Two major camps have appeared since President Muhammadu Buhari showed up in the national space after his third attempt. One group is just as itchy and uncomfortable with his presidency as the other. Both have kicked and griped, quarreled and agonised over almost every step he has taken or not taken, and over just about every word that has fallen out of his mouth.
For the one group, which is decidedly older than the other in the criticism business, there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about their bellyaching. They are composed mainly of old PDP types or of beneficiaries of the party and its sympathisers. There is nothing anyone can, or should, do to cure their gloom and grievances. Not even the president can help in this regard. Even if he manages to reinvent the wheel it is unlikely to cut any ice with them. Should he silence the insurgents for good or create enough jobs to absorb the teeming idle youths or bring the naira at par with the British pounds, it will do no good.
The other group sounds more coherent, nationalistic and progressive, even in criticism and gloom. In this camp you find people who believed in the Buhari project in the run-up to the presidential poll but are now scared stiff that their prospective hero was turning out a limp nonstarter.
To be fair, the president, willy-nilly, unsettled this second set of critics. Deciding to give the presidency a fourth shot, winning his party’s presidential primary last December and going ahead to sweep the poll in late March, the critics reasoned it should not have taken Buhari a clear seven months to have a cabinet. Concerns are also being raised over his now frequent foreign trips, something for which a certain Owu chief was interminably criticised. Even Buhari’s immediate predecessor took a fair amount of unsparing assessment for his shuttles. More worrying to the patriotic critics is the fact that President Buhari has not quite given any hint of his revolutionising vision or transformational blueprint for the nation beyond his vigorous anti-graft and terrorism battle.
The patriots in the second camp of critics seem to be losing heart because they may have thought a Buhari presidency would stimulate a national rebirth complete with not just a buoyant economy but also a country known for something everyone else can envy. They probably looked forward to Buhari giving the country a new image, and if he failed to lift it up and away from the uninspiring Third World, should, at the least, be seen to have sown such transformational seeds as will sprout in no distant time. Some have asked the question in different words why Nigeria under Buhari cannot begin to transit, as Singapore did under its hero Mr Lee Kuan Yew, from an unflattering partner with Malaysia to a buoyant independent nation which attracted the West and everyone else apart from giving its people something to hold on to.
The concerns are genuine, yet probably a bit too much to ask. Buhari is not Mr Lee or anyone else, although the Singaporean leader also vigorously fought corruption as he is doing. In his other life some 31 years ago, Buhari gave enough hints as to what stuff he was made of, and it had little to do with a commanding new economic or such transformational national philosophical order. If I read him right, the president wants a country whose people are probably just as trim as he is, not physically, without the baggage of indiscipline and corruption, a country where you can do honest business and thrive thereby.
Buhari’s war against graft and terror look more convincing than whatever took place in the past. Political opponents and their hangers-on could gripe interminably about what the president is not doing right but he seems to be on course in taking the fight to corruption, a monster which has reduced a prospective giant to an ineffectual Lilliput. Despite their abundant human and natural resources, what comes first to the foreigner’s mind upon meeting a Nigerian is that fellow from that thieving, crooked country. This hurts but it explains why Nigerians are screened and searched at other airports more than any other human who walks the earth.
For some time now, former high office holders have been trying to explain their sides of a mind-boggling corruption story running into billions of naira. By the time the courts are through with them, some could be set free, having done nothing wrong. Still, the fact that these huge sums of money are being mentioned points to the fact that they are actually missing and may never be recovered. That speaks of nothing if not corruption. It speaks of a people who never quite fashioned out a way to keep the hands of the corrupt from the public cash. Better endowed analysts and commentators have documented the depressing perspectives of this corruption saga in a beleaguered country.
But it won’t hurt to consider one more question. What if Buhari had lost the election and Jonathan had won? It is unlikely that those who now have appointments with the courts would be fretting.
If Buhari fails to make a Singapore out of Nigeria it may well not be his worst fault. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo before him bungled the opportunity to make the country great, though that did not stop politicians and other office seekers from flocking to him from time to time. Unfortunate health challenges and eventual death robbed President Umaru Yar’Adua of the opportunity to present his own scorecard for analysis, though he brilliantly kept the Niger Delta insurgents quiet during his short spell. For whatever his presidency was worth Dr Jonathan left office as one under whose nose corruption was elevated and canonised as some form of service to the fatherland.
Presidents should be kept on their toes, lest they forget why they are presidents. But to be consumed by despair does not help. Neither do ill-intended attacks.
If the president fails in his first four years to make an appreciable dent on corruption, God forbid, it is certain to declare that the country may well be beyond redemption. And that will indeed be sufficient reason not only to despair but to sweep him out of power at the next ballot. Until then, cheer up. Let us take one day at a time.
