President Buhari’s diminishing returns and the lessons learnt by Iliyasu Gadu

Having squandered the immense goodwill and opportunity that was invested in him, President Buhari will in a couple of years cease to be relevant to requirements of Nigerians. In rapidly growing numbers Nigerians now believe that President Buhari has lost both the initiative and the positive momentum to carry this country forward in the next four years of his second and last term. Indeed as it is now the president is in deficit of trust and confidence of Nigerians regarding his administration and governance of the country.

The latest indication of this is in the composition of his cabinet which took him several months to put together. Among the members of his new cabinet are persons who have running cases of corruption which the president claims he is fighting against. Indeed it has been observed that in order to win the 2019 election and consolidate his government afterwards, president Buhari had been actively and unashamedly wooing known corrupt elements on bended knee confirming to Nigerians who have always thought that the whole thing was a sham.


Again in his new cabinet are persons who have well known and documented cases of bad governance in their previous positions of public office. President Buhari cannot claim not to know that these same persons who he will entrust to execute his programmes in the next four years, had not mismanaged the public trust vested in them previously.


Have they suddenly now turned squeaky clean in his estimation to be trusted with ministerial office? Or does president Buhari rate his own political convenience more at the expense of the values and visions he made us to believe about him and the country? What manner of leader can president Buhari be when without a modicum of shame he tell us he is fighting to entrench the values of good governance in the country and on the other hand turn around to embrace and bring into government the very same people he is pointing accusing fingers at? Does he think Nigerians are stupid and gullible enough to continue to believe him when he says he is fighting corruption and that he will escape some retribution for this deception?


In the same vein president Buhari has lost the initiative and momentum on the scourge of insecurity raging across the country. In 2015 when he first came on, the country had only Boko Haram to cope with. Today we have banditry, kidnapping, herders-farmers clashes and all kinds of violent crimes and insurgencies ravaging the land. In the midst of all these asymmetrical activities of the perpetrators, president Buhari has shown a mind boggling indifference and cluelessness with only occasional shows of symbolic gestures and empty rituals of meaningless statements and meetings with security chiefs as his response. He has neither heeded meaningful calls to rejig the security architecture of the country nor responded with a root and branch approach to the issues. In the meantime Nigerians have continued to bleed daily, losing their livelihoods and sense of self-worth in their own country.


Nigerians are now poorer and getting poorer by the day. Insecurity is forcing people off the land and killing the rural economy. Buhari’s N-power, Anchor borrowers and Trader moni programmes ostensibly to alleviate poverty have been reportedly riddled with corruption. No less a personality than the president’s own wife has confirmed that. For a country of some 200 million, most of whom are in the active age bracket of 18 to 40 years making up about over a hundred million or 70% of the population, Buhari’s corruption riddled economic programmes are too puny to kick start the much required economic transformation of the country. And president Buhari himself, state governors and the central bank boss have told us to expect economic hardships in the coming months. As president Buhari has not shown a capacity to develop an overarching economic blueprint for country, on the economic plank just as in the others, Nigerians cannot expect any succour.


Politically, president Buhari’s politics has always been underpinned by a sectional outlook and agenda. Of the three previous times he contested and failed to make the presidency, it was largely because Nigerians never bought into his brand of sectional politics. On the fourth attempt which he won in 2015, it was only made possible by more broad minded political figures who injected a national outlook and appeal to his politics.


But even at that president Buhari has found it difficult to shake off his provincial and nepotistic approach to governance. With this mind set, he has not been able to manage the diversity and complexities of Nigeria very well.


Let us face it; with his cluelessness, incompetence, contradictions and dysfunctionality coupled with his proclivity for provincialism and nepotism, many Nigerians believe with justification that president Buhari is the poster of what is wrong with the country at the moment. Sure these problems have been with us all along. But the coming of Buhari with his dysfunctional leadership has exacerbated our fault lines. When he came to power in 2015, the country was teetering on the brink. Instead of leading us out of this as expected of him given the pan Nigerian mandate he got, he is consciously leading us into the abyss. And while the country is painfully hurtling towards this doomsday scenario, president Buhari whose government is now shrinking to a handful of like-minded persons is wallowing comfortably unperturbed at the hopelessness and despair his poor handling of the country has caused.


Coming this far and into the future, Nigeria needs more than president Buhari offers in the leadership stakes. With all its diversity, complexities and resources, is built and equipped to operate as an eight cylinder engine. President Buhari’s one and half cylinder lethargic and laborious performance is not adequate enough for this country.


Putting everything into perspective, there are lessons to be drawn from our experience under president Buhari.


One is that because we are practising democracy, we will have to learn to live with what is now an honest choice we made in Buhari although it has turned out to be more of an albatross around our necks. And despite the disappointment he has come to be, president Buhari in 2015 offered us the best opportunity to get rid of the under- performing President Good Luck Jonathan. It was the power of democratic choice which we freely yearned to exercise at the time which proved fortuitously advantageous to president Buhari at the time. Although president Buhari has just been re-elected for a second term under circumstances that the opposition is challenging robustly, we should not be complacent especially as president Buhari’s administration appears to be taking the feelings of Nigerians for granted on what they expect of it. President Buhari should constantly be reminded through citizens actions and agitations that the power he exercises is derived from the people and when deigns to practise some of his identified lapses he must be called to account.


Secondly, as part of the vigilance we must not allow the ethos of mass deception and hypocrisy in politics which is the hallmark of the Buhari administration take root into our body politic.If we are able to survive as a country till the next election circle, we must ensure that our future leaders stand on the strength of their ideas. We all knew Buhari was a sectional leader from his antecedents and we rejected him thrice because he did not make the cut of the national leader we deserved. But we were bamboozled by his claim to integrity and pledge to fight the ills bedevilling the country. Now from our experience of him it has turned out to be false. He has not only cut deals with the people he denounced as corrupt and brought them into his warm embrace in a bid to consolidate power, he has proven to be the most dangerously divisive leader we have ever had yet.


In 2023 whoever seeks leadership must not be allowed to exploit our ethnic and religious diversities for his political gain. He must reflect all the strands of our diversity and complexities in thought, and deeds. He must be put through the crucible of statesmanship and not emerge as leader on the basis of region, ethnicity, and religion