Lord, heal our president of jetphilia

By Idang Alibi . . .

Almighty Father, the time has once again come when I, your most humble servant, elect to use a public forum to reach you. I usually do so when an issue which seems to defy the collective prayers and counsel of millions of well-meaning Nigerians comes upon the land. Father, this time around the issue has to do with our beloved president,

Muhammadu Buhari, who has so early in his administration gone down with a very terrible disease call jetphilia.

Millions of Nigerians and I have detected in the president a very bad symptom of this, mercifully, curable disease. I am urgently reaching you now out of our deep concern that he needs to be healed of this malady like yesterday for his health and for the health of the nation.

You, of course, are the creator of the world and all in it, including words, so I do not need to define or describe the nature of this disease for your understanding. But for the benefit of some of my countrymen and women who may not know this disease, let me proceed to give a brief description of it and the harm this non-communicable but nevertheless fearful condition can do to the sufferer-president and the country he is presiding over. This disease, I must point out as a part of its case history, is most common among African presidents. That is why some of us are most alarmed that if its viral load is not quickly reduced or completely expelled from the bloodstream and psychology of our president, he will not only suffer from extreme jet lag, the country will suffer from a most devastating socio-economic anomie.

As my compatriots whom I need as witnesses may have guessed from its mere name, jetphilia is the extreme love of jets or extreme passion or fascination for jets. For the purpose of this discourse, it is the tendency among mostly African presidents to hop into one of the usually many jets in the presidential fleet of their country at the slightest prompting or provocation and go all over the world either looking for elusive foreign investors, or seeking for miserable aid, or searching for photo opportunities with presidents and prime ministers of more successful countries or attending meetings and conferences of very doubtful dividends or fora which they can be ably represented without any harm done to the interests of their nations.

Jehovah Adonai, the self-existing one, African presidents seem to believe that the solution to the many problems of their countries lie abroad and not here on the continent. Sir, bear your servant witness concerning his sharp prophetic ability. In my piece of four weeks ago entitled African Leaders in India, I had humbly lamented this bug and prophesied, correctly, that when our PMB leaves the Afro-India summit in India which nearly all African heads of government attended and were promised 600 billion dollars in aid over some time, he will soon head for CHGOM (chop government) meeting and that thereafter, he may go for the Afro-Sino meeting in China. I have, unfortunately, been proved right.

After CHGOM which held in the island nation of Malta, our President left for a climate change meeting in France. He did not even have the time to touch down very briefly to say hi to we home folks before again jetting out. He flew straight from Paris to South Africa for the Afro-China Cooperation Meeting. I said it and I scored a bull’s eye.

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Sir, our continent is dying from this Afro-something meetings and conferences. We have, as already pointed out, Afro-India summit, Afro-China conference and African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group meeting. If Afro-American; Afro-Caribbean; Afro-Latino, Afro-Iberian; Afro-European and Afro-Brazilian meetings do not already exist, I am pretty sure that someone somewhere in Africa or out there is thinking of them and they will soon become a reality because African leaders simply love meetings and the jets they travel to them no matter how far-flung the venues may be.

These Afro-something meetings have not contributed in any appreciable manner to our continent’s earnest quest for development. Sir, I am not yet a president or prime minister so I do not know how they think. But as an ordinary citizen, I would like to think that if you have tried all these forms of meetings, whether bilateral, unilateral or multilateral and they have not helped you much, why do you not consider another strategy? Why do they not engage in some meditation and come to an understanding that the remedy for our malady lies in constant meetings with internal stakeholders? The only way a man whose house is not in order can fix it is to be within; a cracked or leaking house cannot be repaired from without.

Lord, I solicit your quick and most efficacious healing of our president because I am most alarmed that he is fast depleting the enormous goodwill he is enjoying with Nigerians without taking advantage of that asset to tackle some of the many hydra-headed problems most presidents find expedient to handle in the honey moon days and months of their presidency. PMB ought to have, by now, removed the ruinous fuel subsidy but he feared drawing down on some of that goodwill. He ought to have decided on a wide-ranging ban on food import, but he demurred for the same aforesaid reason.

He ought to have waded into the raging controversy about reducing the minimum wage or going for a substantial purging of the bloated public bureaucracies across the 38 governments plus the 774 local governments in the land. He ought to have voted for a sale of the epileptic refineries and announcing a package of incentives for the private sector to go into the refining of our crude. He ought to have given a signal about his willingness to tackle the perennial Fulani herdsmen-farmers conflicts. I have so many ‘he ought tos’ that the president ought to have done by now or give hearty indication that he would confront headlong but which his jetphilandering or jetphiliarisis has not allowed him to pay attention to.

OBJ gallivanted and brought us a tobacco company. God forbid that PMB should jetphilander and bring us a brewery as his dividend. Lord, after healing PMB of his jetphilia disease, give him a powerful shot of jetphobia vaccine so that he will, for the rest of his tenure, lose the love of jets and sit at home, roll up his sleeves, moblise and motivate the citizenry to squarely face the problems of the country whose solutions neither lie in Asia, America, India nor China but right here at home. Amen.

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