OPINION: Nigeria’s race to the bottom

THE All Progressives Congress [APC] political party regime headed by the President, Maj. Gen. Muhammadu Buhari is at war with itself. Before now and especially since after the 2019 elections, top leaders of the administration have been given to silence in spite of the grave and existential danger confronting the country. Nigerians appear to have accepted that theirs is a deaf and dumb President. The appearance of being hard of hearing can be explained. If my recollections are correct, the first medical tourism to the United Kingdom by Buhari very early in his tenure was to deal with a serious problem with, I believe, one of his ears. Probably the two. The procedure was said to have been successful. But in my neck of the woods, we say that you can cure a mad person of madness but you can’t cure the person of ntamu, Igbo for soliloquy.

Certainly, Gen. Buhari is not deaf. The point is that he has a proclivity to engage in selective hearing. He hears what he wants to hear, when he wants to hear it, how he wants to hear it and from whom he wants to hear it. There have been instances in his seven years of reign and rule and ruin of this country to buttress this assertion. We will return to this if need be. On the other hand, the President is not dumb. The point is that his handlers told us from the onset that their man, our President, is taciturn. That he was given to speaking by his actions and not words. They counselled us to constantly be on the alert so we do not miss his body language. They said that that would be the major means of communication between him and us. It did not matter that nobody prepared us for that. Nigerians are by nature loud. We talk without let or hindrance. We talk even when there is no need. Our conversations, debates and arguments are usually loud and robust. And we argue to win not to illuminate. If you want to know how much we enjoy talking, ask the National Communications Commission [NCC] how much Nigerians pay the telecoms service providers every year. It runs into tens of billions of Naira.

And suddenly we were told to use our eyes to talk and our mouths to see. They got us because we became disoriented and so couldn’t talk with our mouths when we saw with our eyes the ruins Gen. Buhari and co. were making of our country. Indeed we became the deaf and the dumb. How ironic! And sad. In spite of the ruination of the country, we still have not sufficiently found our voices to say enough is enough. Not too long ago, a respected international newspaper wondered what had happened to the usually boisterous Nigerians. The newspaper could not understand how Nigerians had been tolerant with a regime that showed signs of cluelessness right from its assumption of office in 2015. If the editors of that foreign newspaper had cast their minds back just a little bit, they would have understood. We have a regime like no other. A leadership that had no qualms in unleashing its ferocious security agents including members of the Armed Forces to shoot and kill singing and national flag-waving youth at Lekki-Lagos toll plaza and other locations in this country on October 20, 2020. Their crime: demonstrating against police brutality and bad governance. The regime said then that the protest was a precursor to an insurrection and a coup to oust it from office.

But as we struggle to find our voices, some leaders of the regime are beginning to talk. But their talks are expressed through quarrels, acrimonies, accusations and counter-accusations. That a government headed by Buhari would underperform or fail out rightly should have been obvious to any person who was an adult or a young adult during his first outing as an usurper military head of state between 1983- 1985. Ostensibly, some ministers are just coming to the realisation that this regime has been a spectacular failure. And they are going for each others jugular while pretending that they have not been part of the rot. Everything that can go wrong in Buhari’s Nigeria has gone wrong. For instance everybody in Nigeria and elsewhere had regularly put the figure of out of school children in our country at between 13-15 million. But last February, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Sadiya Umar Farouq, claimed that the figure had dropped to just over 10 million. But this month the Minister of Education, Dr. Adamu Adamu, said his Sadiya lied because less than six million children are now out of school. None of the Ministers bothered to provide the basis for their claims. But we know that the factors that had caused the huge number of out of school children, including neglect of the girl-child in terms of education, insecurity and poverty have got worse.

Then Adamu turned and faced off with Dr. Chris Ngige, the minister of labour and employment who had accused him (Adamu) of defying Gen. Buhari’s directive to find a solution to the six months-old strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities [ASUU], the umbrella body of lecturers in federal government-owned institutions. Again, Adamu said that Ngige lied and that there was no such presidential directive. Since Buhari does not talk and Nigerians have been unable to decode his legendary body language, we are not able to say between the ministers who was lying. That would not matter anyway for a regime that was founded on propaganda and nurtured on lies. Meanwhile, our children have remained at home. Those who should have graduated could not graduate. Those who should be starting off cannot get started.

Reports say about one million prospects are waiting for admission into public universities. One academic year has been lost and another is threatened. To be fair, the regime has proffered solutions. The Minister of State for Labour, Festus Keyamo, recently said that parents should go and kneel down and beg ASUU to call off the strike so that our children can resume their studies. The Keyamo solution did not gain traction. In fact it was met with disdain and scorn. Next, the regime through Adamu, the education minister, said students should sue ASUU for damages. It’s up to you to choose what you want to do with the proposals- cry or laugh.

Read also: OPINION…Buhari: How Not To Impeach A President!

As Nigerians grappled with the squabbling ministers news broke that the federal ministry of agriculture expended over N18 billion to clear an unnamed bush during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown. The same ministry a few years ago used over N30 million to build a mosque ostensibly as part of its core mandate. In the competition to outdo themselves, another agency of the government, the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund, claimed that termites had devoured documents of its expenditures worth over N17 billion. And so it cannot provide documentary evidence of how it spent the money to the relevant committee of the House of Representatives. The Office of the Auditor-General of the Federation had pointed at the gaps in the books of the Agency, prompting a probe. We live in a country and especially under a regime where anything goes. There is no accountability and there are virtually no consequences for raiding the treasury, no matter how brazen the act is.

And that is why there is now a raging controversy over a gift of N1.12 billion worth of upscale Sport Utility Vehicles [SUVs] to neighbouring Niger Republic by Gen. Buhari. It was supposed to be a hush job but the media broke the news and the Minister of Finance, Zainab Ahmed, was compelled to publicly admit the gifting of the SUVs supposedly for security patrols. The minister had said that upon the approval of Buhari, the government had contracted a vehicle dealer in Nigeria to purchase 10 Toyota Land cruiser vehicles for Niger. Nigerians were outraged given how poorly our own security agencies, especially the police, are provided for. The problem now is that the Defence Minister of Niger, Alkassoun Indatour has denied the gift from Buhari. Instead he said he was only aware of Toyota Hilux gift from Nigeria’s Zamfara state to Niger’s Maradi region.

”The state of Zamfara has given five vehicles to Maradi region, four of which have already been received. It is not the federal government as the Minister of Finance of Nigeria, Zainab Ahmed, declared”, said the defence minister’s statement which was translated to English from French. But something more troubling was lost on Nigerians by the controversy over which government, federal or Zamfara, gifted security trucks to Niger Republic. And that ominous thing was in one of the paragraphs of the Nigerien statement. It read: ”The population of Zamfara who are on the border with Niger call more on Nigerien soldiers who respond to the minute than even those of their country [Nigeria]”. The meaning of this is that Nigerien soldiers move in and out of Nigerian territory at will in response to distress security calls. This disclosure should be concerning to every Nigerian. It is most likely that this is what obtains in many of the states in the northern part of Nigeria which share borders with neighbouring countries.

Elsewhere the future of our country remains less than exciting. The government tells us that they are using over N18 billion daily to subsidise the petrol we allegedly consume. Nobody can tell us for certainty the number of petrol driven equipment- vehicles, generators etc- that are in use. In the aviation sector, the country is almost shutting down. Local flights are gradually getting out of the reach of the rich. Emirates Airline has served notice that it intends to suspend operating into Nigeria from September 1, because more than $80 million of its operating capital is trapped here. With Emirates, other airlines are owed about $464 million and unless something happens, they may also consider shutting down their operations. Last week electricity workers plunged the country into total darkness with the attendant cost on the ailing economy. To cap our tales of woes and Nigeria’s ”from top to bottom” journey as promised by the APC, the chairman of the party, Alhaji Abdullahi Adamu, has threatened that the government is prepared to borrow money from foreign lenders from now to eternity. Welcome to whatever is left of a once promising country.

AUTHOR: Ugo Onuoha…

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Articles published in our Graffiti section are strictly the opinion of the writers and do not represent the views of Ripples Nigeria or its editorial stand.

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