I was initially going to title this article, ‘Why Buhari should hire a Sarah Sanders ASAP” but a headline on one of today’s dailies caused a last minute change of mind.
I wish all President Buhari needed was a Sarah Sanders, the incredibly grounded White House Secretary, who has perfected the art of diplomacy and deflection since joining the Trump administration.
---I write as a concerned Nigerian who’s been promised that ‘things will get better’ in the shallow resolve that we are known for when it comes to ------our politicians and their excesses.
We say that we are thriving in spite of our government and that we don’t need them to function but we call down fire and brimstone when the creaky bus throws us unawares into a jagged, rusty end that leaves one with a dull ache. Or when a year after, you are left wondering if your car came with any shock absorbers at all.
We are quick to ‘find something’ for a law enforcement agent on the way home from a job we detest but can’t leave because we both know no one has broken any law but the one who’s supposed to uphold it but cannot. His pants are not holding up to his waist which has grown thinner by a few inches in the last few months after all. Why should he care?
President Muhammadu Buhari came with the promise of a man who had seen the best and worst of both worlds – military and democratic regimes – and had gained a wealth of experience that could move the country a few steps forward, at worst.
He dressed it up nicely and very simply too – change.
Change as a concept is quite ambiguous. In the backdrop of a security scandal as huge as the kidnap of over 200 girls from a school dormitory by Islamic militants that had over the period of time grown fiercer and invincible, Nigerians were keen on buying anything that signalled some sort of hope or a sense of it.
And having ran unsuccessfully at three consecutive elections – 2003, 2007 and 2011 – we were itching like we assumed he was, for all the concrete plans he had to ‘make Nigeria great again’.
So change it was.
I’m not a political analyst neither am I a historian. My memories of the military regime, the last one I met, is vague and clouded by the innocence of childhood. I can only sometimes lean on my father’s repertoire of stories both of the Biafran civil war and many other milestones of that era.
One of the open secrets on war strategy is simply to hit your opponent at their weakest points repeatedly until they give in.
Since 2015, this is all I can see the Buhari government has employed to force Nigerians to believe that they did not make a bad purchase. And I assume he thinks this is working because we are a foolish bunch. We suffer occasionally from amnesia and sometimes completely deaden our senses to our environment.
President Buhari exited the country on ‘medical check-ups’ on May 7, the third in less than 2 years and wrote the Senate to extend his leave due to unforeseen circumstance. By August, we had made news as the only country in the world where the president was ruling from outside the borders of the territory under his jurisdiction.
One of Buhari’s 2015 campaign promises was simply to ban medical tourism especially among the political class right after his inauguration.
In his address to the nation after he had waltzed back as a medical tourist to the United Kingdom, not a word was made mention of what we had just witnessed.
One of his aides even said he didn’t know who was funding the bills while the sight-seeing lasted. Just as the State Minister of Health this morning said he was not aware of the administrative situation at the medical clinic in Abuja. How convenient.
We were glad to have him back anyways. There was a lot of changes that needed to be effected and the sooner he got to it, the better for everyone. And after such a long time away, he sure was better as the series of visitors who had been to London said. Then we heard of the ‘work from home’ plan. His aides said the office was infested with rats. Large, presidential rats.
As at December 2016, eager to impress and show how clearly things were changing, Buhari declared the war against Boko Haram over. There had been progress. Some strongholds had been recaptured. Some girls exchanged for some terrorists – high profile ones we were told.
But slimy leader Abubakar Shekau in his usual manner, shared a video online taunting the military and making jeers at them. Since January 2017, at least 48 attacks has been carried out by the sect, many of them using teenage female suicide bombers, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.
When the World Bank President, Jim Yong Kim revealed, within context, that President Buhari had requested focus of the body’s economic development projects on the North-east, his aides quickly jumped to his aide explaining how the region was more disadvantaged than the rest of the country.
Agreed, this was clearly part of what he promised Nigerians in the region. Just as he had promised to do same in Abia, in Benue, where just most recently, herdsmen killings have resumed. Recall the presidency was quick to label Biafrans terrorist but only wrote the herdsmen off as criminals a few months back.
Just months after the South-east erupted in chaos following the antics of Nnamdi Kanu to actualise Biafra and exacerbated by the presence of the military, President Buhari, who clearly loves to be on the move is touring the South-easter region to ‘strengthen ties’ with the people.
Why I changed my mind about the topic today was the announcement by the Labour minister that 7 million jobs had been created under the administration especially in agriculture. Simple economic principles tells me that if so much activity is going on and there’s this much labour available,it should translate to the prices of food items in general. Not much has changed in this regard.
And there’s many more where all of these came from.
Like Sarah Sanders, who does this very suavely by the way, Buhari’s team is hell bent on selling all the positives that are not present in this government. And even if they are really crappy at it, we can applaud their unrelentless pursuit of this agenda.
They intend to keep pouring these accolades till Buhari is so drenched we cannot help but agree that he is dripping wet with achievements. 2019 is around the corner after all. And the sad thing is, in 2019, we all may just be pleasantly surprised at how foolish Nigerians can be. Or maybe it’s just this amnesia
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