Opinion
By Steve Osuji
CRISIS DEEPENS: President Bola Tinubu announced a no-confidence vote on himself last week, unknown to him. He inadvertently admitted that he is unable to do the job and that his administration is in crisis when he inaugurated two hurriedly cobbled up, new-fangled economic committees to run things and revive economy.
The one is a 31-member Presidential Economic Coordination Council (PECC), while the other is a 14-man Economic Management Team Emergency Task Force, code-named (EET).
If Nigerians noticed the move by Tinubu, they didn’t seem to give a damn. Many had long given up on the Tinubu presidency anyway and they have switched off its activities. They have come to the eerie realisation that Tinubu is not the man to get Nigeria out of the morass of poverty and underdevelopment, so many have long moved on with their lives, leaving the man to continue with his extended blundering and shadow-boxing.
The teams are made up of the usual culprits: the jaded Dangote-Otedola-Elumelu circle; the Bismarck Rewane-Doyin Salami-Soludo celebrity-economists and the same raucous crowd of governors and ministers. The same motley crowd of people who brought Nigeria to her current tragic destination has been gathered again!
Apparently, Bola Tinubu forgot he had just last February, assembled the Dangote-Elumelu hawks as his Economic Advisory Council members. Scratch! That was just another presidential blunder out of so many. Now PECC and EET are Tinubu’s NEW DEAL. Call it “peck and eat” if you like but that’s the new buzz in Aso Rock. But for discerning minds, this is a clear sign that crisis has deepen in Tinubu’s administration.
SELF-INDICTMENT: But which serious president sets up a new economic management task force after 10 months in office? What about its cabinet? Has it been rid of the failed ministers and aides whose apparent failure warranted a side team like this?
What has the new government been doing in office all this while? What about the election manifesto and the president’s economic vision?
Could it be that all these have been forgotten in 10 months to the point that outsiders are needed to give direction and “revive” the economy?
Now some ministers and state governors have been co-opted into this new TASK FORCE. They are mandated to meet twice a week in Abuja for the next six months. So what happens to the governors’ duties back home? What about the ministers’ core assignments? All of this seems quite weird right now.
The simple message here is that the president has lost focus and direction. Vision, if any, has failed him. The presidency is weak and puny (see EXPRESSO_PRESIDENCYWATCH …Puny Presidency) nobody is holding forth in case the president falters.
BLANK SCORECARD: Now almost one year in office, no scorecard, nothing to report. All the positive indicators the president met upon inauguration have all crashed to near zero. Even the deposits in the blame banks have been exhausted – there’s nobody to blame anymore!
LOW CAPACITY, LOW ENERGY: This column has warned right before election that Tinubu hasn’t the requisite mental and physical capacities to lead Nigeria.
As can be seen by all, President Tinubu has not managed to tackle any of the fundamentals of the economy and the polity; the very basic expectations in governance are not being attended to.
For instance, the corruption monster rages on afield, with Tinubu seemingly not interested in caging it. Official graft has therefore worsened under his watch. About N21 billion budgeted for his Chief of Staff as against N500m for the last occupant of that office has become the compass for graft in Tinubu’s Nigeria. Today, the police is on a manhunt for the investigative journalist exposing filthy Customs men while the rogues in grey uniform are overlooked.
The president personally ballooned the cost of governance by forming a large, lumbering cabinet and showering them with exquisite SUVs, among other pecks.
Insecurity is at its worst with no fresh ideas to tackle it.
The country is in semi-darkness as power generation and distribution is at near-zero levels.
Importation goes on at a massive scale, productive capacity has dwindled further and living standard of Nigerians is at the lowest ebb now. There’s hardly anything to commend the Tinubu administration so far.
WHO WILL RESCUE THE SITUATION: As Nigeria’s socioeconomic crises deepen, and the president’s handicaps can no longer be concealed, who will rescue the polity? All the stress signs are there; the fault lines are all too visible to be ignored anymore.
Recently, we have seen civilians brazenly butchering officers and men of the Army and the army brutishly exacting reprisals almost uncontrolled. We see the escape from Nigeria, of the Binance executive who had been invited to Nigeria and then slammed into detention. That a foreigner could slither out of the hands of security personnel and slip out through Nigeria’s borders, suggests unspeakable ills about the country.
The other day, so-called MINING GUARDS in their thousands, were suddenly ‘manufactured’ – uniforms, boots, arms and all. They are conjured into existence ostensibly to guard the mines. Which mines? Whose mines? How much do the mines contribute to the federation account? Are we using taxpayer’s money to fund an army to protect largely private and illicit mines? Why are we committing harakiri by throwing more armed men into our unmanned spaces? Even the Nigerian Navy has been unable to protect Nigeria’s oil wells!
The Mining Guard is yet another symptom of an insipient loss of control by the President.
Finally, for the first time in a long while, an editor, Segun Olatunji, was abducted from his home in Lagos. For two weeks, no one knew his whereabouts and no arm of the military cum security agencies owned up to picking him in such bandits-style operation. It took the intervention of foreign media and human rights bodies for the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) to own up they abducted him, and eventually release him. Not one charge was brought against him.
Not even under the military junta were editors kidnapped by security agencies in this manner. The point is that the so-called democrat-president is losing patient with the media.
There shall be many more abductions and media mugging in the coming days. When a government fails, it kicks the media’s ass for reporting the failure; that’s the historical pattern!
Things will go from bad to worse and government would respond in more undemocratic and authoritarian ways.
Lastly, it’s unlikely that Dangote and Co can rescue the dying Tinubu presidency? These are fortune-hunters craving the next billion dollars to shore up their egos.
To mitigate the looming crisis, Tinubu must quickly reshuffle his cabinet that is currently filled with dead woods and rogues. Many of them are too big for their shoes and they are not given to the rigour of work.
In fact, Tinubu must as a matter of urgency, fortify the presidency by changing his chief of staff to a Raji Fashola kind. As it is, the hub of the presidency is its weakest link.
2nd April, 2024.
C.E.
Tags: CRISIS DEEPENS President Bola Tinubu
