Who will wake Buhari up?
First, let me disagree with Prof Wole Soyinka by saying I think President Muhammadu Buhari is not in a trance – he is in a coma and apparently sleepwalking through it too. For a while, one would pity the president. The troubles he has inherited and unfortunately compounded are legion. Forget about the photo-ops showing […]
First, let me disagree with Prof Wole Soyinka by saying I think President Muhammadu Buhari is not in a trance – he is in a coma and apparently sleepwalking through it too. For a while, one would pity the president. The troubles he has inherited and unfortunately compounded are legion. Forget about the photo-ops showing him smiling bemusedly at an iPad screen, we have a dinosaur in government struggling to grapple with governance in the digital age. I know it because I have travelled that road myself.
When I enrolled to study Interactive Multimedia, I underestimated the level of my computer illiteracy. To my shame, I withdrew twice and re-enrolled as many times before finally graduating. Anyone using devices for email and social media would think himself or herself equipped for the mercurial world of digital computing. Once you’re confronted with mathematical concatenation, Javascript, the layers of video editing among others, you suddenly realize how stringing words together differ from digital computing. The effect could be overwhelming.
President Buhari is overwhelmed. He was unprepared for the challenges of governance in spite of sitting so long on the reserve bench. The man who would fix Nigeria would need to improve himself every day. The one in the saddle has not read a book since leaving office in 1984 so where is the inspiration to govern? It is obvious from his handling of the leadership tussle in the legislature he does not even understand how separation of powers work in a democracy. His arm of friendship is not extended beyond his geo-political arena as obvious in the number of months he took to raise his cabinet of fellow dinosaurs.
His Gestapo-style operations to harass certain members of the judiciary demonstrated how he thought a different arm of government could be coerced to buy into an unwritten code of governance. We now know that all those light travels to London was to see his doctor and that his travelling popular class is not evidence of frugality but what he could afford at the time. We could guess that Madam Aisha must have played a serious role in paying the international fees of her children and that left to Buhari, he would have kept his children in Nigerian schools – it’s not a sign of modesty, it’s the principle of necessity.
Now, nothing is wrong with all these after all, marriage is usually contracted for better or worse. What is horrible is the way the president has been running the country on trial and error for the first three years of his presidency. If he were a corporate hire, he would have long been fired because there’s nothing proactive in his governance style. Even in reacting to issues of governance, he lacks both promptness and tact as if he was still sitting on his reclining chair in Kaduna pointing at Goodluck Jonathan’s errors – hence the continued blame game. What he lacks is how to fix it. Nigeria of 2018 needs a person at the saddle equipped with a workable blueprint to govern its vast geographical entity and its nearly 400 fractured ethnic nationalities. They need a non-bigot who can separate governance from religion. Obviously, Buhari is not that man, neither is his party or the one it replaced – the recycling troups.
President Buhari needs someone to wake him up. A president who sits idly watching his own population decimated left, right and centre reacting only with empty promises and issuing lame threats is not suitable for governance at this moment. Our gallant troops have broken lives, limbs and equipment confronting the evil of Boko Haram, but even in the time it takes to couple an AK47, our commander-in-chief declared the battle won. In the age of social media, the shelf life of propaganda is very short indeed. We are not a nation that counts to counter the propaganda of Boko Haram’s defeat with the death tolls that keep rising, but IDPs know they are not safe and if they are not safe how much less people in the throws of the war.
This is compounded by so-called rampaging herdsmen killing a couple of people in cattle raids that would cause outrage in other parts of the world. Ottawa has recorded twelve shootings already in 2018 and perhaps one casualty, in America eight school shootings. We can’t count and we don’t count. How many died in Benue before Buhari went to Nasarawa to commission projects? Did he branch off to see for himself and to comfort the state in mourning? Now, a member of the House of Representatives vows 60% of his constituency are in the hands of armed bandits who recently killed 39. Buhari was in Daura, he didn’t branch off in Gusau to commiserate with the people. In veiled words, the absentee governor of Zamfara claimed he gave advance warning but nothing was done to avert the crisis.
It is common knowledge that people are amassing arms and ammunition ‘to defend themselves’ because the state is impotent to defend them. This nation that killed six million people to keep itself together is gradually heading for a pogrom. If this president is awake, he should sack people, prosecute some and be on his feet – for now he is sleeping on duty and needs to wake up, Nigeria is dying!