traducer of Nigerians.
•Ige, a public policy analyst is the chair @ Concerns for Democracy and Good Governance in Nigeria.