By Paul Onomuakpokpo
Until last week, it
might have been dismissed as delusional to think that President Muhammadu
Buhari considers the citizens as people he has conquered. But if the
body language of the president has failed to magically make available the
dividends of democracy to the citizens, it has at least in recent times
reinforced the notion of his seeing himself as a conqueror, and thus a blight
on our democratic experience.
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| *President Buhari |
Here are a people who have been brutalised by decades of misrule and who invested so much hope
in the Buhari’s change mantra. Over a year after waiting for the
realisation of the promised change, Buhari has unabashedly disavowed it.
Passing the buck, Buhari has rather asked the citizens to make the change a
reality.
Yet, Buhari and his
party members are the only people who know the breadth and length of
the change he envisaged. The citizens did not sit down at a table to
arrive at a template of his promised change. At best, the president only
revealed snippets of the change: a robust economy that would guarantee full
employment and a parity of the naira and the dollar, and as a palliative
measure for those who are still jobless, the payment of a stipend of
N5,000.
Buhari’s new mantra of
change beginning with the citizens is an expression of his sense of
triumphalism. The new mantra brims with the hauteur of a president who has not only
impenitently abdicated his responsibility, but who is yet to come to terms with
his own failure to grapple with the problems he was elected to solve. The
citizens could tolerate the president’s incompetence while hoping that with his
seeking the advice of those who should know better, he could still fulfill the
people’s expectations. But with a mindset that the citizens have been
conquered, the president does not need to attach any importance to such advice.
Or why would the president tell the people that change begins with them when he
is expected to make good his promise? As far as the president is concerned, he
has used the change mantra to gain power and those who are interested in its
actualisation are free to torment themselves with that triviality.
But the president may
not be wrong after all. From his Olympian height, he can only see the
citizens he has conquered. The conquest began with his ministers and other
aides who are supposed to advise him on the right decisions to take. We must be
reminded that the president did not hide his disdain for his would-be
ministers. They were only imposed on him by the constitution. And this was
why he considered them as noise makers whose contribution to national
development could only be consigned to a marginal space compared to that
of civil servants in whom he reposes more confidence.
