By Sly Edaghese
It is fatal in governance when the citizens begin to perceive or
see their President as lying through his teeth. The earlier President Muhammadu
Buhari knows this the better for him. It is increasingly becoming the hallmark
of the President and his administration to say one thing today and the next day
you hear them reversing it or even denying it. This is referred to as a
flip-flop. Flip flop is very harmful in politics, especially when it becomes
pervasive, as we are seeing it happening in this administration. It started
with the padding of the budget the President passed on to the National Assembly
for debate.
*President Buhari and Lai Mohammed |
The
document was inflated and stuffed with all sorts of unimaginable provisions by
some unknown elements. As the President was saying that the budget proposal he
sent to the National Assembly had been tampered with or padded with sand, so to
say, the Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, who seems unable to
differentiate his propaganda work as APC National Publicity Secretary from his
present portfolio as Nigeria’s Minister of Information, was saying another
thing, that the budget remained as it’s submitted; that no one padded it. Later
the budget was declared missing from the National Assembly. Who took away the
budget, no one knew. Again, before you knew it, we heard the budget was not
missing!
Then most
recently, Buhari set a date, May 29, the Democracy Day, that he would be
publishing the names of those who had looted the nation dry along with the
amount of what each of them looted and what have so far been recovered from
them. The day came and nothing of such or near to that was heard from the
President in his national broadcast! Rather, as it were, the president
developed cold feet and began to speak to the nation in “tongues”. Not a single
name of looter was disclosed nor the amount of what was looted or recovered. It
was only just two or three days ago the government published some amounts it
claimed to have recovered from the looters, without stating the names of such
looters. Yet another display of a master class in lying was when the President
gave a notice the other day, first, that he was coming to visit Lagos State .
Lagos made
elaborate preparations to receive Mr. President.
At the eleventh hour, a change was made, the President would be represented by
his deputy, because of his “tight schedule.” An online social media disclosed
that the President not coming personally to visit Lagos was due to his ill-health: an ear
tumour or so. The presidency rose stoutly, as if the President was a
superhuman who could not be touched by infirmity, to fault the claim of the
online social media. To prove that the president was sound and healthy, they
began to show him on TV the next day or so welcoming a visiting governor to his
office. Next was the President’s planned visit to Port Harcourt .