By Dan Onwukwe
Can the news get any uglier for President Bola Tinubu than it is already? It’s not yet half-time, but as Tinubu, wherever he is in Paris, France right now, he may be pondering anxiously where his government has taken Nigerians in just eight months of his presidency, an office he so desperately wanted, and got in most unquestionable fashion. He must also be thinking how much harder it is being the President of Nigeria.
Truth is, there’s big trouble everywhere. Even in Abuja, his official residence, insecurity has squeezed everyone to a corner. Kidnappers are daily on the prowl, taking their victims at ease, and demanding hefty ransom. First Lady, Remi Tinubu had recently suggested intense, fervent prayers as the answer to the problem of terrorism in the land.
No doubt, prayer
works. But prayer without diligent work won’t yield desired result. In
short, it has been a hard slog for Tinubu in these troubled eight months with
little to show for as real accomplishments, except pain, sorrow, horror, hunger
and poverty as food prices soar. There’s perhaps nothing to compare what most
Nigerians are going through right now. It’s all tales of woes, frustration and
disillusionment. It’s all about the anti-people policies of President Tinubu.
This question remains valid: Is your life better now than it was before Tinubu
came to power?
For many Nigerians, being in a Correctional Centre seemingly looks better, at least you are sure of N750 daily meal that each inmate is entitled to, much lower than the cost to feed a dog. The man in the saddle has shrunk into the job, and perhaps in France to ‘recharge’. For him, the presidency is just a prize that has been won, not a duty to perform. Any hope that the present situation of extreme hardship in the country will ease soon is hard to foretell.
In other words, the bar that
President Tinubu will reach to be deemed a successful leader will be so high
and hard to attain. He has himself to blame for taking dreadful, thoughtless
decisions in such a few months that his policies have resulted in more
far-reaching negative consequences, with more harrowing multiplier effect on
every sector of our national life than the development of coherent and
attractive ideas.
This is not a good track record of how to
govern a country. There’s a limit to what prayer can do. The starting point for
this government, this President, is deep reflection, self-discovery and
transference leadership. If truth be told, these critical factors are in short
supply in this administration. It’s, indeed, unfortunate that living in denial
has been a major occupational disease of the APC government.
That’s exactly the kind of voyage of lies that
vice president Kassim Shettima told in faraway Davos, Switzerland during the
just- ended World Economic Forum( WEF). He told Arise News anchor Reuben Abati,
that there’s no poverty in Nigeria. It’s the opposite. If what Shettima
said was a satire or a joke, it was joke taken too far. Well, how will he know
there’s poverty in Nigeria? A man who has spent the greater part of his adult
life feeding at the expense of public resources.
A further source of despair to Nigeria’s present
decay is the ever willingness and servile nature of the present crop of
politicians, especially at the National Assembly. They are always, without
shame, ready and pliable to dance to whatever tune the presidency decides to
whistle. No elected leader since 1999, not even Olusegun Obasanjo in his
worst days in office, ever wielded such enormous power as Tinubu has done in
eight months in office. With a tightening grip on the judiciary, the servile
loyalty of Akpabio-led Senate, and a seemingly endless flow of cash to
‘service’ the insatiable appetite of lawmakers, the red tide is rising, at a
time when a vast majority of Nigerians are not sure where their next meal will
come from.
He may not know, or perhaps doesn’t care, but this has further damaged the Tinubu presidency in the eyes of both local and international publics. The grim and bizarre, or rather, amusing aspect of of the trouble with this government is the adaptive lies, empty bragging and self-glorification by the President. We saw that during the 10th German-Nigerian Business Forum last year in Berlin, when he claimed that he “deserves to be in the Guinness World Records”. And you ask, for what? On this page, November 28, 2023, I did say, figuratively, that, ‘yes, Tinubu deserves to be on the Guinness book of Records’ because of the wrenching pain his administration has inflicted on Nigerians in such a short time.
That’s the point Mr Peter Obi, Presidential to of the Labour Party in last year’s election made in the interview he granted The Niche, a reputable online newspaper, last week. This is what Mr Obi said, “Tinubu may be actually correct when he claimed that his name deserves to be in the Guinness World Record. Don’t forget that people’s names don’t always make it into the Guinness World Record for only altruistic reasons.
So, it depends on what angle he(Tinubu) is coming from. If the idea is to
put his name in the Guinness book of Record for causing Nigerians the most untold
hardship, he’s spot on, and I will totally agree with him because his
[economic] reforms are not achieving what they are meant to achieve”. Obi is
being kind with words in assessing Tinubu’s policies in 8 months. The grim reality
is that Tinubu’s key economic reforms such as fuel subsidy removal and
foreign exchange rates harmonisation, have become, in every sense imaginable,
dreadful decisions with consequences that will take years to correct.
Yes, Tinubu may well deserve a good space in
the Guinness World Record for obvious, heartbreaking reasons. His reforms have
brought tears to millions of Nigerians. A young banker in Lagos who committed
suicide in her office in Lagos recently dropped a note for her colleagues, in
the bank’s toilet, saying she took the sad decision because she could no longer
bear the hardship in the country. That, definitely, was not right option to
take at all. However, it underpins the level of frustration that is eating deep
in many people like an acid.
As experts will often caution, when a policy sounds too good to be true, it probably is. That’s what happened to the subsidy removal and the unification of the exchange rates. They were done without any serious thought. They have failed to achieve the intended results. Nobody has accounted for the trillions of naira said to have been saved? Perhaps they are keeping it for the 2027 Presidential election. What is the fate of the naira today? As of last weekend, naira exchanged for N1,400/$ at the parallel market. This is as bad as other financial policies that have not been able to withstand the toughest test of time that Nigeria is currently going through.
At this critical point, it’s not unkind to ask a few compelling questions: how did we get to this terrible present? Is Nigeria jinxed on the leadership index, lacking in producing excellent leaders? Why has leadership that has moved other nations forward, and shaped their hopes and aspirations, and the opposite is the case with Nigeria?
For Tinubu, the lesson of the last 8 months mirrors the mind and soul of a leader for whom power simply means being able to bend people to his will. It’s a sorrowful reminder to historians’ warning that power, indeed, reveals. It means that when a leader gets enough power, when he feels he doesn’t need anybody anymore, then we can see how he has always wanted to treat people all along. In eight months, it’s fair to say that the acquisition of power to accomplish personal goals, not power to achieve great purposes is lacking in this government.
With the lopsided appointment of key cabinet position to the South West,
and the current plan to relocate key departments of the Central Bank of
Nigeria, and Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) from Abuja, to Lagos,
you may ask, does this President truly believe in one Nigeria? Go back in
time. In an interview he granted Mr. Ayo Arowolo, published in This
Day, the Sunday Newspaper, April 13, 1997, Tinubu said, “I
don’t believe in One Nigeria”.
For me, the message is simple: What leaders do while they are trying to get political power is not necessarily what they do after they have it. Under Tinubu’s leadership, Nigeria is polarised down the middle. The fault lines that divide us have widened more than ever before. Every day, most Nigerians wake up, saying it has been more like a miracle than anything else. That’s the present reality of today’s Nigeria.
My
advice is this: President Tinubu should be watched carefully. Sadly, we don’t
have that lawmaking institution and the judiciary that can checkmate the
excesses of a President before he throws away our Constitution and turns it
into his own playbook. The judiciary has lost public confidence. Today,
the courts are derided (and in most cases so), as courts of favours rather than
courts of justice.
Altogether, this President needs reminding that the essence of
Presidential power, according to Grant McConnel, the author of The Modern
Presidency, is the ability to appeal to both large and wide different
constituencies at the same time. Every section of the country should receive
equal treatment. For this reason, Grant warns that any elected President
who ignores this timely advice risks running aground in the office.
I must add that the essence of true leadership is that even when you disagree with a leader’s policies, you will be touched by his goodness and ability to look at facts and acknowledge he has made mistakes and ready to learn from them in the best interest of his country and the people. So far, Tinubu has not shown any of these ennobling qualities to commend him for any good work.
It’s not unkind to say that Nigeria is experiencing perhaps the worst era of leadership in its political history, and you ask, why are the worst people sometimes in power? That’s the question American political scientist Brian Paul Klass tried to answer in his book with the same title. The unravelling large-scale corruption scandal swirling around some ministers speaks volumes of the spokes in the wheel approach in the affairs of governance in the country. Bettagate is one of the outcomes of this government’s lack of strong managers who can control the career bureaucrats without becoming their victims. On his own part, the President seems not to know how to determine or clearly define national priorities and directions.
There’s a clear absence of quality men and women who can give
the President unvarnished truth when he goes off tangent. In all of this, my
unsolicited advice to Tinubu is: don’t be a footnote in the pages of history.
The trappings of an ‘imperial’ President may give you a short-term advantage,
but it has long-term, incalculable damage to democracy. Whenever he comes back
from France, a harsher reality awaits him outside the unwelcoming bubbles of
insecurity and multiple economic challenges. He should save his presidency if
he concentrates on the larger interests of the nation before any personal
consideration.
*Onwukwe is a commentator on public issues
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