By Suraj Oyewale
Abdulhakeem is the name of my two-year-old son,
but we fondly call him Baba from birth due to his resemblance of his
grandparents. At the height of President Muhammadu Buhari’s popularity
before and shortly after the March 2015 presidential elections, my neighbors
added ‘Sai’ to this alias, to form ‘Sai Baba’, the phrase used to hail
President Buhari, which means ‘only Baba’.
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| *Buhari |
A few days ago, while having a walk on my street with the
boy, I came across two of such neighbors, and while one, as usual, was hailing
my boy as ‘Sai Baba’, the other interjected, with fury: “Please don’t call the
boy Sai Baba again, Sai Baba is in Abuja
I walked away thinking: So this is how life is? The same Buhari that
these gentlemen were proud of just last year to voluntarily want to share name
with, is now the man they despise so much that they don’t want their neighbor’s
beloved son to take after again? The reason is simple: they had just come back
home after hours of queuing and fighting at the fuel station to buy petrol to
fill their generator, which is what they had to resort to due to the power
outage they had been experiencing for weeks. They had thought that, with Sai
Baba in power, the era of spending hours at the filling station was over, or
that there would not even be the need to resort to their generator every day.
The above experience is one of the many I come across everyday in
the last three months. From the market woman in Obalende to the tricycle
operator in Ajah, the story has been the same: things are hard, this is not the
change we voted for, we expected a better deal from Sai Baba.
Expressing my worry to a Buharist friend, he tried to downplay this
pulse of the street, I dared him to go the nearest newspaper stand or board a
BRT from any point in Lagos
As someone that believed in the Buhari project and expended a great
deal of intellectual resources to actualize a Buhari presidency, I owe it a
duty to express my worry through the same open medium I used to sell him.
The common men on the street are the easiest to lose support of,
because they’re usually unidirectional, and they care probably only for things
that affect them directly. The trader in Isale Eko or the barber’s shop
operator in Apapa does not care whether one looting general is going to prison,
he only cares about fuel availability, transport fare, power supply and water –
at least, before anything else. Herein lays the problem with the current trend
of things.
When Buhari came to power in May 2015, people were ready to key into
the impending atmosphere of change. I narrated in an article I wrote last year
that I saw, for the first time, Nigerians obeying zebra crossing while crossing
the roads saying they were now in the change era. I also narrated the story of
a cab driver that reminded me that “Sai Baba is now there; he will punish all
of you” when there was dispute on the taxi fare. I saw several other cases of
people showing so much confidence in the new government and ready to do their
own part. This was in the first few weeks of Buhari presidency. I expected the
President to seize the opportunity to take off immediately. Unfortunately, the
momentum later waned and people started dropping guards again.
The market reaction to the emergence of Buhari presidency was highly
impressive such that financial and economic analysts and journalists dubbed it
names like BUHARI EFFECT, BUHARI BOUNCE, BULL-HARI RUN etc. Investor confidence
significantly rose. Unfortunately, if the reports published by respected
international publications like Bloomberg and The Economist in recent times are
anything to go by, the investors appear to have been disillusioned by the turn
of things.
I don’t see the benefits of waiting for five months before the
ministers were announced given the people that were eventually appointed. That
was the first avoidable distraction that began the plunge into unpopularity of
the current government. I’m also not very convinced that the over 20
foreign travels of the President in less than one year was optimal. The
management of the current fuel crisis may have dealt the biggest blows to the
popularity, at least among the populace.
I have the feeling that even key politicians in the fold of the All
Progressives Congress (APC) are worried. I have reasons to believe that the
National Leader of the party, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is unhappy at the
erosion of his party’s goodwill on the streets too. His statement berating the
Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, confirms this.
Tinubu is a politician that thinks far ahead of his peers. If I were him
I would be worried too, as my job of convincing the electorate in the next
elections is just being made difficult.
I’m aware there that there has been serious damage from successive
bad governments that the country had been inflicted with, but I’m hesitant to
join the excuse team – the team that blames former President Goodluck Jonathan
for everything. I think APC knew this before promising us heaven on earth. I
think we need to talk less on who caused the mess, and dwell more on the
solution.
Thankfully, it appears the President is aware and not feigning
ignorance of the feeling on the streets. His statement at a recent conference
of APC supports this. The statement renewed my hope in this government,
but more actions need to back rhetoric. This government needs to act very fast.
The last year has been far from what I expected as a strong Buharist. My senior
friend and Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Femi
Adesina, sometime last year described people that criticize Buhari as “Wailing
Wailers”. The epithet stuck in the Nigerian social media space. If all
Nigerians are lined up and divided into two camps – those who wail and who don’t
– I will likely be grouped into the latter group. But on this depletion of
goodwill of a man I had (and still have) so much hope in, I beg to join the
wailing team for once.
Mr. Oyewale is a chartered accountant and the author of The Road to Victoria
Island: A Practical Guide to Climbing Career Ladder in Corporate Nigeria
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