Happy birthday and season’s greetings Baba Buhari

Mr. President, I must appreciate that you remembered to wish me Happy Birthday as I turned 70. When you turned 76, I was supposed to have also reciprocated by wishing you a Happy Birthday, but I had two problems. Quite unlike you, I must accompany my birthday wish with a token of something that would […]

Mr. President, I must appreciate that you remembered to wish me Happy Birthday as I turned 70. When you turned 76, I was supposed to have also reciprocated by wishing you a Happy Birthday, but I had two problems. Quite unlike you, I must accompany my birthday wish with a token of something that would mean a significant lot to you in compliance with my profligate nature. Sadly for buhariya’s sake, I could hardly afford it, and I am not ashamed to say so. Besides also, your felicitation to me cost me unplanned hospitality in no small way because my side of Nigeria believes that if the person of the President of the country wishes anyone a happy birthday, it must have been accompanied by some goodies and they came to share your love for me! I swore there was none to their disbelief. I wish you knew how much I enriched Atiku Abubakar by sharing his bottles of Faro water.

I did call my brother Femi Adesina to thank you. My editor would not let me write my appreciation to you on my column and indeed, I am counting on his grace to publish this engagement. I did say to Femi that there were better times in the past, when such a gesture would have been graced with accoutrements – what former President Ibrahim Babangida used to call “soft landing welfare” in the form of a vehicle the type I cannot afford as a retiree but be proud to use, and I believe, with some start up cash in the boot, usually useful to a man our age, in settlement of medical bills we also cannot afford. I have spondylitis that requires N10m million naira to treat with a surgery abroad of course, and I have chosen a wheel chair and the commitment of one of my gifted yet unemployed children to my carte pushing. I dared Femi to have told you that.

You were not my 2015 Presidential hopeful. Sule Lamido was. I admired his humanistic approach to democracy and detested the glaring incompetence of President Goodluck Jonathan in dealing with governmental nonperformance, corruption and the insurgency of Boko Haram. Sadly Goodluck Jonathan destroyed Sule Lamido’s promising political career by criminalizing the ploy to raise and apply political support funds in a relatively “clean” manner, cleaner than the slush N400m that President Goodluck himself in the end approved to PDP kingpins across the country to each State. Thus you were my Hobson’s choice, which was not difficult for me because I had served you in the Petroleum Trust Fund as a Communications Consultant, and to me, the PTF Programme remains a most excellent model of development intervention. You may recall how we tried to save it from President Obasanjo’s vengeful torpedoes with our submission on how the intervention could be accomplished in a democratic setting and thereby retain the PTF. And typical of President Obasanjo, while he vilified you and all that the PTF represented, he copied it to set up failing FERMA! I routed for you in articles and social media postures believing that if you came into power, that submission would be refined and applied to governance delivery. Alas.

Fundamentally I think you also goofed big time on the anti-corruption by choosing to address the symptoms of the malady – criminalizing and seeking to recover N400m from political leaders that you well knew was money shared to poor voters on the approval of President Jonathan, and even delivered in cash! Were you to have defined the corruption worth fighting, this aspect would have been covered by a determination of the appropriateness of Jonathan’s approval whether lawful or not. In your approach, you destroyed every modicum of respect that leaders involved had since the common folks who in any case received the money irretrievably, now identified them as thieves. In the South, the elite could ride roughshod over this and rebrand themselves. Not so in the North where this infraction has cowed and dehumanized many elders and elite. And you bear the brunt because it appears to me that they have held back what could have served you as much needed valuable counsel for enhanced good governance. Worse, the specter still exists and just might be used, who knows?

I also think you were mistaken in being disinterested at the onset, to the politics of who emerged as leaders of the National Assembly. And then when as a result, Senator Bukola Saraki emerged  as Senate President,  you accepted the circus of the Code of Conduct Tribunal for getting rid of Saraki. Were you well advised, the same political ploy the gadfly Saraki used to crest on the Senate would have been used to oust him and foist one that suited your political game plan if there was any. I think this gross error of judgement caused far too much distraction and endless upheavals that have ensured an unstable polity to this day, and at such colossal collateral damage.

Do you know that you could easily lose the 2019 elections? Not that it pays me to warn you, seeing you have lost general elections three times and I have no experience to admonish you from. But while you have done well with the development of infrastructure and have established so far a praiseworthy monetary management, the economy is not responding to your policies and there is abject poverty in the land. Hunger makes the poor man very unpredictable and hence susceptible to being purchased at the polls. The opposition People’s Democratic Party think that is what is in the pipeline and mean it when they cry out that there are wolves among the sheep.

I am sad about pathetic killings in Zamfara State, but so did we also suffer in Benue, Plateau, and Adamawa when our ethnic groups burnt their abodes and killed each other in hundreds, until they both got tired and let up. I think you could have intervened early, to speak to the Governors and admonish them to the order Commander in Chief would tolerate. My surprise question often is, are these people taking the law in their hands and killing villagers at will and kidnapping, not among the masses who love you as madly as they say you are loved? Methinks you could have spoken to them to order and saved lives.

Today, between you and Atiku Abubakar stands your integrity against everything that the opposition PDP is being vilified for, but on the eve of the election, what will be of concern to the voter is his hunger for food and the safety of life and property. Who will the voters hear on the eve of election? I wonder. Happy Birthday sir, and Merry Christmas.