100 days too early to judge Buhari – Farouk

How would you rate president Buhari’s performance so far now that he is a hundred days in office? As far as I know, I think he has done creditably well. He is meticulous and takes his time to study the situation and I guess that Nigeria will be all the better for it. What about […]

How would you rate president Buhari’s performance so far now that he is a hundred days in office?
As far as I know, I think he has done creditably well. He is meticulous and takes his time to study the situation and I guess that Nigeria will be all the better for it.
What about all the fanfare the hundred days are generating? Do you think that’s necessarily a good thing for the democratic process?
I think it started in America, with Franklin Roosevelt, because the American economy was down and he thought that in the first hundred days he was going to turn things around and so it became a tradition. You would recall that President Buhari in his Chatham House lecture said in the Nigerian situation, nobody is going to celebrate the first hundred days because there is so much rot in the system.
First of all, recall that in normal climes when there’s an election and hand-over date, in-between, the incoming and the outgoing must meet. That’s why the incoming puts up a transition committee. In our own case here in Nigeria, of course Buhari put up a transition committee, but the outgoing never cooperated. So what you see Buhari doing now, listening to this and that from MDAs, is what the transition committee should have done, but it seems that they were under instructions not to cooperate.
It happened to us also in Kaduna, where the outgoing governor directed that his government will not cooperate. They just want to give you hand-over notes and you take it hook, line and sinker. So, his pace is good. Don’t forget that when he came, he has three cardinal points, which are security, the fight against corruption and poverty alleviation. In the area of security you know that he spent about the first two weeks of his government visiting neighbouring states, who before now, had not participated because they saw the lackluster Goodluck Jonathan government, and they left us to our fate. He went round to Cameroon, Benin Republic, Chad, Niger Republic, and they are all on board now. He has performed creditably well thus far.
He did say he would hit the ground running. Would you say he has done just that?
When he was outside, yes, he thought he would hit the ground running. But to do so, you require the outgoing to give the necessary cooperation. Yes, he hit the ground running, but not as fast as he would have been because of what was denied the transition committee.
So you are saying the apparent slowness by the president and even the Kaduna State government, is not really slowness but more like being careful and deliberate in their actions?
There’s nothing like slowness. Don’t forget that they have a four-year term. The opposition says there’s no minister, first of all let’s appreciate the fact the permanent secretaries that you see, even if there’s a minister, they are the chief accounting officers of the ministry. As a matter of fact, most times, the ministers have to rely on them and their input. But like I earlier explained, during transition, they were never given access to brief their transition committee. However, successes are being recorded.