Category: Sunday

Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s first term was almost entirely devoted to completing and initiating impactful and gigantic projects in line with the state’s master plan. His fidelity to plan and project execution successes were significant enough to fetch him a second term, despite the acrimonious infusion and interplay of ethnic politics. Thrown into the poisonous ethnic mix were a welter of religious politics and sprinklings of Lagos-for-Lagos campaigns. Mr Sanwo-Olu won the election on the strength of his projects and other achievements, relieved that after the shocking outcome of the Lagos presidential vote, which favoured the Labour Party (LP), he did not come to electoral grief. In his first term, he had governed cautiously, wary of offending diverse interest groups, whether ethnic, religious or elite. And it did not also matter whether the groups were upcoming or established celebrities and entertainers, or the youth class to which he, by orientation, age and probably background, belongs. His approach was not quite the model by which great leadership manifests; but at least he got a second term, despite his inability to develop, manage and empower his party into a great army of believers and activists.

Now, he must abandon his wary and excessively cautious leadership style, and must provide the sublime leadership that Lagos, a beguiling smorgasbord and melting pot, really needs. The state is religiously and ethnically complex, with the rich and poor traversing the city-state cheek by jowl. The state needs a different template of governance that is deep, decisive, firm, almost brutal but yet humane, and futuristic. The last presidential and governorship polls exposed the deep fissures underlying the state’s substructure and the molten magma of social and ethnic disharmony seething below the surface. In his inauguration address, Mr Sanwo-Olu, a naturally equanimous man, did not give any indication he was aware of those seething fractures, let alone be troubled by them. Just as his response to the EndSARS protest showed, he seems more inclined to ‘heal’ divisions than grapple with them in a way that shows his awareness of looming danger.

He has a second term now. He must quit the wariness that characterised his first term and the previous Akinwumi Ambode governorship. Lagos’ problems will not be assuaged by cautious and mellifluous words and displays, considering that migration to the state has picked up in inverse proportion to the mediocrity and retrogression of national leadership in the past 14 or 15 years. And since Lagos is not just a melting pot, but also a honey pot, migration into the state may not decline immediately; instead it may heighten, thereby diminishing or even neutralising the state’s best efforts. Mr Sanwo-Olu must, therefore, first recognise that fine words will not attenuate the state’s problems, nor would those who have laid constitutional and unfettered claims to Lagos be mollified by anything other than having their way as well as sustaining their pampered privileges. He must recognise that Lagos’ status as a megacity and aspiring multicultural state have been deployed in the past few decades as a tool of blackmail to compel the state to accommodate cultural, ethnic and political differences, regardless of their harmful effect on the state’s heritage.

Reassuringly, however, the state has, however, begun to rouse itself to confront the contradictions undermining its progress. Whether this awareness has anything to do with the governor is not entirely certain. But the state has begun to take the fight to celebrities who, despite failing in their civic duties, have tried to bend the state to their leprous worldview. After years of flaunting their wealth on social media, buying land and building houses, not to say insulting and ridiculing the state and its people and government, they are now being compelled to take up their responsibilities as taxpayers. The state should not relent. It is scandalous that for many years the state had failed to detect and expose drug barons living big in multiple houses in many choice estates, and it has taken the unsparing sleuthing of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) to expose and apprehend them. How could anyone buy a house or land in the state and not enter the state’s tax and security database so as to query his financial bona fides? Indeed, it should be impossible to even rent or lease property without being captured in the state’s tax and security databases. The laxity of years past needs to end.

It is not yet known where the initiative to make legislations to protect Lagos indigenes is coming from, whether from the executive or the legislature. Re-elected Speaker of the State House of Assembly, Mudashiru Obasa, referenced that legislative responsibility to indigenes when he won another term to preside over the legislature. So far, it is difficult to impeach his reasons. He should not downgrade that responsibility. Lagos-for Lagos was a potent campaign slogan directed against the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in the last elections, and clearly Lagosians have felt undone by waves of migrations into Lagos, not to say the convoluted politics of the past two decades or so. They have nowhere to go, unlike many of the vocal and entitled nouveau riche who hide behind the country’s unitary constitution to commit excesses. It is one thing to settle in Lagos, it is another thing to imbibe, respect and protect the state’s cultural and political worldview. Sadly, the ‘Lagos is no man’s land campaign’, a campaign that recrudesces at nearly every election cycle, has done grave injury to the Lagos psyche and continues to engender difficult and intractable problems between ethnic groups.

Already, critics, fearing where the indigene campaign could lead, including perhaps as far as the disenfranchisement witnessed in the last poll, have warned that the Assembly’s pro-indigene legislation would be unable to stand legal and constitutional tests. It is true that Lagos is unusual, with its development often attributed to the influx of diverse people who brought with them ingenuity, investments and large absorptive capacity. It is, however, unlikely that Speaker Obasa or any other Lagosian, assuming such a person can be inclusively and accurately defined, is proposing an insular and exclusionary regimen for the city-state. The Speaker made it clear they were talking of protecting the culture and heritage of Lagos as well as its indigenes. It does not necessarily imply a zero-sum game. The gain of one does not inescapably mean loss for the other. There is hardly any other state in Nigeria that has not retained its distinct identity, whether in the East, North, Middle Belt or South. And there is no state whose political, ethnic and even religious identity is not shielded in large measure. It is dismaying that even before the essentials of the proposed legislations are known, threats are being issued, shockingly but unsurprisingly by the superficial former LP candidate in the last Lagos governorship poll, Chinedu Rhodes-Vivour.

Mr Sanwo-Olu will have to contend with the proposed legislations. They will be drafted. And they will probably not match or take cognisance of his usual cautious approach to politics. He could have lost the elections had those whose umbilical cords were tied to Lagos not risen in his and Lagos’ defence. He must engage with the lawmakers in order to manage the legislations in line with the inclusiveness and progressive ideology of his party. He must be futuristic in his expectations, enough to coax whatever legislations are proposed to remain relevant for all time even if the APC should lose office. And the laws, while they must be clear in their objectives and unapologetic about what they set out to defend, must neither be poisonous to witch-hunt nor distasteful to exclude others who have enriched the state culturally and economically. But they must clearly serve for Lagosians as ramparts against domination and acrimonious miscegenation. The state must not bear the burden of a tedious and contradictory federal constitution that runs as a unitary system and still fails to protect regions and peoples, including their civilisations.

In opening its doors to all and sundry, and despite the gigantic and laudatory building projects all over the state, Lagos is now struggling with its identity. Teenagers operate Okada and keke business without regard to state laws, and are thus not captured in the tax net. The problem is only now being redressed. Meanwhile, transport unions have become a law unto themselves. In addition, months before elections, anyone from anywhere can on account of the country’s dysfunctional constitution register as a voter in the state, any state. The constitution allows it, but it ignores the fact that such a practice sows distrust and seeds of future conflict. The last polls nearly exploded into a paroxysm of ethnic rage in Lagos. It is, therefore, not an option not to do something. The objective conditions on the ground, sometimes falsely and inaccurately attributed to President Bola Tinubu’s alleged implacable hold on Lagos, predisposes the state to a future convulsion. Clearly, the constitution must be reworked to make it truly federal, and for peoples and states to have a sense of connection and exclusivity within a united Nigeria. The goals are not mutually exclusive. More importantly, it can be done.

If White Americans still nurse a nostalgic attachment to a time when their country was nearly lily-white, and many European countries have veered ultra-right to protect their identities, and the Chinese want Taiwan at all cost, and Russia wants Ukraine at any price, and Canada is temporarily banning non-Canadians (read Chinese) from buying properties, etc, it is important to understand why Lagos lawmakers may be seeking legal means to protect their people and heritage, regardless of the factors that made Lagos a megapolis, and notwithstanding the fact that Lagos is a state within Nigeria. The United States constitution is not a fitting role model. The US was founded on the ashes of the indigenous Red Indians. Australia and New Zealand were also built on the diminution and degradation of the aborigines. The Romans practiced the cataclysmic art of transplanting whole peoples as punishment. And the Assyrians transplanted foreigners into northern Israel thus creating half-Jew and half-gentile people called the Samaritans who were subsequently loathed by Jews. Identities are an irrevocable part of politics. They cannot be ignored; they need to be recognised and managed within the context of a reworked constitution that protects and guarantees rights of peoples as well as serves the cause of justice. Nigeria has not always had the capacity to anticipate future crises. The Lagos legislative plan serves as a reminder to everyone that the time to begin anticipating future interethnic and interreligious conflicts and doing something about them is now.  

Tinubu, NASS elections and sceptics

The steadiness with which President Bola Tinubu has been assembling his team gives hope that Nigeria can in fact be redeemed. Eight advisers have just been announced, and their resumes show men and women of first-rate technocracy. Tangentially, too, the states have, almost by uncanny coincidence, elected into office first-rate men who, except in one or two impulsive cases, can be trusted to offer their states surefooted and competitive leadership. On the whole, after decades of national misadventure into predatory military rule, democracy appears in the long run to be capable of producing promising politicians and leaders far exceeding the best the military could ever give. Last week, the 10^th National Assembly also elected its presiding officers, four gentlemen who are products of ingenious compromises and consensuses initially thought to be difficult to engender.

It is not certain why that feeling of hope and possibility lingers in the air; but somehow, Nigeria is being dragged away from the precipice which decades of misrule and entitlement had tethered it. Some critics wait for the other shoe to drop as far as the Tinubu administration is concerned, expecting that he would make egregious blunders costing him his reputation. Instead, he has given the public and the media enough bones to chew, enough policies to instigate their angst. Rather than basking in the euphoria of the moment, especially because of the generally lowered tension in the country and the pragmatic retreat from Sudan-like chaos and the nihilistic orgy of social media deviants imprecating everything noble and sensible and possible about Nigeria, a few critics have grumbled about how the administration was getting away with murder, so to speak. President Tinubu has sustained his innovations and political seductions, and has strangely also made the unusual and even emblematic NASS elections seem chic.

The Tinubu administration, despite being led by a consummate politician, must begin to reconcile itself with public deprecations of some of its dashing policies and programmes. However, such public deprecations will probably give way to optimism if the policies take on redemptive value: lower inflation, realistic and market-led foreign exchange rates, significant capital inflow, and quality education and health infrastructure, among other things. The president has had a knack for taking bold decisions in and out of office as Lagos governor, and he has shown a great predilection for tempting fate. He will hope that none of his major policies miscarry with telling consequences. He showed his hands early in the day by backing the quartet of presiding officers of the National Assembly, and they won handily after weeks of rigmarole and permutations. Yes, that support was bold and unflinching; but it could easily have crystallised the opposition against his administration and helped his enemies train their guns with precision on his position, even if that position was mounted on lofty ethical peaks.

It is remarkable that the president got away with that chutzpah of supporting and projecting candidates in the NASS election. It had seemed, curiously, that since the APC has a commanding lead in the Senate with 59 seats, the party would easily get Senators Godswill Akpabio and Barau Jibrin elected. And if they got bipartisan assent to swell that plurality to put the election soundly beyond doubt, that would indeed be a powerful statement. In the end, they got 63, with the other contender Sen. Abdulaziz Yari nearly pulling an upset with 46 votes. The race in the House of Representatives, where the ruling party did not fare too well in terms of numbers, seemed less certain, and pundits had predicted a herculean task before the APC. Surprisingly, despite the president showing his preference, and was indeed accused of trying to impose the Reps’ leadership, Hon Tajudeen Abbas secured an overwhelming victory with 353 votes. His opponents are apoplectic.

However, the Senate race should give the APC reason to ponder on the catastrophe it escaped by a whisker. Sen Akpabio, a Christian, needed to be elected to indicate clearly that the party did not harbour an Islamic agenda, especially in view of its Muslim-Muslim presidency. Why that altruistic and elementary fact failed to persuade those who voted for Sen Yari is hard to fathom. Had Sen Yari been elected as senate president, it would have created a lasting, destabilising and debilitating problem for the ruling party. It seemed Sen Yari’s supporters were more persuaded by the desire of the North to secure political visibility at a time, according to their argument, when the South dominated the three arms of government, to wit, executive, legislative and judicial branches. But under President Muhammadu Buhari, the North also for a long stretch of time dominated the three arms.

Reassuringly, overall, politics in Nigeria has become sophisticated, and the quality of the presidency, state houses, and legislature at all levels has risen significantly. Nothing will henceforth be taken for granted, and even the president, with all his depth and courage, will have to be on his toes to stay ahead of competition, both at the policy and politics levels. His initial successes have been entrancing; however, those early successes make his job and his future all the more precarious but infinitely more enthralling.

Many Nigerians are in a fix what to make of the fuel subsidy removal controversy with which President Bola Tinubu kick-started his presidency. On the one hand, they agree that paying trillions in subsidy was economically wasteful, and it needed to be stopped; but on the other hand, they fear that ending the binge abruptly could also prove disruptive, if not obstructive. Even presidential candidates who were caught on tape suggesting that they would stop subsidy immediately they were elected have, sensing the drift of public discontent and the stirrings by labour unions, quibbled that ameliorative measures needed to be put in place first before the policy was halted. Irrespective of the back and forth over the policy, the subject of subsidy and its complex undertones as well as the acrimonious debates that have suffused the country in the past two weeks indicate the chasmic gap between theory and practice in politics, and between electioneering and governance.

President Tinubu, perhaps contrary to his expectations, managed to baptize his presidency in the furnace of controversy right from his inauguration. Barely a day after the inauguration and unsure which way the pendulum of the controversy swung, he dithered briefly; and in the similitude of Napoleon Bonaparte’s hesitation during the Coup of 18 Brumaire, even gingerly walked back his brusque statement on subsidy. But as the days wore on, and as a favourable consensus seemed to develop over the subject to the stupefaction of the labour unions, the president has found his voice, and has put more resonance in his voice and convictions. It is not certain how those tumultuous early beginnings could be taken to signpost the early period of the Tinubu presidency, especially whether making intuitive interjections in policies would not sometimes endanger his administrations’ carefully choreographed measures. But all considered, his daring fuel subsidy policy has proved a success; it even met with curious acclamation to the dismay of his opponents and those who swore he was incapable of providing strong leadership.

In great leadership, there is always a place for intuition. This time, President Tinubu’s intuitionism won. But that is the mystery about intuition; a great leader must always have the intuition to rein in his intuition, to know when, or how often, to indulge it and when not to. Intuition cannot always stand in the place of carefully crafted and orchestrated policies. The president may have started on a roaring and even uproarious note, but it will take months, if not years, to determine the measure of his presidency: his style, his depth, his intellect, his vision, his work experience, and the durability of his administration. Without a visible kitchen cabinet to advise him, his steps so far, including meetings with security chiefs, traditional chiefs, intelligence chiefs, political titans and parties across all divides, and a few one-on-one parleys, have been unimpeachable. He has seemed to imbue his presidency with a sense of urgency, and surprise of all surprises, has increasingly and quickly appeared surefooted and knowledgeable such that critics who had dismissed him as phlegmatic are left flummoxed. He garbled a few words during his inauguration address; but now he is even elocuting far better than expected.

Nevertheless, the great tests of his presidency are still many months away. Yes, he may have cleverly dealt with the Godwin Emefiele conundrum, and with one throw of the stone may be restoring stability and credibility to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), but initial house-cleaning, as adroitly as President Tinubu’s has so far undertaken, neither emblematises nor defines the coherence and brilliance of an administration. He has signed a few landmark bills passed by the Ninth Assembly, but the direction of his presidency, far beyond the theoretical indications of his manifesto, is yet to emerge. It remains to be seen whether in the face of public, legislative, and perhaps judicial resistance he will yield supinely to the flip-flops that scandalised and enervated the Goodluck Jonathan administration or the rigidity and centrifugation that undermined and dissipated the Muhammadu Buhari presidency.

In his address to the council of traditional chiefs few days ago, President Tinubu admitted that no leader could hope to get it right 100 percent of the time. He hoped, he said modestly to a round of applause, that his administration would get it right at least 90 percent of the time. For a presidency inaugurated amidst contrived opposition by powers and forces of the old order masquerading as harbingers of the new order, the president must really hope he can score the mark he has wished for himself. As every historian knows, decades of leadership can be compressed into one or two books, with much of the mundaneness of daily and hourly administrative details edited out. Often too, the brevity of such books masks years of pains, indecisions, agonies, and failures. President Tinubu’s success will, therefore, be judged not by the facile measures he takes, including signing some nondescript bills into law, but by great and defining policies as well as unerring appointments. Before he took office in the opening months of World War II, Winston Churchill was more known for his policy failures than the great acclaim which followed his leadership of Britain throughout the war. President Tinubu will be judged by how bravely and knowledgeably he stands for great ideas and how well he remains true to impactful but sometimes complex and unpopular policies. Renowned for doggedness of the most punishing and self-flagellating kind, he will hope that throughout his stay in office, he will neither flag in enthusiasm nor drop the ball.

In the short term, however, he will be assessed in terms of the integrity and solidity of the cabinet he assembles, both at the kitchen cabinet level and general cabinet level. Weeks into his presidency, and in addition to his inexplicable denigration of ministers as a component of government, ex-president Buhari managed to assemble the most insular kitchen cabinet ever. And after he got round to appointing a general cabinet, he virtually outsourced the responsibility. The predictable result was an amalgam of men and women of differing and counteracting temperaments, ministers and security chiefs who sauntered off blithely at different tangents.  Unlike President Buhari, President Tinubu has built a wide circle of friends and associates around the country, bridges that connect brilliant politicians and technocrats from one end of the country to the other. He probably understands that the style and tactics that made Lagos responsive to his sculpting and enabled him offer sound leadership are different from the style and tactics capable of sculpting Nigeria. His kitchen cabinet is, therefore, expected to reflect the ennobling essence of his cosmopolitan politics, as against the provincialism of his predecessors.

Should President Tinubu succeed in assembling a great kitchen cabinet, with most of them as advisers, he will logically be expected to follow suit with a great general cabinet, many of whom he will have had personal contacts and relationships with. States and their parties may nominate candidates for the statutory ministerial positions, but despite being a consensus builder unwilling to ignore those nominations, he is nonetheless expected to be able to vouch for his appointees. In Lagos, some of his protégés, indeed an uncomfortable many, ended up parting ways with him acrimoniously, some of them unable to manage their ambitions, and some lacking in sobriety, character and the right values that conduce to loyalty and succession. His task of assembling the right men and women will, however, be complicated by the political debts he owes many of those who helped him secure the scintillating victory he is savouring today.

Take for instance, former Kaduna State governor, Nasir el-Rufai, who, despite hedging his bets wildly in the last presidential elections, finally settled for President Tinubu. There is little anyone can do to restrain the gadfly from imprudently baiting Christians and political opponents. He is a relentless volcano of trenchant words calculated to always skewer and scald but seldom to build, a Niagara of dismissive characterisations of opponents, all dressed in probably the most opportunistic politics any Nigerian seems capable of. Yet, there is no denying the role he played in the last elections. That role may have been exaggerated; but it was still pivotal. Rewarding such a man in the face of a seething Christian population still nursing the wounds inflicted by APC’s Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket will be tricky. Then there is the ferocious battle between two Kano State ex-governors, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso and Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, both strategic and influential friends of the president. Given the bitterness between the two Kanawa politicians, it will take the skillfulness of angels to reconcile them. At the moment, the two seem permanently to be at daggers drawn; yet both were and still are crucial to President Tinubu’s success. How would the president walk the tightrope?

In the midst of resetting Nigeria’s foundations, a task the president is probably the most equipped of all Nigerian leaders to carry out, he must enunciate great and defining economic and social policies, and then top them sometime in the future with some tolerable political reengineering of the country. Ex-president Buhari signed some 15 bills or so in the twilight of his presidency, and President Tinubu has given assent to two more. These and perhaps a few more in the medium term could help reset Nigeria and deliver a great approximation to the federalism Nigerians crave. Structures are as important as policies, hardware as important as software. The president, it is expected, will not lose sight of the goals of building a great, powerful and stable nation, let alone allow the ball to drop. As he gets down to brass tacks, he will need all the savvy nature has fashioned in him in his years in office and in the wilderness. He is gifted and resilient, and had hankered after the job for decades. Now he has the job; but vengeful opponents scarified by eight years of President Buhari will use him as their battering ram for the next few years, whether he succeeds or not. He must not let the distractions weaken his resolve.

Those who assigned themselves the task of crafting post-mortems on the Muhammadu Buhari presidency are embarking on a thankless, cathartic exercise. Other than exhaling well, and perhaps regaling themselves in the robust use of phrases and insults, any post-mortem now will achieve nothing meaningful. Everything that should be said about the Buhari presidency had been said while he was in office. Anything extra will be superfluous. During the Buhari years, critics had a field day, untrammeled by constitutional constrictions and other legal conjurations. Critics were so vile and unsparing that presidential spokesman Femi Adesina coined a label for them. Unfazed, critics in turn deployed his pejorative phrases against him to maximum effect. The exchanges were hearty, full-throated and riveting. For the entire duration of the Buhari administration, everyone who had something bad to say about him, including cartoonist who drew him spectrally thin and curved with oversize caps, had the leeway to unleash deprecatory fusillades.

What else is there to say? You may not like the former president’s sense of humour, but he was so self-deprecating that he anticipated the loathsomeness of his compatriots who might wish to trouble him. Niger Republic would defend him, he croaked. That is apart from relocating entirely to Nigeria’s northern neighbor if the bother becomes heightened. The critic may wish to point at his failed economic, social and political policies; but even these the ex-president had washed his hands of any responsibility. The failures were the responsibilities of idiot or prehensile appointees. Are you eager to point at illicit accumulations? Why, here again, the former president stole your thunder. Tee hee. As he put it elegantly, unable to mind his private business, his herd of cattle depleted considerably. And as for houses, he could not care less before he assumed the presidency, during the presidency, and after. He had only two houses in Daura and Kaduna. He had taken frugality, if not parsimoniousness, to a level never seen before. Indeed, he insinuated that public officials should learn a thing or two from him. But, alas, he is preaching to reprobates who don’t see him as capable of teaching anything.

There are usually strong reasons for post-mortems: to find out what went wrong, how it went wrong, when it went wrong, and who was responsible. Flush with purpose, and driven by messianic duty to country and maybe, too, West Africa, eulogists gratuitously take upon themselves the dismal task of dissecting a past administration. When the First Republic failed, eulogists were summoned to concoct panegyrics on those assassinated by the January 15, 1966 coupists. Their compositions still endure till today. When Gen Yakubu Gowon reneged on his handover date and came an appalling cropper, the eulogists were also on hand. And on and on and on until ex-president Buhari’s first term, a post-mortem this columnist also assigned himself, being averse to eulogies. It is true most post-mortems are often curated as eulogies, but connoisseurs know better when and why not to mix the two. Having erred badly in composing a post-mortem on President Buhari’s first term, in the false hope it would affect the outcome of the former president’s reelection chances, this column has sensibly tiptoed around committing himself to dissecting the eight years of the Buhari administration too quickly.

But overall, the post-mortems on the Buhari presidency have been less fierce than anticipated. Yes, there has been the occasional play on words and phrases, a few dismissive and brutal putdowns, and some swear words and puns; but beyond these, most essays have been tame and off-key. There won’t be eulogies of course; but even the post-mortems themselves will lack amperage. As the former president strutted away from the inauguration ground on May 29, he probably chuckled at how expertly he had anticipated the biliousness of his unrelenting critic. His sixth sense predicted all they might wish to say about him, and he had in some three interviews before his exit tackled their surliness with his customary disdain and abrasiveness. In any case, he summed up, no one should come and ask him questions, for he would be far away in Daura, Katsina State. And if he deigned to travel to Kaduna, not too far from Abuja, it would not be for the purpose of indulging their questioning and mortifying inquisitions.

But here is a final proposal for aspiring eulogists of the Buhari presidency. Forget the economy in a tailspin; forget the colouring of some naira notes and the cruelty and indifference of Mr Emefiele; and forget the skewness of the former president’s appointments. Instead, recognise that his presidency demonstrated that his predecessors merely papered over Nigeria’s existential cracks while he indirectly issued an invitation to his successor to do something major about those cracks. Recognise also just how down in the doldrums the economy has plunged, thereby necessitating not the amenities of a presidential candidate skilled in delivering Chinese and Singaporean homilies, or the faculty of a presidential candidate adept at cloning Dubai and making implausible promises about rotational presidency. Whether the country knew it or not, and notwithstanding their bellicose approach to presidential politics last February, eight thunderous and unforgettable years of President Buhari instilled in Nigerians the urgency of putting someone in office who knew his onions. It is not yet understood how that miracle occurred, but at least, and despite chafing Nigerians and a meddlesome presidency, a miracle did take place on February 25. There is indeed so much to be said for the Buhari presidency rather than belching hostile, unforgiving and premature post-mortems. At least for now.