With six months already gone, the president should realise that time flies!
Going by Nigeria’s constitution, the president, governors and legislators have a four-year mandate, after which they return to the electorate to seek approval to continue, or go home to rest. So, exactly 42 months from now, Nigerians would either be waiting for the return of President Muhammadu Buhari for a second term, or be preparing to swear in another president if they deem him to have performed below expectations. The choice is the president’s.
Traditionally, many writers who remember the import of today as exactly six months since the president came on board would dwell on his activities of the last six months. For me, however, this has become predictable despite its little significance. The last six months is gone; it can never be recovered. So, we should look forward to the remaining three-and-a-half years of the Buhari presidency. And, if we even think the president has 42 months to go, we must have lost sense of the country’s political trajectory. Unless there is a new paradigm, the race for 2019 will begin at best 24 months from now. This is much more so that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) that President Muhammadu Buhari’s All Progressives Congress (APC) trounced at the polls is not resting. It wants 2019 to come as early as yesterday, in its dream of returning to the same power it occupied for 16 wasted years.
In fairness to the president, when he assumed office, a few things changed for good in the country. Perhaps the most noticeable of these is power supply. Nigerians suddenly realised that electricity supply to their homes and businesses improved even as President Buhari was yet to form his cabinet, and even as he was yet to add a single megawatt to what he met on ground. Nigerians simply attributed these positive changes to Buhari’s ‘body language’. Only a few remembered that he was yet to appoint ministers then. But the recrudescence of fuel scarcity and a few other challenges have changed that perception. Buhari, where is your ‘body language’? They began to ask. The number of those asking the question began to increase as they watched the scarcity worsen from days to weeks. If the matter is not resolved this weekend, more people would still join those wondering what has happened to Buhari and his ‘body language’.
One can only imagine what could have happened if the president had not named his ministers until now because, even as there were no serious challenges before the team was finally sworn in November 11, many Nigerians had started to be apprehensive of when we will know those that would work with the president. President Buhari promised to have his cabinet latest September but when the month was almost ending and he was yet to fulfill this promise, Nigerians naturally began to ask questions: if it took him this long to name his cabinet, then how far can he go, given the time so far spent without ministers? For me, however, the time the cabinet is chosen is immaterial. This has nothing to do with the performance of the ministers. We have had situations in the past where presidents had named cabinet almost as soon as they were inaugurated; yet we had nothing to show for it. Indeed, some of such ministers left us worse than they met us. But this should not be taken as assurance that we will have value for money only because Buhari’s ministers were late in coming. Far from it. What I am saying is that the time the cabinet is formed is not necessarily a guarantee of good performance. Even after naming the cabinet, some people say if the list paraded as what the president could offer, why did he waste our time before naming them? Irrespective of what Nigerians, particularly arm-chair critics might say, President Buhari believes he has named some of the best persons that can better do the job he wants for the country.
One thing is that, as with the Jonathan administration when we had Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as finance minister and coordinating minister for the economy, former Governor Raji Fashola would appear Okonjo-Iweala’s equivalent in the Buhari administration, with his bagging of the power, works and housing portfolios! Not a few are wondering what President Buhari intends to achieve with this appointment in particular which, to me, signposts the measure of his implicit confidence in the former governor. Suffice it to say that President Buhari found a soul-mate in Fashola. Remember his hard-line posture as governor and Buhari’s tendencies too when he was a military head of state. But, whether the president has made the right decision or not is in the wombs of time. We have also seen solid minerals, agriculture and the economy as Buhari’s other areas of focus, given the ministers he appointed to oversee the respective ministries. If the ministers in these ministries (particularly Fashola) succeed and make reasonable dents on the challenges in their ministries, then Buhari’s presidency would have been made.
With his cabinet now formed, both the president and his cabinet members know the country’s problems. President Buhari knows like any other Nigerian that the economy was destroyed by the rapacious Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) government that he took over from; he knows that there is insecurity in the land; he is aware that Nigerians are not happy with the state of power supply, that the roads are bad; our schools are in urgent need of revamping, our hospitals are now worse than the ‘mere consulting clinics’ that he met when he came as military ruler in 1983. With the crash in oil price and the massive corruption that pervaded the land, especially in the immediate past, it has become a daunting task to expect sudden improvement in the country.
Expectedly therefore, some Nigerians have said the government is too slow in making things happen. I have the feeling some may even be silently asking how come the government has not built ‘a single’ refinery in the last six months if it does not want to remove fuel subsidy! As a matter of fact, some are asking: how many corrupt Nigerians has the government jailed? These were the same people who accused General Buhari of high-handedness when he clamped many Nigerians suspected of being corrupt behind bars without due trial in the 1980s. That has been the case with human beings; they are hardly patient for results; preferring instead, quick fixes which often break down as soon as they are fixed. It has been like that since the days of Moses when he led the Israelites out of captivity in Egypt.
Whilst it may be tempting to see some of the criticisms, particularly those coming from the former PDP chieftains (some of who should be behind bars now but for rule of law) who ruined the country, as deserving of little attention, the president should be interested in constructive criticisms, irrespective of where they are coming from because it is part of what keeps government on its toes.
What should not be lost on him is that Nigerians not only want change; they want the change that would endure and President Buhari should know that time is not on his side. Before we know it, it would soon be one year that he took over. That would be less than a quarter of his four-year tenure because, as I said before, the race for 2019 will begin anytime in 2017 and attention would be shifting from the present government to the next, unless the president succeeds in steering affairs in a way that would make this unattractive. And one way to do that is by giving Nigerians the good governance that PDP could not give in 16 years.
With six months already gone, those asking for President Buhari’s policy direction obviously have a point. Government, like an aero plane, needs a compass. Otherwise, ministries would be working at cross-purposes and ministers will be singing discordant tunes. Beyond that, there must be yardsticks with which to measure the government’s performance. This implies the government setting timelines to its programmes and policies. We need to see all that in the coming weeks, perhaps months, to keep hope alive that there will, indeed, be light at the end of the tunnel.
