For some time now, the wailers in our midst, courtesy of Femi Adesina, the Special Adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari on Media and Publicity, has been worrying themselves complaining that PMB is a failure, that he has done well for the country in three years since 2015, when he came to power and that he and his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) has not kept their campaign promises.
Mr. Adesina was brilliant to characterize these category of Nigerians as Wailers, because indeed they have chosen to ignore all the signs of commendable efforts being made by President Buhari to put Nigeria on a better footing as a nation.
It turns out that these class of Nigerians are in a minority and happen to be die- hard loyalists and admirers of two of Nigeria’s past leaders namely President Olusegun Obasanjo and Buhari’s immediate predecessor in office, President Goodluck Jonathan! These two former leaders belonged to the opposition party, the PDP which held power from 1999, when power returned to civilians after a long period of military rule and who therefore could be said to have operated on the same political philosophy.
Now, the former ruling party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), lost power in 2015 to President Muhammadu Buhari who came on the platform of a loose political coalition whom Nigerians gave little chance of taking power. In 2015, and before then, Nigeria had become a very unhappy country where corruption, maladministration and greed was wrought large in all facets of public administration under the Jonathan government. And the people of Nigeria wanted a change of leadership.
The fact that after his eight years stint as President under the PDP, former President Obasanjo influenced the emergence of all the succeeding presidents of Nigeria under the PDP, a political party that he dominated and directed, and Nigerians clamoured for a change of leadership and direction, means that the successor to these leaders was of course better than those he succeeded. The point is clear that had Obasanjo and Jonathan, done well as leaders, Nigerians would not have wanted change and carried it out using the ballot box!
The undoing of the PDP under the Obasanjo and Jonathan regimes, were principally, the pervasive corruption and impunity under which Nigeria was governed. While the impression was created by spin- doctors of the party in power that all was well with the country, underneath, economically, the country was sitting on a time- bomb that would have led to total financial ruin of the country if an anti- corruption leader had not come on board in the person of Muhammadu Buhari.
Nigerians chose PMB in 2015 on account of his integrity and abhorrence for corruption meaning that the people were fed up with a corrupt leadership at the center. President Buhari’s anti- corruption slogan was later to be justified by the heart- breaking revelations of how billions of the nation’s wealth were shared and misused by privileged and top functionaries of the PDP party and government. The massive corruption and lies about the economy told by the PDP using false statistics resulted in massive poverty, capital flight and foreign domination of the economy and a near collapse of the nation’s economy under the PDP government. Thus it was no surprise that a few months after PMB took over power, the nation’s economy fell into a painful and costly recession.
A second issue that highlights the failure of the PDP, the party of both former presidents Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan, was that the nation found itself immersed in widespread insecurity never before witnessed in the annals of the history of the country. Terrorists known as Boko Haram took over most of the country’s North east region and more or less proclaimed a Caliphate to be governed on the principles of Islam. The Jonathan government dithered on what to do with the Nigeria Army virtually in disarray after repeated encounters with the terrorists. It became clear that if the country was not rescued from the grip of President Jonathan, it would fast loose its status as a sovereign state.
The above aside, Nigeria under Obasanjo and Jonathan could not provide electricity and infrastructure. The country was dotted by abandoned projects as well as huge debt obligations at both the State and Federal levels. In the case of Obasanjo, while in power as a comical Imperial president, he allocated a whopping $16 billion to provide electricity nationwide with no result. While the money disappeared, Nigerians were served with more darkness than electric power thus confounding the industrialization of the country and the employment situation.
Therefore when a few months ago, President Buhari asked Obasanjo ‘where is the power’, Buhari was in order and knew what he meant. Many Nigerians are still hoping that Obasanjo and his cohorts will be made to answer that question of massive corruption in the power sector.
On the power issue, Jonathan, Obasanjo political son did not fare better. Rather than query what happened to all the investments in the power sector and turn things around, in order to make political capital out of the mess, he embarked on an ill- advised and corruption laden privatization of the sector before the 2015 presidential election. He contested that election as a sole candidate ignoring the fact that real democracy and fairness frowns at such impunity.
Though the PDP has been on a rebranding mission in readiness for the 2019 polls, the party should not look far for the reasons for its woes. Former president Obasanjo and his choice of successor to the late Umaru Yar’ Adua, Goodluck Jonathan are solely responsible for the sorry situation of the party, and the painful descent of the nation. PMB is right after all that they have questions to answer bordering on the ruination of the nation and the massive disease of corruption which ate deep into the nation’s finances and economy.
PMB has done better than these two men in just three years. We only need to look at the sensitization of Nigerians about the need for economic self- reliance and diversification, judicious use of the meagre national revenue from oil and other sources for payment of salaries and building of infrastructures across the regions of the country, the retreat and near annihilation of the Boko Haram terrorists, return of peace to the North east region and freedom for kidnapped girls and civilians etc., to appreciate the lasting impact of three years of PMB, compared to the 16 long years of self- enrichment and corruption presided over by Obasanjo as leader of PDP.
The worst aspect of Obasanjo’s public record is that when things become very bad, rather than step in as a Statesman to assist his chosen ones to return to sanity, he tends to abandon them by openly declaring that he has quit the political party where he once held sway.
Written by Chidi Arinze. a Commentator on Public Issues from Abuja.
