SONALA OLUMHENSE FROM PUNCH
With increasing intensity as the President, Maj. Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd.)’s era hurtles to an embarrassing end, the truth has become inescapable: his government is as much a lie as any other.
I have given him credit for some infrastructural work, but Buhari ought to be insulted that he may be remembered in that light, especially as nearly all his initiatives are still in process.
But even if they were all completed over the next few hours, that would hardly be a cause for pride because it is the business of a government to construct infrastructure. It is not a favour to the people; the governments that Buhari lampooned from 2003 until he won the presidency in 2015 all constructed infrastructure.
What must be kept in mind is that Buhari was not supposed to be just another president. He gained office for something far more fundamental but at which he has failed ingloriously: to infuse character into governance and therefore ensure that the work of Nigerian leadership was never again the terrain of scoundrels and hypocrites. He was expected to provide steel in the backbone of public policy and quality in the bloodstream of process.
Those old citizens who in 2015 were wheeled to polling stations or carried on the backs of their children to vote for him; market women who stood in the sun throughout the day; the hungry and the sick, who set aside their personal welfare to ensure that the votes were counted did not make those sacrifices simply for Buhari to say he signed highway contracts or commissioned someone else’s work. Those citizens threw themselves in front of every inconvenience for Buhari because they believed his big talk about CHANGE.
Does anyone remember C-H-A-N-G-E? Buhari won in 2015 because he claimed he could and would change the way Nigeria works. He would end insecurity because he was a knowledgeable former military man. He would beat back corruption because he was a man of integrity.
But in Buhari’s eight years what Nigerians received from him has been the deepening of those problems. And he has done it with the kind of arrogance that has culminated in his threatening to abandon his own “achievements” for Niger, where the standard of political impotence is probably lower than Nigeria. Nigeriens, he has repeated, will defend him against his own nationals should they challenge him after he has left the buffet.
It is an unprecedented and unpresidential insult traceable to Buhari’s lack of a sense of geography or history. That is the only reason why he seems to think that there is some vegetation in place or time where he can somehow hide from the anger and indictment of a people he has so wantonly betrayed.
