By Reno Omokri
Having worked twice at the Nigerian
Presidential villa and once at the British Parliament, if there is anything I
have learnt, it is that it is impossible to over inform a leader. You can under
inform him, but no matter how much information you give a leader, you cannot
give him too much information.
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| *Buhari |
In today’s world, strength and weakness are gauged differently than they
were, say in 1984.
In the
millennial age in which we live in, information is power and lack of
information is weakness. My concern is that there are a lot of weaknesses in Nigeria’s
seat of power because not enough information is being given to President
Muhammadu Buhari. I, like other Nigerians, have heard or read reports of
ministers in President Buhari’s cabinet being afraid to challenge him or
disagree with him. Perhaps unawares, the minister of state for petroleum, Dr.
Ibe Kachikwu, corroborated these reports in a recorded YouTube video now
circulating where he revealed that the President ignores his ministers when
they bring up issues that he does not want to discuss.
Having such anodyne personalities around you just means that you are
living in a bubble, seeing things as you want them to be and not as they are.
On Friday May 20th, 2016, Dr. Yemi Kale, the Statistician General of the
Federation and head of the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics revealed that
Nigeria’s economy had not grown in the first quarter of the year but had rather
shrunk by 0.36%, the worst contraction in 25 years! Since the announcement was
made, there has been various reactions with pundits pointing at this or the
other as being the cause of this setback. But I am convinced beyond any
reasonable doubts that this negative trend owes more to President Muhammadu
Buhari’s utterances on our economy and polity than to any other single
causative factor.
The bigger problem is that even though I suspect that his
ministers know that what I have just said is true, they would rather pander to
the President and like Dr. Chris Ngige, say that Nigerians are lucky to have
President Buhari (obvious Ngige does not know the meaning of luck). In the last
eleven months, the President had traversed the globe and has spoken about Nigeria’s
economy as if he was the chief undertaker of our polity rather than the chief
marketer that he is meant to be. Of what benefit is it to the President’s
agenda or to Nigeria’s economic well
being for him to go to foreign nations and instead of highlighting the positive
things that are happening in Nigeria, he begins to
regale his hosts with the most unsavory stories about Nigeria.
And some of the stories the President tells are just that-tales.
They are not factual. At best they are arguable. You go to India for a summit where other world leaders
are competing with you for the attention of venture capitalists and foreign
investors and while your counterparts are talking about how great their
countries are, you tell the audience how everybody in your country is corrupt
except you and oh, can they come and invest in your country? Only a foolish
investor would go and invest in a country whose President thinks his citizens
are ‘criminals’ (as the President said to the Telegraph of UK in February) and
whose officials are ‘fantastically corrupt’ (as the President said in agreement
with British PM David Cameron when questioned by Sky News). The President
speaks on the Nigerian economy and polity without any filters and his comments
are causing his chickens to roost with devastating consequences for all of us.
