Re: How to make 2017 count
Dr. Hakeem Baba Ahmed’s Wednesday column in Daily Trust newspaper is one of my favorite addictions, due to his profound ability to present multiple perspectives and articulate broad insights on all issues, even if, his conclusions may be at variance with one’s convictions. This week’s edition, captioned: “How to make 2017 count”, is, by […]
Dr. Hakeem Baba Ahmed’s Wednesday column in Daily Trust newspaper is one of my favorite addictions, due to his profound ability to present multiple perspectives and articulate broad insights on all issues, even if, his conclusions may be at variance with one’s convictions. This week’s edition, captioned: “How to make 2017 count”, is, by my assessment, a timely topic, meant to indirectly guide and encourage the President to strengthen, as well as reinvigorate and reinforce his governance activities and programmes, in order to objectify and meet set target, so as to assuage the insatiable public demands, yearnings and hasty expectations of hungry Nigerians, for long starved and neglected by the PDP corruptly-ravaged administration.
The learned intellectual and experience technocrat pointedly gave his inputs on needful vital areas of leadership, tactics, motivations, incentives and critical role of established institutions as collaborative partners, in governance, at all levels.
All said and done, I will oblige the columnist the honor of being on the same page with me, on most of the issues; and have to admit that Dr. Baba-Ahmed has offered some pragmatic views, particularly on the need to address the gaps in boosting the interest of rural farmers, given their pivotal roles, as the backbone and solid pillars, as well as cornerstone of Buhari’s change.
However, in spite of all the valuable contributions and polite suggestions presented by the writer, I feel miffed and uncomfortable with his (writer’s) post mortem assessment and conclusion about President Buhari’s achievements, which from my personal point of view, are negatively constructed and psychologically in tandem with the ill-motivated but stigmatized version of the over- recycled cliché and sinister propaganda, long popularized, pitched and advertised by some PDP disgraced avengers, like Ayo Fayose of Ekiti State, Femi Fani Kayode and their sponsored cliques against Buhari, as far back as 2011,when General Buhari, then a CPC candidate, publicly declared his expression of interest to contest for president, against their corrupt-tainted leader (Jonathan’s) wish, to be an unopposed and lone candidate, for which President Buhari is much vilified and antagonized till today, with this orchestrated campaign of calumny, that has found its way to popular usage in the public domain. In any case, I cannot find the basis of comparison, nor negative rating, against a warrior who has defeated Boko Haram insurgency; demonized and demobilized the hitherto, unquenchable forces of corruption, kleptomania and economic crime in 2016, and poised for a final kill and total defeat and annihilation in 2017.
Finally, I believe that, President Muhammadu Buhari has been a victim of serial blackmail in this country for a very long time because of his principled stance on issues of integrity and heroic legacies, which many characters with dented and tainted image always labour, fruitlessly, to inveigh. The president should take solace in Plato’s philosophical dictum, as once quoted by our own Aristotle. Dr. Hakeem Baba Ahmed, in one of his past articles, to wit: “Wise men speak because, they have something to say; fools because they have to say something”. Many Nigerians are, unfortunately, in the latter category!
Abdulkarim M. Abdullahi, Keffi, Nasarawa State.