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Critics and supporters of President Muhammadu Buhari cannot agree on what the new administration has achieved 100 days after he assumed office. But they agree that his administration needs to do more and fast to assuage dwindling fortunes of the Nigerian masses
| By Olu Ojewale | Sep 14, 2015 @ 01:00 GMT |
HE won the presidential election with the mantra of change as well as tackling corruption, insecurity and the rotten economy. Since his inauguration on May 29, Nigerians had expected President Muhammadu Buhari to hit the ground running to deliver on all his electioneering promises. The first 100 days, which dues on September 5, has no doubt, given Nigerians the opportunity on to assess how much the Buhari government has delivered on his promises.
But ahead of the 100 days mark, the President Buhari government appeared to be making excuses to wriggle out of being assessed on the first 100 days in office by claiming that it did not promise to fulfil certain obligations in the first 100 days in office. But anxious Nigerians are not willing to allow him to go scot-free.
This prompted the Presidency to insist on Tuesday, September 1, that President Buhari did not promise Nigerians that he would achieve specific things within his first 100 days in office. Garba Shehu, senior special assistant to the president on media and publicity, said this while responding to questions about reports on documents titled, “One Hundred Things Buhari Will Do in 100 Days” and “My Covenant with Nigerians.”
Shehu disowned the two documents, saying they did not emanate from the Buhari campaign organisation and that as director of its media campaign he neither authorised nor aware of their existence. He therefore, advised Nigerians to ignore the claims that Buhari specifically made promises of achievements within his 100 days in office.
Instead of assessing the first 100 days in office, Shehu said the Presidency would rather talk about milestones reached by the administration since it assumed office.
On Monday, August 31, Lai Mohammed, national publicity secretary, spoke on the subject as well. In an interview with Channels Television, Mohammed said Buhari and the party had nothing to do with any other campaign materials apart from the APC manifesto and constitution.
Besides, Mohammed said the president never promised to do anything in 100 days. The APC spokesman said the literature could have come from any other source. “There are only two documents that you can judge a party with: That is the constitution of the party and the manifesto of the party. Those are the only two documents that are registered with the Independent National Electoral Commission; you can go to court or hold a party accountable for them,” he said.
Festus Keyamo, a lawyer based in Lagos, seemed to be in agreement. Keyamo said: “If those promises were made in the course of the presidential campaign and they were made by the party for Buhari as the presidential candidate, then it is only proper that the president should deliver on those promises and Nigerians should hold him accountable regarding those promises.
“But then, I can vouch for President Buhari. I travelled with him and I was with him at Chatham House when he was asked a question on what he would do in the first 100 days; and Buhari’s reply was very simple. He said, ‘I consider all of these promises about my 100 days in office fraudulent. I am not going to commit myself to any 100 days promises.’”
However, most of the promises made by the president during the electioneering campaign are yet to be fulfilled, which must have provided a plank for the controversy on the first 100 days of his administration.
As expected, observers are divided over whether or not the ruling party is being sincere about first 100 days achievement. But what is incontrovertible, of course, is that meeting the full set of promises attributed to the president or the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, during the campaign would be a tall order for the first 100 days of any government, let alone that of Buhari’s whose crusade against corruption is a big threat to some of his allies.
In any case, Nigerians had expected that once Buhari took over the rein of governance, he would hit the ground running. But that has not been the case. The explanation being advanced for the slow pace in action is that there had been so many rots in the system in the past 16 years that the president would have to work carefully in the maze to clean them. That does not mean that he has not made his mark.
One of the first remarkable things about what he did was that once he assumed the president visited neighbouring countries in efforts to launch a multinational force on Boko Haram insurgents in the North-East. His efforts also earned him invitations from the G7 and the United States in fence mending moves with the Western powers. The West is now helping Nigeria in its war against the Boko Haram sect with arms and training of its military personnel. This took President Buhari to the meeting of the G7 in Germany in June and went on to meet with President Barack Obama in Washington, on Monday, July 20. At the meeting President Obama assured him of the US cooperation to fight against the terrorist group and also help to trace and repatriate all the funds looted from the Nigerian treasury being kept abroad.
At home, Buhari changed the service chiefs, national security adviser and moved the command zone of the military to Maiduguri, Borno State, so as to tackle the insurgency more effectively. During the campaign, the president was quoted as saying he would end insurgency in two once he came to power. That did not happen. He has, however, given the new military service chiefs December deadline to rid the country of the Boko Haram insurgency.
Since the mandate, the military has recaptured some territories under the command of the insurgents, but sadly the killings by the terrorist group have remained very high as the war seems to be failing against guerrilla tactics of the terrorists. More than 500 people have been killed since the change of guards n Boo Hara enclave and about 234 have been killed in Jos, Plateau State.
Perhaps, to bolster up the morale of the military fighting Boko Haram insurgency, the Army, with the permission of its commander-in-chief, on Thursday, September 3, said 3,032 out of about 5,000 of its soldiers who were dismissed by a court martial had been reinstated following a review of their cases by a Disciplinary Review Committee which was constituted by Lieutenant General Tukur Buratai, chief of Army Staff.
Retired Lieutenant General Kenneth Minimah, immediate past Army chief of Staff, had set up a court-martial which tried, convicted and sentenced soldiers over various acts of alleged indiscipline in the war against Boko Haram insurgents.
Colonel Sani Usman, acting director, Army public relations, who announced the reinstatement in Abuja at a news conference, explained that the cases of the affected soldiers were treated strictly on merit by the committee.
Further on security, Buhari directed reduction in the number of police attached to government officials and withdrawal of police from those who were not entitled. Thus, the number of police personnel attached to a governor has been reduced from 150 to 62.
The president also on August 17, gave approval for recruitment of additional 10,000 personnel into the force. This is probably in view of unabated increase in number of kidnapping, armed robberies and lack of intelligence to nib some crimes in the board ahead of time.
Known for zero tolerance on corruption, President Buhari has disclosed publicly that he would probe the immediate past administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan, which has been various accused of a number of corrupt practices. A good number of poltical appointees who served under the former president were said to have looted the country’s treasury.
For instance, shortly after Buhari’s visit the US, Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State alleged that some senior US State Department officials told him that a minister under former President Jonathan stole as much as $6 billion from Nigeria.
Oshiomhole, who was on the entourage during President Muhammadu Buhari’s visit to the US, while speaking with State House correspondents shortly after meeting with Buhari at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, said: “The man said even by Washington’s standard, that is earth-shattering. So, the PDP is a party that presided over the liquidation of our nation, destroyed all our institutions, converted the Armed Forces commanders to use them as if they were political thugs, converted the Nigerian Television Authority to a party megaphone, destroyed the Department of State Services, went after opposition as if we were rabbits to be pursued into our holes, compromised even student unions and destroyed everything that you can think of, and elevated religion to a state affair.”
As if that was not bad enough, the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, NEITI, alleged that about 160 million barrels of crude oil, valued at $13.7bn were stolen under the watch of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, during the tenure of the past administration. Zainab Shamsuna-Ahmed, executive secretary of the NEITI, disclosed on this during her visit to Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State at Sir Kashim Ibrahim Government House, Kaduna on Wednesday, July 30.
Shamsuna-Ahmed told the governor: “Crude product swap of $866m was lost from 2009 to 2011 and $82.43m in 2012. Total amount expended on subsidy payment from 2005 to 2012 as captured, $11.631m have been paid to the NNPC. However, there is no evidence this amount was remitted to the federation account.”
To plug the holes whereby public funds were being looted, the president on August 8, ordered that all revenue collection ministries and agencies should pay into a single government account. This, he reasoned would help to promote accountability and eliminate diversion of public funds to private pocket.
Similarly, President Buhari on August 4, appointed Emmanuel Kachikwu as the new group managing director, GMD of the NNPC. He also sacked all the executive directors and replaced them with new ones. The president ordered the new NNPC team to clean up the rot in the corporation.
Until his appointment, Kachikwu had been the executive vice-chairman and general counsel of Exxon-Mobil (Africa). He took over from Joseph Dawha, who was appointed by former President Jonathan.
Since his appointment, the new GMD has embarked on restructuring of the corporation. On Wednesday, September 2, he assured the nation that Nigerian refineries would not be sold. He said that joint venture partners with established track records of success in refining would be invited to support the running of the refineries in order to ensure efficiency.
According to him, efforts are in top gear to fix all the crude and petroleum products pipelines across the country.
“The Nigerian Air Force will be engaged to provide aerial survey of the pipelines, the Nigerian Army Engineering corps to fix and police the pipelines while Nigerian Navy would provide marine surveillance for the network of pipelines,” Kachikwu said.
He said that the corporation would commence the unbundling of the Pipelines and Products Marketing Company, PPMC, into three different companies. The companies, the statement said, would focus primarily on the maintenance of the more than five thousand kilometres pipelines of the corporation
There would be a storage company that would maintain the over 23 depots and a products marketing company that would market and sell petroleum products.
Kachikwu said that the move would ensure that the right set of skills are rightly positioned and the number of leakages in terms of pipelines break and products loss are reduced to the barest minimum.
While trying to block all the loopholes at the NNPC, the Nigerian Naira has been made to suffer indignity of devaluation occasioned by the fall in price of crude oil. The Central Bank of Nigeria in July devalued the Nigerian currency and suspended the Retail Dutch Auction System, RDAS.
Thus, at the interbank foreign exchange market, the exchange rate of the naira to a dollar is N196.9 while in the black market it hovers between N210 to N214 to a dollar. Similarly, British Pound Sterling exchanges between N303 to N304 to the Naira, while the Euro exchanges for N222.
This has caused an outcry in the manufacturing sector of the economy that source foreign exchange to import raw materials and products. In addition, the banks suspended lodgement of foreign currencies into domiciliary accounts and ordered all transactions to be done through banks.
The measures, operators said, was to tighten control on the foreign exchange market, in a bid to protect the nation’s external reserves and save the Naira from further slide in value. But it has been counterproductive for people whose businesses depend on forex. Prices of both imported and locally made goods have been on upward spiral because of lack of economic blueprint or an economic team to direct affairs of the government.
Frank Udemba Jacobs, president of Manufacturers Association of Nigeria, MAN, claimed that the impact of devaluation was enormous on all manufacturers, especially those that depended on imported raw materials. Jacobs warned that the plan of the federal government to create three million jobs annually would be a mirage if the current exchange rate was not addressed quickly.
Indeed, the Buhari administration is yet to begin work on its promise to create jobs or give unemployed 25 million Nigerians N5,000.00 each as promised during election campaigns. Nigerians are still waiting for the day the promise would be translated into a concrete action.
Also on job creation, Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo on Tuesday, September 1, said the Buhari administration would soon start giving primary school children free meals as promised during the campaign. Osinbajo said the free feeding scheme was a core project of the federal government that would in turn yield about 1.14 million jobs and increase in food production by 530,000 metric tonnes per annum and attract investment of about N980 billion.
The vice president, who disclosed this at the 45th Annual Accountants Conference in Abuja, said the government would be investing more in the people, education and job creation.
Nevertheless, what seems to have been engaging the public discourse recently is President Buhari’s appointment of some principal officers. Although he has not yet officially announced his choice of ministers, the president has made some key appointments, which seems to portray him as ethnic leader.
He actually caused uproar with the appointments announced on Thursday, August 27. Contrary to speculations in political circles that Ogonnaya Onu, former governor of old Abia State, or a prominent politician from the South-East, would serve as secretary to the government of the federation, Buhari surprised everyone by naming Babachir David Lawal, from Adamawa State to the post and appointed Abba Kyari, from Borno, as his chief of Staff.
Similarly, he appointed Hameed Ali, a retired colonel, as the comptroller-general of the Nigerian Customs Service, from Bauchi State. Ali’s appointment is no doubt an indictment on the service as the president seemed to find no career customs official suitable for the post.
He also named Kure Martin Abeshi as the comptroller-general of the Nigerian Immigration Service. Abeshi hails from Nasarawa States.
Ita Enang, a former senator from Akwa Ibom State, was appointed senior special assistant to the president on Senate affairs, while Suleiman Kawu of Kano State, who is a former member of the House of Representatives, was named the president’s senior special assistant on House of Representatives.
The six officials brought to 31 the total number of key appointments of those who would handle the economy, energy, defence and other important sectors of governance for the administration.
Irked by the development, South East Town Unions, a pan Igbo socio- political group, warned that the way and manner of Buhari’s of appointments, lopsided in favour of the North, was threatening the unity of Nigeria. The group, which is the umbrella body of associations of town unions in the five states of the South East zone, insisted that Buhari’s neglect of Ndigbo in political appointments would portray him as a president who seemed to have a score to settle with the bloc.
Emeka Diwe, a leader of the group, therefore, called on the president to live by his words that he belongs to everybody and see the entire nation as his constituency in making appointments. Besides, he said: “Ndigbo people cannot allow themselves to be marginalised in a country where they have equal, if not greater stakes than other zones. What the President has done is akin to declaring total war on Ndigbo.”
Diwe said he was not persuaded that the appointments were made on merit. He therefore, asked rhetorically: “Is he telling us that people from other sections of the country are not qualified or cannot be trusted for appointments into the grade A positions? Buhari should change the pattern of these appointments in the interest of the nation.”
Governor Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State was unsparing in his condemnation of President Buhari over the appointment issue. Fayose said a critical look at the president’s operation since his assumption of office had clearly shown him to be a president of the Northern Nigeria only. In a statement issued on Monday, August 31, by Lere Olayinka, his special assistant on public communications and new media, Fayose said it was wrong for Buhari to have made 31 major appointments and only seven would come from the South while 24 were from the North.
The governor said: “They said the president made the appointments on merit and I wish to ask whether there are no competent people in the All Progressives Congress, APC, in the Southern part of Nigeria, especially South-East where no one has been appointed. Are they saying Igbo leader like Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu, who graduated with a first class honours degree in Chemical Engineering at the University of Lagos, is not competent to be appointed as secretary to the Government of the Federation, SGF?”
According to him, lopsided appointments skewed in favour of the North, had become a sad reminder of his time as military Head of State. “I hope the president is not seeing Nigeria of today as that of 1984 because doing so will mean that he has turned himself to a northern president, thereby justifying his notion that those who gave him 97 percent votes must get more benefits than those who gave him five percent votes,” Fayose said.
John Odigie-Oyegun, national chairman of the governing APC in Abuja on Monday, August 31, enjoined Nigerians not to bicker over the development, assuring that the president would balance appointments across all the geo-political regions. He said that most of the appointments made so far were the personal staff of the president.
Odigie-Oyegun said: “We have two sets of appointments that have taken place. One set is the personal privilege of Mr. President, as far as his personal staff are concerned.
“The other set has to do with a few important and strategic persons that are going to help him either in the fight against corruption or the fight against insurgency in the North-East, but this is not where to play the political balancing game. These are serious appointments and the president has the right to appoint those he has confidence in because these are the areas where he has made promises to Nigerians.”
Although Onu, was largely tipped to be the SGF and that did not happen, the former governor himself has taken it with philosophical calm, asking his supporters not to take it personal.
Nevertheless, the issues facing Nigeria as a nation goes beyond appointments. A good number of people want to see and feel a functioning government to better their lots are daily calling on the Buhari administration to start its lofty programmes as promised during electioneering campaigns.
Joseph Amoro, a public commentator, said President Buhari seemed to be moving well in tacking the issue of security very well, adding: “It is not over yet so we can’t say Uhuru.” On the question of corruption, he said the president seemed to be fighting it on pages of newspapers without any concrete action such as prosecution or conviction.
Ditto, Amoro said for the Buhari administration on economy. “On economy, we have not seen anything to show that the lot of Nigerians would be better soon. The president needs to buckle up and fix the economy because that is where the hope of every Nigerian lies. People are no longer investing because there is economic team on ground. The naira on a free fall,” he said. Besides, he said the GDP was still going down because of the fall in the price of crude oil.
He, however, said he would not blame the government so much because the legislature had not been forthcoming in doing its job to complement efforts of the government. “The government is still in limbo, so to speak because some parts of the government are not in place. The Senate doesn’t seem to have found its bearing. The judiciary has not even shown any sign of being alive to its responsibilities. So, it is an arm of government that is still working,” he said.
For Larry Lola Oyemari, another public commentator, what the Buhari administration has done in the past 100 days could not be what the masses hoped for. “All the PMB has did in the last 100 days is inactivity and not the change we still hope for,” Oyemari said.
Governor Akinwunmi Ambode of Lagos State has a contrary opinion. Ambode said that Buhari had succeeded in bringing integrity and credibility into public office in his first 100 days in office.
Ambode said: “What President Muhammadu Buhari has come up with in the last 100 days is about credibility and integrity for those of us who are in public office. Buhari has come up with moral leadership in the last 100 days and that is what is needed to fight corruption in the country. Nobody is judging anyone. What we have seen since May 29 is about strong leadership that has shown direction to all Nigerians. The mantra of such leadership that is being reflected by the President is what we are seeing in other states.”
With that, Ambode says everyone was now obeying the law of the land. He noted that all revenue agencies had started paying to a single account, which had made everyone to be accountable.
The governor has a supporter in Onyekachi Ubani, lawyer and human rights activist. Ubani commended Buhari for trying to lay a solid foundation for the nation to thrive on. He said what the government had been doing since coming to power was in order. Ubani argued that the government was elected to fix things for four years and not 100 days and that critics should look at what the government has been doing dispassionately. “What is going on is that there has been a big rot in the system and everyone acknowledges that. The rot was caused by miss-governance of the past 16 years. And someone is trying to put that in order. It will be very, very unreasonable to expect that man who met so much rot in the system to clear all the rot within three months,” he said.
The activist noted that the president had succeeded in getting an international support against Boko Haram insurgency. He said this would help the country to wipe out Boko Haram from the country.
According to Ubani, President Buhari has been succeeding in the fight against corruption because people were reading his body language that he would not condone any act of corruption. “For me the most critical thing of this government of President Buhari is the body language. The aura of being incorruptible, the aura of discipline, which is now trickling down to various organs of government; people are now aware of what is wrong and what is right. He is laying a solid foundation.
“The most important, for me, is leadership by accountability; whether you spend 100 days or 100 years does not matter as long as there is a solid foundation to build good governance on,” Ubani said.
Be that as it may, President Buhari himself has assured that Nigerians would soon see the fulfilment of his election campaign promises. The president who spoke on Wednesday, September 2, in Abuja while receiving university students under aegis of the National Association of Nigerian Students, NANS, assured Nigerian youth that his government’s anti-corruption campaign would secure their future.
“Everything you have asked for are the things that will make for a good country, and what we are after is a good country, a country where our youths can have a future and a hope,” the president said to the students who marched to the presidential villa to pledge their full support for his anti-corruption campaign.
That, indeed, is the yearning of every Nigerian. But how soon all these would materialise is another kettle of fish.
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President Buhari achieved a lot in his 100 days in office. See some of achievements as listed by his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina. Go to Femi Adesina’s Face book and you will see some of PMB’s achievements in 100 days!
Mr Femi Adesina was very modest in his assessment of the new administration in 100 days!
So, update your information!
Rose Obioma Aniagoh