One year of PMB

It’s already one year since newly inaugurated President Buhari told the world, “I belong to nobody and I belong to everybody”. Nigerians are now looking back at that day with mixed reactions. Some are blessing Buhari’s second coming; others are cursing their stars that he ever mounted the saddle. The man himself tells us that […]

It’s already one year since newly inaugurated President Buhari told the world, “I belong to nobody and I belong to everybody”.

Nigerians are now looking back at that day with mixed reactions. Some are blessing Buhari’s second coming; others are cursing their stars that he ever mounted the saddle.

The man himself tells us that what he discovered on assuming office was not what he expected but he swears that he will give the job his best shot.

In the last one week, the president’s media team has been reminding commentators and public policy analysts of the various things Buhari has done differently in the last one year. They score him high in the areas of security; regional cooperation; anti-corruption; introduction of cost-saving measures; reforms in the oil, gas and power sectors; environmental initiatives and enhancement of Nigeria’s image in the comity of nations.

We are living in interesting times typified by harsh social dislocation and benumbing paradoxes. As George Carlin sees it, “The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness.”

He could well have added that we have more elections and less cohesion, more grammar and less (Warri) wiseness.

To the man in the street, there is no disputing the fact that Buhari is doing things differently from his predecessors but life is tough. The fiscal iniquities that the wretched of the earth tolerated in past years have now rebounded with vengeance on the heads of the same downtrodden people. Prices of goods have hit the roof. People now have to pay more for petrol, electricity and other requirements in the face of the free fall of the national currency.

To some people, especially political opponents, Buhari has not done well and we should return to the open bazar of the Jonathan days when all the lines separating public from private purse were obliterated and budget allocations were simply shared between a few conspirators.

The generality of the people, however, having now seen the extent of the pillage by successive administrations, especially the immediate past one, are prepared to give Buhari a chance to repair the economic damage. There’s no better evidence of this than the understanding shown by the people during the unsuccessful strike called by the Nigerian Labour Congress. Painful as it was, the people preferred to pay more and thereby terminate once and for all the entrenched subsidy scam in which eminent thieves collected billions of Naira as subsidy for petrol not supplied.

But I am not one of those who say that Buhari is the best thing to have happened to Nigeria since the invention of ice cream. The government could do with better cohesion. Also, there ought to be better synergy between the ruling party, APC, and the government. In this light, the president and the party ought to be on the same page on all issues.

The president will have to work hard on his messaging going forward. As I have had occasion to say before, political communication ought to be professionally handled. If the message is well couched, you can tell somebody to go to hell and he will actually look forward to the trip! Buhari and the bureaucracy around him have a lot of work to do in that regard.

In the next one year, Nigerians want their president to step on the gas. No sme-sme, as the Lagos area boy would say. Things are so bad and there is so much desperation in the land that whatever government wants to do to make lives better for the people has to be done expeditiously. You can’t help dead people.

By this time next year, there will be no excuse for not delivering specific dividends promised by the president himself when he signed the 2016 budget. He would have spent half of his tenure and public analysts will be in a better position to deliver a mid-term judgement.

RE: TIME TO TWEAK NYSC

Dear Sir,

Thank you for your article on the above. My humble suggestions on tweaking the National Youth Service Corps are as follows:

* Attitudinal change must be inculcated in NYSC staffers through massive training and retraining

* NYSC management should present a Council memo on making entrepreneurial training and principles of teaching compulsory courses in all tertiary institutions to prepare prospective corps members for the tasks ahead.

* All corpers should be taken through a practical entrepreneurial training as part of Orientation course as it used to be done in the early days.

* Eco-plazas should be created in each of the 774 local government areas where group of corps members will embark on large scale integrated farming of crops with comparative advantage over other areas.

* Rogue officials must be fished out and punished to serve as detergent to others.

* Jingles should be made to sensitise parents to desist from unpatriotic behaviours that compromise the system.

* NYSC management should reintroduce Corps Employers’ Forum where employers can air their views or lay their complaints or suggestions directly before management.

* A program should be created to honour best corps employers every three years to encourage them and others to do more.

* Orientation camp facilities should be expanded to accommodate more corps members. All camp facilities should be renovated every 3 years. For a start, all the dirty and flat mattresses in the NYSC camps should be replaced. It a health hazard to continue to use such flat and stinking mattresses. Corps members will render more service if they are cared for properly.

· All NYSC programs should be planned well in advance instead of the usual ‘fire brigade’ method.

Bonaventure Adekambi, Abuja