Is Buhari poorer four years after?
President Muhammadu Buhari has offered the ‘ideal’ measuring rod to assess him and other public officers while serving the people or when out of office. We don’t need to consult any arcane research or some tongue-twisting grammatical construction to guide us to determine whether outgoing executives have fared well or underperformed. All we should do […]
President Muhammadu Buhari has offered the ‘ideal’ measuring rod to assess him and other public officers while serving the people or when out of office. We don’t need to consult any arcane research or some tongue-twisting grammatical construction to guide us to determine whether outgoing executives have fared well or underperformed. All we should do is to consider the body optics: has the office holder lost weight or gained extra flesh? A little bit of extrapolation: is the departing fellow poorer or richer? If he is still in office, do his airs suggest he is on the route to earning a mention in the club reserved for the likes of Aliko Dangote? What’s his sartorial disposition? Is his now a knack for Savile Row, London, the confluence of tailors and billionaires.
When Buhari was moving in as president in 2015, he told CCB through Garba Shehu, one of his media aides, that he had N30m in the only bank account he had. There were five homes and two mud houses in Daura, his hometown in Katsina state, along with two undeveloped plots of land in Kano and Port Harcourt. Still more: farms, an orchard, a ranch, all harboring 270 heads of cattle, 25 sheep, five horses, a variety of birds and a number of economic trees. More: cars, two bought from his savings, with others supplied by government as ex-head of state and some donated by well-wishers after Boko Haram savaged his jeep in 2014. The record with CCB also says our president had shares in Berger Paints, Union Bank and Skye Bank.
Osinbajo, according to Garba Shehu, came in with N94m and US$900000. He has property in Victoria Garden City, Ikoyi, both in Lagos, and a flat at Redemption Camp, along Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. There is also a mortgaged property in Bedford, England. Our vice-president, apart from his law firm, had shareholding in six private companies including MTN Nigeria.
By the law, we should expect diminished, not enlarged, assets by our public office holders as they give us the account of their stewardship via their assets. Have they added to what they had? Have they worked so hard and selflessly that they have shed weight?
In March this year Osinbajo told Nigerians that he had evaluated Buhari ahead of meeting CCB’s requirements at the close of his boss’s first term in office. His findings: ‘’When I looked at his assets declaration form, I was checking it in 2015, I said to him, ‘Mr President, I am so much richer than you, it is an embarrassment…’I can tell you that he is perhaps; even poorer than he was in 2015 when I saw his declaration of assets.’’
That should be the goal of every true leader. You don’t go into office to embark on a hunt or expedition for unbridled riches. You don’t go in and return boasting you’ve put on weight. You don’t become a public officer and all your mission is to abandon your Ajegunle tailor and Aba shoemakers for Italian designer and customized products. You don’t go into office flying abroad for medicare and sending your children to private and foreign schools and hospitals, leaving the people you serve at the hands of the deadly system you refuse to tend to.
The leader posterity recognizes is the one who pauperizes himself while serving his people. He dies for them, if duty to the people demands it. But we’ve had leaders who want it the other way round: the society must be castrated at the altar of their gargantuan greed; we must go under for them to milk us dry.
Banji Ojewale, Abuja