Reflections on Buhari administration

Also published in Daily Trust 

As Nigerians groan under the current excruciating economic hardship, which is arguably the most severe ever experienced in the country, their growing sense of disappointment in government is quite understandable, considering their hitherto high expectations following decades of drift that reached its worst during the previous administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan.

Though many Nigerians weren’t being realistic in their expectations, in the first place, many others had rightly expected President Buhari to kick-start his administration at a swift yet measured tempo necessarily needed to arrest the drift and effect reasonable and tangible economic development achievable in light of the available resources. In other words, on President Buhari’s assumption of office, many Nigerians rightly assumed that, within the period between his election victory and his assumption of office, a substantive and comprehensive action plan had already been prepared. Soon afterwards, however, some clues indicating otherwise and instead indicating his government’s inadequate readiness to immediately roll-out its promised economic reform strategies, began to manifest themselves. It turned out that, even tasks as relatively easy as shortlisting the names of the candidates for various major political appointments simply hadn’t been done.

President Buhari 

By the way, the swift implementation of the Treasury Single Account (TSA) system, was a welcome exception in this regard, even though it could be argued that it was already ready for immediate implementation following its formal adoption by the previous administration of former President Jonathan who, albeit, never implemented it. Also, though I acknowledge the government’s impressive success in containing Boko Haram insurgency quite significantly, and its commitment to ending it for good, my focus in this column is primarily on the administration’s commitment to deliver on its campaign promises with regard to economic recovery and development.

Anyway, the excuse given by the government that the then outgoing Jonathan administration did not cooperate adequately with the then incoming Buhari administration in terms of sharing the necessary official information and details wasn’t plausible after all, because the unprecedented and practically institutionalized corruption under former President Jonathan, and the resultant systemic decay were too obvious to elude even a casual observer, let alone an incoming administration that would soon take over. Besides, the resultant misery in the land was overwhelmingly pervasive and virtually unbearably agonizing that it actually needed no official handover notes to realize that the situation was extremely messy.

Nonetheless, Nigerians showed a great deal of understanding anyway, hoping that it wouldn’t take longer than necessary for the then new Buhari administration to swing into action. However, when it took the administration six months to get a substantive Federal Executive Council, and even longer to appoint other equally important public office officials, public confidence in the administration’s commitment to deliver apparently began to shake, especially when the calibre of the appointees turned out to be below the people’s expectations who had been made to believe that the delay in the appointments was due to some painstaking scrutiny procedures designed to ensure that only those with unquestionable moral qualities and professional competence were appointed. 

   

Yet, almost one and a half years into the four-year tenure of the administration, there are still many other equally important appointments that have not been made, which further hinders the achievement of any significant headway. For instance, while President Buhari has all along indicated his interest in a more productive engagement with the international community with a view to attracting foreign investments, securing appropriate support in Nigeria’s war on Boko Haram terrorists, securing the repatriation of Nigeria’s stolen funds stashed in some countries and indeed laundering the country’s battered image globally, he, ironically, has not yet appointed substantive ambassadors and high commissioners in many, if not most, of Nigeria’s embassies and high commissions around the world, even though, in bilateral and multilateral undertakings, a country is taken seriously or otherwise in light of, among other things, the level of diplomatic representation it maintains. 

Likewise, policy-making process is unnecessarily slow that further compounds uncertainties about the government’s strategies, which in turn discourages local and foreign investment initiatives and prolongs the country’s current economic recession. Incidentally, though the current economic recession was basically triggered by the collapse of crude oil prices in international markets, Nigeria’s overdependence on crude oil sales proceeds is actually responsible for the country’s relatively swift slip into recession. After all, there are many other oil-producing countries that have equally experienced sharp decrease in revenues as a result of the same crisis, yet their economies have proved too resilient to go into recession anyway.   

This unnecessarily slow-paced way of doing things also hinders and indeed undermines government’s anti-corruption drive especially with regard to the investigation of corruption cases and the prosecution of the suspects involved. Besides, the Presidential Advisory Committee against Corruption (PACC) set up by President Buhari more than a year ago, to recommend judicial reforms and mechanisms that would accelerate the process of investigation in corruption cases, and speed up the process of prosecution and dispensation of justice, has either not yet finished the assignment, or its recommendations (if actually made and submitted) are simply gathering dust somewhere in the presidency.  

Also, the apparent inconsistency in some government’s strategic economic polices (e.g. removal of fuel subsidy and the adoption of floating currency exchange system, notwithstanding their merits or demerits), which it had adamantly rejected before it eventually implemented, is equally associated with the unwarranted slowness in policy-making process.

In a nutshell, almost one and a half years into its four-year tenure, this administration has not yet attained momentum even though it is supposedly aware of the sheer enormity of the complicated challenges it has to contend with in order to live to the minimum expectations of the understandably disappointed Nigerians. It, obviously, needs to vigorously pursue and attain momentum strong enough to enable it to deliver, for it simply can’t afford to fail.