The media chat between President Bola Tinubu and a panel of selected media chieftains, anchored by Dr Rueben Abati of Arise Television last Monday, will go down in history for several reasons. First is that it took as many as 18 months before the president stepped down from his imperial disposition and considered Nigerians deserving of the ‘privilege’ of his personal engagement with them in spite of the fact that it was at their instance that he was elected.
All this while, the essence of the Bola Tinubu persona was literally a subject of speculation as his proclivities and those of his administration were conveyed to the citizens, only through media aides and other spokespersons.
With the media parley conducted, he has at least demonstrated that he is still flesh and blood, while establishing for the first time, a direct personal engagement with the people. At least the people can now see the difference between Bola Tinubu himself and the president who communicated to Nigerians only through third parties.
Second is that the parley announced the president as a leader that offered a grasp on the affairs of the country, even as the course of, as well as the real dividends from the administration, largely constituted a mismatch with his rhetoric at the parley.
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While it was indeed a delight to watch President Tinubu at the parley, it was also a matter of concern that his responses to the questions portrayed him as talking of some dispensation beyond his administration. For as far as much of the wider cross-section of Nigerians have come to know the administration, the president could have been talking about another administration and certainly not his own. That was also why his attempt to score himself high on the performance rating fell through. However, given the popular Nigerian street parlance that ‘monkey no fine but him mama like am’, Tinubu can still be excused for self-adulation.
Meanwhile, just as had been muted earlier, among several take-away from the parley, the responses by the president betrayed a wide gulf between the performance rating of the administration by Nigerians and himself. And that is a significant situation given the present state of affairs in the country. It implies that both the president and the citizenry are running along parallel lines and at cross purposes. This is, therefore, an area he needs to reconsider, given that he offered to serve the country and not otherwise. Hence, he needs to work up to reconcile with the expectations of Nigerians, as a matter of duty.
For instance, in response to the question on the cataclysmically negative impact of the withdrawal of fuel subsidy on the Nigerian economy, the president declared that he had no regret for the dispensation. While many Nigerians share the wisdom of the initiative to withdraw the fuel subsidy, the failure of providing a contingency plan for the fallouts of the dispensation remains a low point for the administration. His failure to address this aspect of the subsidy withdrawal regime makes him culpable for whatever untoward fallouts from that measure.
Another area of concern was his take on the general increase in prices of essential goods and services with basic items now priced above the income levels of most Nigerians. While he expressed a fixation with the expectation of a play-out of market forces of supply and demand coming to the rescue, the realities on the ground betray him as being pedestrian with that consideration. For thinking along that line, the president owes Nigerians the explanation of how the supply of goods and services will outstrip demand to bring about the expected drop in prices, as well as what the administration is doing to fast track such a dispensation.
While having been in office for just 18 months may be excused as the administration being still too young to make a significant impact on the economy, the time span is still enough to capture tell-tale signs that a new dawn of better days is on course. This, so far is yet to manifest to most Nigerians.
With respect to agriculture and food security, the president disappointed not a few Nigerians with his failure to marshal out specific strategies to ameliorate the trending hunger and starvation raging across the country, which had led to disastrous protests earlier in the year and is also responsible for recent food riots in some parts of the country. For while the president was chanting his empathy with Nigerians over their plight, his delivery at the media chat cast a huge doubt over how deep such pathos is in him.
Coming to the fight against corruption, the president simply demonstrated a most disturbing disposition to downplay the scourge of corrupt practices on the country’s social fabric by justifying his cherry-picking of corrupt matters for his attention. Meanwhile, this tendency of assuming the liberty of what corruption to pay attention to by the president is itself a corrupt practice as it is not backed by law and subjects statutory matters of state to the whims and caprices of the president.
In the final analysis, the media chat offered the irrefutable impression that President Bola Tinubu has been ensconced from much of the harsh realities faced by Nigerians across the country.
Granted that the past experience is a learning process, he can still redeem his mandate by getting closer to Nigerians in order to feel the pulse of the country he is presiding over, for a leader cannot raise the hopes of a followership he is distant from.
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