Mr. President, Nigeria Is Broke, So What Are You Going To Do About It?

By Desmond Afolayan

The Presidency in its rejoinder to a recent statement by the PDP upbraided its spokesman Mr. Olisa Metuh for “unjustly denigrating the President who continues to strive with all his might to alleviate and reverse the harm done to the nation by PDP misrule and corruption.”

*President Buhari

The Presidency further made several diversionary ad hominem attacks on the person of Mr. Metuh and the PDP, failing to address a very serious issue raised by the main opposition party in the country. The Presidency needs to be reminded that in a healthy multi-party democracy, the opposition party takes on a crucial role of holding the ruling party and the current administration to account for every action or inaction that can hurt the country, and ultimately help to articulate the frustrations of those who bear the brunt of bad governance. The PDP, warts and all, has a role to play in our democratisation journey, while the Buhari administration as the legitimate bearers of the mandate of the Nigerian people also have their role to play.

In this case, the PDP has chosen the very apt concept of De-Marketing to pass across a message. A dispassionate consideration leads any true patriot to agree that it does appear the President’s media handlers truly have a challenge in helping their principal play his role as the Chief Marketing Officer of Nigeria effectively, inadvertently de-marketing Nigeria instead. The global economic space is a very hostile environment not given to sentiments, where visionary governments take every opportunity to sell their countries’ competitive advantage while downplaying the challenges and unsavoury aspects about them.

President Buhari needs to be advised to rest his vapid rhetoric about all of Nigeria’s woes being caused by his predecessor and the PDP – Nigerians and the rest of the world know that already. He needs to be guided on how to sell Nigeria; he needs to tell us what we don’t know. He should restrict discussions about our flaws to his strategy sessions with his team back home. When he is in the field as a marketer with definite performance targets, he is to convincingly sell Nigeria by highlighting our strengths that make us such a viable country to invest in.