The Technical Defeat Of President Buhari

By Emmanuel Ugwu

It may seem too early to write off the presidency of Muhammadu Buhari. He is in the second year of his four year tenure. That amounts to a reasonable mathematical chance to change the narrative and finish well. But if the law of inertia counts for anything, the remainder of Buhari's time will prove to be the slow motion fulfillment of an ineluctable tragedy.

*Buhari 

 Granted, there is a context to the pervasive misery in Nigeria today. Buhari inherited a scorched earth. He was bequeathed a landscape of ruins. He was bound to face the challenge of building with rubble.

Jonathan had the good fortune of seeing high crude price for the greater part of his 6 years-long tenure. He grossed a steady windfall of petrodollars. But he sanctioned the merciless looting of state funds.

As a candidate, Buhari appeared to recognize that revamping the economy had to be a priority. He made it a go-to talking point. He hammered on it at the hustings, always checking it off with the promise to fight corruption and arrest insecurity.

But in his earliest days in office, the economy was the last thing on his mind. The leisure of globe trotting was first. And he started to work his planes as soon as possible.

When Nigerians, alarmed that the intoxication of power may have made Buhari frivolous, asked him to sit down and work, he plagiarized Obasanjo: My world tour is a necessary charm offensive. Nigeria is a pariah state. I am traveling to reconcile Nigeria with the world!

While he lived in the air, Buhari left Nigeria without direction and without a cabinet. He took six months purporting to look for the beautiful ones. Even in a fiction, that's too long a period to run an amorphous government after a disruptive election that saw an opposition candidate win.

Naturally, that eternity of vacuum was filled with speculations and rumors. The market place was paralyzed. Investors and businessmen got edgy, confused and afraid.

Because they were made to hedge their bets and wait forever for the new administration enunciate its economic policy, some took their capital elsewhere. The financial system reacted. And an epidemic of job losses began.

Buhari had been advised to take drastic measures in his first days in office. Former British PM Tony Blair -whose autobiography, A Journey: My Political Life, detailed his action-packed first 100 days in office -suggested that Buhari's first 100 days would define the shape of the rest of his tenure. Blair counseled Buhari to leverage his massive goodwill and abolish fuel subsidy and take hard decisions to spur economic recovery.

Buhari demurred. He said the argument for the removal of fuel subsidy didn't sound rational. He would not sanction a decision that would the increase inflation and suffering.

Buhari: The Obstacle To War On Corruption

By Remi Oyeyemi

“…. whoever that is indicted of corruption between 1999 to the time of swearing-in, would be pardoned”
– President Mohammadu Buhari on March 11, 2015 at a Campaign rally in Kaduna
 
“The right thing to do is to probe at least the administrations from 1966 when this level of corruption and criminal wastefulness of resources started…”
– Balarabe Musa, Former Governor of Kaduna State
 in The Sun  of July 25, 2015.
 

Buhari 

It is becoming increasingly clear that President Mohammadu Buhari really has no interest in fighting corruption. It is embarrassing and disappointing that President Buhari conveys confusion and contused confidence about the war on corruption. The defeat of corruption is the greatest desire of Nigerians. It is why Nigerians felt that he should be given a chance after rejecting him at the polls three previous times. So far, President Buhari has not been able to come up with any clear cut policy, rules and guidelines as to how he plans to fight corruption.
 
In fact, evidentially, the most challenging obstacle to fighting corruption in this present dispensation is President Buhari himself. President Buhari has raised obstacles to the war on corruption so that it would be impossible to prosecute. This would help him and his friends could keep their loots. Any hope that corruption would be decimated if not brought to its knees by President Buhari is not just dissipating, it is fast disappearing. One more time, Nigerians have been taken for a ride.
 
In a document titled “I Pledge to Nigeria” released during the campaign, President Buhari made the following promise to Nigerians:
 
“I pledge to publicly declare my assets and liabilities, encourage all my appointees to publicly declare their assets and liabilities as a precondition for appointment. …. I pledge, as Commander-in Chief, to lead from the front and not behind in the comfort and security  of Aso Rock, to boost the morale of fighting forces and the generality of all Nigerians.”
 
 So far, President Buhari has failed to fulfill this promise to publicly declare his assets. What this refusal to declare assets publicly means is that he has skeletons in his own closet. He is hiding something from Nigerians. He is not as poor as Nigerians have been made to believe and he is probably embarrassed to openly let Nigerian know what he has illicitly accumulated.
 
It would be remembered that on Wednesday March 11, 2015, in Kaduna, President Buhari had promised that he would not probe anyone who was engaged in corruption up till May 29 when he would be sworn in. As far as he was concerned, according to that speech, you can steal all you want up till his swearing-in as president, you would be left untouched. This gave an impetus to more stealing toward the dying days of President Goodluck Jonathan administration. He has by his utterances and actions so far created confusion about what he planned to do about corruption. It is difficult given some of his actions so far if this was not a deliberate act of obfuscation to undermine the war on corruption on the part of President Buhari himself. Now, he has turned around to insist that he would only probe Jonathan’s administration as if corruption just started six years ago; as if Nigeria just came into existence six years ago. What a balderdash!

Nigeria: How To Be A Clueless President

By Femi Aribasala 

Instead of giving Nigerians the change you championed, give them excuses. Blame Goodluck Jonathan for everything.

In six years of Goodluck Jonathan’s presidency, the opposition told us again and again the man was “clueless.” It made sure the tag stuck to him like glue. But now we have a new sheriff in town, with the APC claiming to be better at everything than the PDP. While that might still be subject to debate, there is overwhelming evidence that in the cluelessness department, the PDP is certainly no match for the APC.

*Jonathan and Buhari 

Here is a compendium from the APC textbook of cluelessness, provided within barely one year in office. If you want to know how to be a clueless president, this is the APC blueprint.

Instead of giving Nigerians the change you championed, give them excuses. Blame Goodluck Jonathan for everything, including the harmattan. Whenever you make a blunder, pass the buck to the former president. If there is petrol shortage, blame it on Goodluck Jonathan. If the budget is dead on arrival, blame it on Goodluck Jonathan.

In the middle of an economic crisis, promise to provide Nigerians with free education; free meals daily for millions of Nigerian public school-children; free tertiary education; free health-care and free houses. Facing a drastic drop in Nigeria’s income, declare you will be giving grants of N1.5 trillion a year to Nigeria’s poor. When you fail to deliver on any on these highfalutin promises, blame it quickly on Goodluck Jonathan.

Forget the name of your vice-presidential running-mate. Call him Yemi Osunbade instead of Yemi Osinbajo. Tell President Obama the name of your political party is the All Nigeria’s Peoples’ Congress when it is All Progressives Congress. Call your party on CNN the All Progressives Confidence.

Corruption And The Rules Of Engagement

By Chuks Iloegbunam

The fight against cor­ruption has been dominating national discourse since the inception of the Buhari ad­ministration. The Rules of Engagement of the Nige­rian Armed Forces recently weighed in as a topic for de­bate. Discussions on corrup­tion have remained central for two reasons: Candidate Buhari indexed his presiden­tial campaign on it. And it is the one topic President Buhari seizes every opportunity to declaim impassioned commit­ment.

*President Buhari

At the annual Osigwe Anyiam-Osigwe Foundation Lecture in Abuja last week, he was at his sanctimonious best: “Without our collective will to resist corrupt acts as a people, it will be difficult to win the war. Nigeria has been brought almost to her knees by decades of corruption and mismanagement of the public treasury. We must come to a point when we must all collec­tively say ‘Enough is Enough.’”

Unfortunately, the Presi­dent’s anti-corruption rheto­ric, and the manner his gov­ernment is prosecuting the war point to duplicity. This is because the fight against entrenched corruption can­not succeed unless it is sys­tematized. But Buhari’s anti-corruption war is bereft of system. It is selective. It is running on the wheels of me­dia hysteria. It is unconcerned with preventive measures. It is overloaded in censure and sanction. It is, therefore, bound to end in tragic failure. Commentators unwilling to acknowledge the foregoing cannot honestly claim to love the man or support his presi­dency.