Muhammadu Buhari: What An Integrity Fraud! Replacement Possible! By Frisky Larr

At about the same time in 2014, the news media – Social and Mainstream – were busy showcasing the deep polarization that ripped through the Nigerian political landscape in the common quest to salvage Nigeria. The country was in the suffocating grip of a very clueless leader, who sought to hang on to power by all means, even though the real power was wielded by everyone else around him but himself. Today, we are back to square one in the infamous pattern of “Same Procedure as every year”.

In the euphoria that greeted the contrasting personal qualities of candidate Muhammadu Buhari as opposed to President Goodluck Jonathan, expectations were hyped, not the least, by the very actions and pronouncements of the candidate Muhammadu Buhari. “We will give corruption a bloody nose” was one of his most popular propagandist comments. The earth tremored in trepidation and angels bowed before him.

Some thieves had cause to flee overseas after failed personal overtures. The petulance of hustles and whitewashing political journalism that followed bore immense testimony to the tremor of the earth upon Buhari’s ascension to power.

The lack-luster inaugural speech aside, Buhari enjoyed a huge amount of goodwill and trust even in spite of his failure to hit-the-ground-running. He wasted six good months before installing a government. It was the first assumed pointer to his comfort zone of sole rulership without much input from lieutenants and subordinates. Alas, this has long been proven wrong by the dose of arrogance and self-importance displaced by his inner-circle. We will come to this in much details as this discourse progresses.

Starting with his immediate clampdown on looters and reorganization of the military in its fight against insurgency, President Buhari made a very good start. He could not be accused of tribalism or nepotism. The fight began with his own kinsmen. He moved swiftly to restructure the regime of fuel subsidy having lambasted the running of the project under his predecessors, particularly under President Jonathan.

President Buhari swung into action and had refineries functioning again and promised to build new refineries and ensure existing refineries work at installed capacities.

He awakened expectations that he would negotiate with foreign companies to refine crude oil against a token commission and have them bring back the refined product for public consumption. This way, the public would not even know that crude oil had been sent out and reimported as refined fuel. This was supposedly the way he did it in his military days when they suffered shortfalls. His infamous question then, was “Who is subsidizing who?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmG_dYY7YRA)

Today, there is hardly any refinery functioning anymore. The nation is now at the mercy of just one man – Aliko Dangote – to complete the construction of his private mega-refinery. Never mind that Olusegun Obasanjo foresaw this early enough and sought to have the investor sanitize and completely refurbish and overhaul existing refineries. He was sabotaged by the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, also by a persistent psyche of hateful antagonism. Subsidy payment, although nominally abolished, continues today, as ever before albeit with lesser fraud and an insanely crowded field of importers, as I would choose to assume in the face of missing transparency. Precisely this is where President Muhammadu Buhari began to derail.

As in many other fields, the President never considers it necessary to address the nation and inform its citizens, when things happened that changed the trajectory of his promised policy implementation.

It speaks to a lower level of integrity when the President, who raised the banner of integrity for his own election, now travels abroad the most, for medical treatment. A practice that he, reportedly, vowed not to encourage. He does this today, without still making any project-based effort to create a world-class hospital in his own palace, not to mention the country, manned by highly qualified doctors even if they needed to be flown in time and again.

And then, there was this lengthy submission written by Prof. Wole Soyinka in the run-up to the Presidential election of 2007. The Professor had warned Nigerians urgently to desist from voting in Muhammadu Buhari as President in the face of his ugly clannish acts of nepotism and merciless execution of young souls while he was a military Head-of-State.

Today, many acts of the President seem not only to be confirming and entrenching this fear of clannishness, another element of pettiness and desperation for power now seems to be manifesting itself in the general image portrayed by the President.