For once, let’s applaud Buhari

The beginning of a new year such as now, offers a good opportunity for Nigerians as a people to take a second look at the previous year 2016 and its catalogue of negative events. Such a review will no doubt be helpful especially if it can draw attention to the way forward. In other words, to make 2017 a better year, we need to avoid a recurrence of the negative events of last year. Arriving at the solution to our problems may not be an easy task but we imagine that giving credit occasionally to whom it is due is a wise approach.

It is obviously superior to the current trend whereby everybody is a critic in a game in which only President Buhari is perceived to be at fault all the time. The recent crisis in Kaduna is probably a good example of an issue in which the President has been hastily blamed. Kaduna is a state with its own governor that was elected to run the day to day affairs of the state. According, Buhari should not be the first to intervene in a problem in one state within a country that has adopted federalism as its system of government For the better part of 2016, the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was in crisis. Many of the members would readily suggest that the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC) has been behind it. There are indeed, those who would blame President Buhari for not dissuading his party members from it. Interestingly, the typical Nigerian politician is ungovernable. The President cannot even stop his own party members from destroying their own party let alone telling them to let the opposition be. In any case, it would be difficult to find a ruling party in a country like Nigeria which runs a zero-sum political system to encourage political opposition. Of course, it can’t happen in Nigeria where a ruling party in a state “wins” all the seats in a local election. If the truth must be said, a political party like the PDP is the architect of its fate. It is its members who are currently in factions that have prevented their party from making a mark even in a state like Ondo where it has been in power. Painfully they always do so for personal gains. Buhari or not, Nigeria is far from being ready for free and fair elections. The other day, Governor Ibikunle Amosun of Ogun state was reported to have said that he knows those who will not succeed him. We have no proof that Amosun is a professional soothsayer just as we are unaware that as a person he has more than one vote. So, how else will he stop those he has decided will not succeed him in a future election? He would probably disallow a level playing ground for all aspirants and like Oshiomhole and Mimiko did during the last governorship elections in Edo and Ondo states respectively impose his preferred candidate. Put differently, it is hard to find a blameless politician in Nigeria. The alarm by Governor Wike of Rivers state on the posting of 28,000 security operatives to his state for just a re-run election makes a lot of sense but when compared to what his PDP federal might did in the same state in 2015, the alarm is not more than crocodile tears. The fight against corruption is an area where many citizens have hailed President Buhari but quite often, the applause is drowned by allegations of selective prosecution. In a nation that has for too long, been weighed down by excessive corrupt practices, many of those arrested would obviously attract sympathy by singing religious and ethnic tunes. As we argued elsewhere, it is logical that many of those called to question are now in the opposition. This is because being the ones who were in government yesterday; they are those who currently have explanations to make on what they did with public funds. It is thus irrational to describe their arrests as amounting to selective prosecution. It is worse to insinuate that they are not the only corrupt politicians in our midst because that cannot exonerate them; rather that draws attention to the need for many more people to be arrested. Again, to harp on the sting operation by the Department of State Services (DSS) on some judges underplays the disturbing issue of corruption in the judiciary-a distasteful act which many retired senior judges had for long been drawing attention to. Instead of praising an administration that evolved ample courage to deal headlong with the subject, the focus became the inelegance of the method employed.  We are unable to support that line of thought more so as the sting operation did not target every judge. It is only fair that Nigerians who claimed to have elected President Buhari as a man that can rid the nation of corruption should not also become hyper-critical about a result-oriented approach to the hydra-headed monster. If however people are unhappy about the state of our national economy, it is understandable. The steep rise in the cost of living alone is enough to sustain public frustration. While agreeing with the argument that the problems of today are the direct result of yesterday’s bad governance, we can hold no one else but the government of today which earlier promised to fix the problems. Until the economy is fixed, no sermon can convince people to applaud the President. But the premise of this article is that the government should be commended for whatever is well done while urging it to tackle other areas requiring attention. Today, the nation should be up-standing in praise of our President in the fight against insurgency particularly the capture of Sambisa forest. Before Buhari’s time,  Nigerians languished in the forest as huge sums of money appropriated for the fight against insurgency were allegedly diverted by different actors in the corridors of power. Cynics may doubt the feat at Sambisa but we prefer to commend our gallant forces seen by newsmen in Maiduguri the other day dismantling the official Boko Haram flag at Parisu, Camp Zairo, in Sambisa Forest. Bravo to our Commander in Chief!