Re: Buhari, time we stopped lying to ourselves

Muhammadu Buhari wasn’t the choice of Abimbola Adelakun in the 2015 Presidential election. Adelakun, a respected columnist writing for Punch newspaper, was a “fawning admirer, supporter and believer” in former President Goodluck Jonathan. She badly wanted him re-elected because in her reckoning, “even though many Nigerians are probably weary of Jonathan……by now, they are still […]

Muhammadu Buhari wasn’t the choice of Abimbola Adelakun in the 2015 Presidential election. Adelakun, a respected columnist writing for Punch newspaper, was a “fawning admirer, supporter and believer” in former President Goodluck Jonathan. She badly wanted him re-elected because in her reckoning, “even though many Nigerians are probably weary of Jonathan……by now, they are still practical enough to understand that another four more years of Jonathan’s government will not kill them.” That’s what it has come down to in Adelakun’s sickening logic, that Nigerians should elect someone who will not kill them; he doesn’t have to develop anything or anybody afterwards. This is what the electoral choice of her readers had come down to, electing someone who would not kill them! How much more insult can a columnist haul at her readers? But really, hasn’t Jonathan killed us even after his departure from Aso Villa?
This time, Adelakun (The Punch, February 11, 2016), is unable to believe that the Buhari government has saved N2.2 trillion; she dismisses it as “pornography of propaganda” and a lie we need to stop telling. I have no reason to doubt that this government has saved such sum and am certain that President Buhari wouldn’t have told Nigerians in London that he did it, if it were not so. For a long time, ministries and government agencies had operated multiple accounts from where some of the criminal elements had siphoned public funds. With the Single Treasury Account (TSA) which Adelakun’s clueless hero had toyed with and then abandoned, but courageously enforced by the new national leadership, it has become possible to corral all government revenue into one place and not all columnists are going to agree that N2.2 trillion has been saved through the TSA. Whether this is true or not will be revealed by time.
Neither do I see why Adelakun should find it difficult to believe that people can be “so grossly incompetent in one aspect” and still be opposite in another. Many students, who have no aptitude in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, etc., choose the option of studying humanities or social sciences instead of natural sciences. Some people said to have the mastery of a language also write better than they speak it or vice versa. That’s why I don’t think that just one budget is enough to judge the expertise of the new administration’s financial plan. It is possible that “errors, duplications and fraud” are all over the 2016 budget but the document was written by the same civil servants bequeathed to him by Peoples Democratic Party administrations. Buhari is always going to have problem with those “budget rats” and it is up to him to fish out and punish them.
The 2016 budget has indeed become blight with outlandish figures earmarked for some nebulous projects, but again these disclosures flow from the honesty and openness of President Buhari. If the President had chosen, he would have paid his way and the budget would have probably been passed by now. As it is, Buhari is the author of the budget but he certainly didn’t write all the pages. Like a newspaper editor, some of the clutter on some of the pages cannot all be edited by him before the paper goes to the newsstand.
Thank God, the President has ordered a probe into how those who prepared the budget came by those “errors, duplications and frauds’, we will now sit back and watch how he is going to deal with them. Rather than an apology demanded by those arrayed against the President in a battle of wits, it is far more helpful to find out those directly responsible for the shoddy budget work, and sanction them in a way that will deter others. After all, those asking for a presidential apology never even wanted Buhari as a President, so having become one in spite of them, he really doesn’t owe them that. Apparently, this is the first time the Nigerian budget is being scrutinised in a long while. Certainly, Jonathan’s budgets were never examined, they were just passed; any wonder they were never implemented.
According to Adelakun herself, “there are no easy solutions to Nigeria’s many problems. Our problems are many, twisted, unending…” how then can President Buhari be expected to solve our national problems in 9 months? Neither do I believe that Buhari’s lamentation of a cruel fate that hands him the Presidency in times of national misfortunes is an indication that he is overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems. Undoubtedly, it may take more than the 16 years of PDP debauchery to reset the country on the path of political stability, economic prosperity and social harmony. We have wasted too much time in the hands of people who neither possessed Buhari’s “only quality” of honesty nor their advertised capacity to transform.
People are free to pillory President Buhari for his inability, thus far, to conjure up the magic wand to sort out the country within this space of time. However, Buhari’s mandate runs till 2019 and unlike the skeptical columnists like Adelakun, the President’s “most fanatical followers” believe he will turn the country around by that date.
If Nigeria wasn’t doomed under Jonathan, it can’t be doomed now. There’s no question about it, four years of Buhari will be far more glorious than five miserable years under Jonathan. We shall continue to weigh the citizens’ optimism in a successful Buhari Presidency against the pessimism (and expectations of its failure) entertained by columnist Abimbola Adelakun.