A new race
of men is springing up to govern the nation; they are the hunters after
popularity, men ambitious…the demagogues, whose principles hang laxly upon
them, who follow not so much what is right as what leads to a temporary vulgar
applause.
– Joseph Story (1779-1845), American Judge
 |
| *President Buhari |
President Muhammadu Buhari has offered the
‘ideal’ measuring rod to assess him and other public officers while serving the
people or when out of office. We don’t need to consult any arcane research or
some tongue-twisting grammatical construction to guide us to determine whether
outgoing executives have fared well or underperformed.
All we should do is to
consider the body optics: has the office holder lost weight or gained extra
flesh? A little bit of extrapolation: is the departing fellow poorer or richer?
If he is still in office, do his airs suggest he is on the route to earning a
mention in the club reserved for the likes of Aliko Dangote? What’s his
sartorial disposition? Is his now a knack for Savile Row, London, the
confluence of tailors and billionaires.
The other day, when he took a non-forensic look
at Mohammed Adamu, Nigeria’s Inspector-General of Police, our president
concluded that the security chief has been working hard in the light of his
diminishing weight. Buhari spoke when he was taken up on the frightening
reports of insecurity here and there. We are not to worry, he assures us; the man he has charged to deal with those
giving us sleepless nights is himself suffering insomnia, leading, naturally,
to loss of weight.
You would also emaciate if you do not eat well.
It’s a contradiction to say of a gourmand that he is simultaneously
slenderizing. So our IGP has been so busy battling the antisocial elements in
our midst he’s had no time to be a glutton. There is nothing he has amassed;
therefore there’s nothing to gobble to make Adamu grow out and burst his
uniform. After all, you prey on what you have.
You eat sparsely as you acquire
sparingly. It gives you a lean figure, unfatty bank account, and above all,
ascetic nights so that like Obafemi Awolowo, ‘’when most people in public
office and in the position of leadership and rulership are spending whole days
and nights carousing in clubs or in the company of men of shady character and
women of easy virtue, l, like a few others, am always at my post working hard
at the country’s problems and trying to find solutions for them’’.
I believe these are neat deductions we arrive at
from Mr. President’s pronouncements on the police boss as we also examine the
president and others in their asset status at the end of their tenure on
Wednesday, May 29, 2019. The Code of Conduct Bureau, CCB, has asked Buhari, his
vice, Yemi Osinbajo and a train of others to drop their asset scorecard with
the bureau not later than Tuesday May 28, 2019.
When Buhari was moving in as president in 2015,
he told CCB through Garba Shehu, one of his media aides, that he had N30m in
the only bank account he had. There were five homes and two mud houses in
Daura, his hometown in Katsina state, along with two undeveloped plots of land
in Kano and Port Harcourt. Still more: farms, an orchard, a ranch, all
harboring 270 heads of cattle, 25 sheep, five horses, a variety of birds and a
number of economic trees. More: cars, two bought from his savings, with others
supplied by government as ex-head of state and some donated by well-wishers
after Boko Haram savaged his jeep in 2014. The record with CCB also says our
president had shares in Berger Paints, Union Bank and Skye Bank.
Osinbajo, according to Garba Shehu, came in with
N94m and US$900000. He has property in Victoria Garden City, Ikoyi, both in
Lagos, and a flat at Redemption Camp, along Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. There is
also a mortgaged property in Bedford, England. Our vice-president, apart from
his law firm, had shareholding in six private companies including MTN Nigeria.
By the law applied by Buhari to rate IGP Adamu,
we should expect diminished, not enlarged, assets by our public office holders
as they give us the account of their stewardship via their assets. Have they
added to what they had? Have they worked so hard and selflessly that they have
shed weight? Have they become anorexics, with their apparel, hitherto
full-bodied on them, now hanging to give them the prized Mohammed Adamu-like
shape?
In March this year Osinbajo told Nigerians that
he had evaluated Buhari ahead of meeting CCB’s
requirements at the close of his boss’s first term in office. His
findings: ‘’When I looked at his assets declaration form, I was checking it in
2015, I said to him, ‘Mr President, I am so much richer than you, it is an
embarrassment…’I can tell you that he is perhaps; even poorer than he was in
2015 when I saw his declaration of assets.’’
That should be the goal of every true leader.
You don’t go into office to embark on a hunt or expedition for unbridled
riches. You don’t go in and return boasting you’ve put on weight. You don’t
become a public officer and all your mission is to abandon your Ajegunle tailor
and Aba shoemakers for Italian designer and customized products. You don’t go
into office flying abroad for medicare and sending your children to private and
foreign schools and hospitals, leaving the people you serve at the hands of the
deadly system you refuse to tend to.
The leader posterity recognizes is the one who
pauperizes himself while serving his people. He dies for them, if duty to the
people demands it. But we’ve had leaders who want it the other way round: the
society must be castrated at the altar of their gargantuan greed; we must go
under for them to milk us dry.
*Mr. Ojewale, a regular
contributor to this blog, writes from Ogun State (bmrtbo@yahoo.com)
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