“All and any suggestion that the Buhari administration is not leaving Nigeria in a better place than we found it…is pure fantasy,” presidential spokesman Garba Shehu has declared.
He was responding to a Daily Trust editorial last Sunday in which the newspaper commented on the state of the nation following the Kuje Prison break on Tuesday, July 5.
The newspaper appropriately lambasted President Muhammadu Buhari’s model of leadership in which he demands neither performance nor responsibility for non-performance of his appointees.
“It is this model of government, this government without governing, this conferral of authority on persons without a corresponding demand for responsibility and accountability, that has brought President Buhari, and the country he leads, to where we are now in Nigeria,” the newspaper said. It described Nigeria as being “effectively back to where the President took it over in 2015, only much, much worse off.”
“Much, much worse,” is right. With the Aso Rock narrative now that Buhari will be leaving office better than he met it, Mr. Shehu came out “emitting smoke from seven orifices,” as the Chinese might say.
I recently provided a cursory study of how the administration’s claims are being debunked, but Shehu asserted that it is “incorrect to say nothing has changed, not to talk of getting worse.”
It is a classic deployment of obfuscation, deafness, arrogance, and condescension. To begin with, nobody has said that the government has achieved nothing whatsoever, and Daily Trust made adequate concessions in this regard.
The problem is that Buhari’s APC government lost its soul and its sense of direction as soon as it assumed office, a sense of power overrunning responsibility. That was when any sense of character and mission was tossed aside as Buhari—having declared he was scouring the world for the very best Nigerians to appoint as Ministers—took six months to nominate the same people who had never left his side.
It was the first major sign that Buhari would neither promote merit nor permit justice. He then refused to publicly declare his assets—as he had bragged pre-election—and reneged on his First 100 Days promises.
By his second year, Buhari had openly begun to protect corruption itself. He backed out of a commitment to disclose to Nigerians during his first anniversary speech on May 29, 2016 the identity of officials from whom he claimed to have recovered funds. And when an official of the Ministry of Information finally published the figures that had allegedly been recovered, the associated names were not disclosed. The bullets in Buhari’s gun were smoke and mirrors wrapped in words!
And then he began to disobey court orders on anything concerning corruption. In February 2016 and again in July 2017, he ignored the order of the Federal High Court to publish a full account, including on a dedicated website, of all recovered funds and the officials from whom they had been recovered since 1999.
Buhari refused, confirming by those actions that he was granting full protection to corruption, and freedom to Nigeria’s most brazen kleptocrats. His party openly recruited those same figures not for prosecution but into its fold as high-ranking members. That explains why the menace has become far more ferocious in his time.
Think about it: Shehu celebrates that the administration “has seen hundreds of millions in stolen funds returned from abroad and used” for Nigerians. But those funds are the $308m repatriated Sani Abacha funds that the United States and the Island of Jersey returned in 2020. Before the repatriation, those governments insisted on an agreement in which they threatened hell should the money be diverted (code for re-looted). They knew that under Buhari, the funds would disappear.
Spokesman Shehu also referred to some social and welfare funds being “distributed directly to the poorest,” one of the opaquest policies by a tone-deaf administration. While Buhari has falsely claimed to have liberated 10.5 million people from poverty, for instance, the World Bank has stated in a new report, “The Continuing Urgency of Business Unusual,” that at least seven million more Nigerians (one million more than its original projection) will fall into extreme poverty this year.
Poverty has become us because of the hypocrisy of the ruling elite, particularly under Buhari. The man who last week became Buhari’s latest son-in-law is the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister for Justice.
His name: Abubakar Malami, previously an obscure lawyer but who has been followed around in office by allegations of massive corruption he does not discharge. He was also the second Minister asked by Buhari in 2020 to sell off all assets that had been forfeited to the government. Up till today, not one word has been uttered by the government about what he sold or who bought, let alone for how much.
The same kind of story applies to the presidency’s probe, by the Justice Ayo Salami panel, of former EFCC chairman Ibrahim Magu. As is the character of the Buhari administration, the report was never issued.
It is also curious that Shehu chose to cite the Auditor-General (AuGF) among government’s anti-corruption measures but not the Accountant-General whose report the AuGF statutorily uses for his work. In June 2015, Buhari appointed Ahmed Idris to the position of Accountant-General and re-appointed him for another four-year term in 2019 despite Idris being overaged. In May this year, Idris was arrested by the EFCC on charges of diverting N80 billion ($193m) in public funds.
N80bn and just one official. Even worse are the annual reports of the AuGF that are scandalous enough to make any attentive leader cry. But nobody in Aso Rock weeps because they are too busy being powerful. This is what Daily Trust was alluding to when it spoke of “government without governing…”
Finally, a word about insecurity. Yes, Nigeria was insecure before Buhari arrived. Shehu phrases it this way: “…As recently as 2015 Boko Haram held territory the size of Belgium in Nigeria. Today they hold no Nigerian territory to speak of…”
Hold no territory? They hold no territory but sack jails, airports, highways, train services, police stations, military institutions?
Before Buhari took control, Nigerians could plan and travel and interact freely with some certainty. Under Buhari, that luxury has disappeared so much that not only was his advance convoy to his hometown attacked recently, even he required the protection of the army simply to walk home from the mosque.
The point here is to remember that the measurement of a government’s effectiveness is not the totality or even average of its efforts. Buhari was elected because he offered to lead the cause of CHANGE, a dream betrayed.
In 2019, he then offered a NEXT LEVEL vision. Nigerians did not buy that and are not disappointed to find that it was levels down.
No, the issue is not whether Buhari will leave Nigeria way worse than it was; he has already accomplished that objective. It is that he should go now that he has confessed the job is too much for him.
It is the only path of honour left. Nigeria needs a leader.
[This column welcomes rebuttals from interested government officials.]
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