NEWS DIARY
Nigerians will be heaving a heavy sigh of relief as the eight years tenure of President Muhammadu Buhari comes to an end.
First elected in 2015 for a four year term after three previously unsuccessful attempts, President Buhari who was also re-elected for another term of four years in 2019 would go down in history as the worst leader Nigeria ever had since its independence in 1960.
As President Buhari hands over to Ahmed Bola Tinubu his successor in less than a week, he will be handing over to him a deeply divided, traumatized, pauperized and terrorized Nigerian country of 130 million multi-dimensionally poor people that are barely existing and not living. In addition, President Buhari will be leaving behind a desperately corrupt Nigeria whose national income has been swallowed by its excessively huge burden of debt.
Tired of the not so good, bad and ugly sixteen years of the People’s Democratic Party rule in Nigeria since the advent of 4th republic in 1999, the Nigerian people defied the power of incumbency and heavy monetary inducements to vote out the incumbent government of Goodluck Jonathan and vote in the opposition candidate Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress in 2015 as president of Nigeria.
In a feat that was described as the first democratic revolution of Nigeria’s 4th republic, Muhammadu Buhari, a retired army general and former military head of state who had a rock solid reputation for discipline and incorruptibility was propelled to power mainly on the will-power of the Nigerian people who identified him as meeting the leadership need of Nigeria that was ravaged by the twin evils of corruption and insecurity.
By 2015, then ruling PDP had reached its apogee of leadership incompetence, which left the country reeling from an incurable form of endemic corruption, heightened insecurity arising from the Boko Haram insurgency and a shrinking socio-economic space that excludes the overwhelming majority of the Nigerian people while serving the self-interests of a privileged few thus setting the stage for a democratic revolution.
Added to this was a power struggle within the political establishment of Nigeria over the issue of the violation of the power rotation between the north and south of the country by the PDP, which fielded Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner as its presidential candidate going into the 2015 presidential election at a time it was generally believed to be the turn of the north.
To defeat the incumbent PDP in the 2015 presidential election, a competent northerner, who has the capability to defeat insecurity and cure Nigeria of endemic problem of corruption was required. And no one was a better fit for this purpose than Muhammadu Buhari, an…
