Your Excellency, please permit me to join the league of joyous Nigerians who have been falling over themselves in unrestrained giddiness after your well-deserved victory in the recent Presidential election in our dearly beloved country, Nigeria. I believe congratulations are in order for the many reasons I shall shortly provide as explanation. What you succeeded in doing is tantamount to performing the eighth wonder of the world. And you made it look so simple. The story of your political meandering is not too different from the Israelite’s journey, when a trip of 40 days came to 40 years. You started your adventurous sojourn as far back as 2003 and navigated your way through mountains and valleys and couldn’t reach the pinnacle until 2015, when you stunned the world with your blistering performance.
Sir, you even set a new African record on a continent where it is almost impossible to defeat an incumbent President. All the odds were perfectly stacked against you. And your opponents did not spare you, walahi! They went after your jugular with the hope of snuffing life out of you completely, and in a jiffy. But you took all the deadly punches and still stood ramrod like the Rock of Gibraltar.
I’m still wondering how and where you got your kind of fortitude from. Not just that, Jesus must have been speaking about you when he spoke about faith that can move mountains. You are a true testimony to the limitless possibilities of the Almighty. A veritable example to mankind that it is never over until it is over. To God be the glory. He has used the Buhari/Osinbajo ticket to return pride, confidence and hope of a greater future to Africa’s most populous nation. This has been the case everywhere I’ve travelled in the last two weeks. Nigerians and non-Nigerians alike are very excited that Nigeria has this chance of redeeming and truly transforming from a nation of bad news to a country of real giants.
This is where I would stop my admiration and adulations in order to have enough time and space to tackle some serious issues that cannot afford to get buried in the celebration of the moment. Let me say from the beginning that I don’t envy you sir. What you’re about to carry on your shoulders from May 29, 2015, is heavier than an elephant. You will require all the strength and will-power to carry this burden. And you can’t carry it alone.
Fortunately in Professor Osinbajo, you have a deputy who is of like mind and disposition, an ascetic gentleman who shuns the wordly pleasures of life preferring to concentrate as you do on matters that will uplift our country and your countrymen. Your joint success or failure would be determined by the character and calibre of the men and women you and your Vice-President surround yourselves with. From the moment we see the composition of your inner and outer cabinet, the direction you are headed should be obvious to us.
Your job is not going to be made easy by the gale of defections from different parties to the incoming ruling party. The way politicians are abandoning the erstwhile ship of power should tell you only one thing; that the number of job applicants you have to contend with has quadrupled. They are not coming to you because they’ve suddenly seen the light and are now genuinely born again progressives but because these big and smaller fishes can never afford to stay out of the ocean of power for what would seem to them like four interminable long years. They have refused to take useful lessons from other climes.
The British Prime Minister and his Deputy belong in different parties. In our own country, the Deputy would have voluntarily sacked and personally torpedoed his own party without caring a hoot about his own fellow members. I beg you sir, you must resist their nuisance pressure and concentrate on the arduous task ahead. If you have to step on some toes, so be it. They will forgive you when they begin to see your excellent performance and the breaking of new grounds. If you decide to do it the way they’ve always done it, you will fail similarly or even fall more cataclysmically.
My humble suggestion is that you should assemble a star studded team. Anyone so chosen should be accomplished in his own right and must have managed people or resources or both. You can’t afford to keep hungry lions in positions of authority because it is certain they will abuse it. Chief Moshood Abiola had an eloquent way of putting it succinctly: “it would be wicked to put a man who’s hungry in the kitchen and expect him not to take some of the meal for himself!” Such is the reality of life.
Therefore, extra care must be taken not to appoint people by primordial or political or other sentiments but purely on merit. It is also important to form an all-inclusive government of national unity and not that of winner takes all. The reason many are running helter-skelter today is because they don’t want to be left out in the anticipated bazaar. But this should not be so. Some of those who toiled for your victory did so from within the current ruling party and other fringe opposition parties. Also, a lot of those who made your victory possible functioned outside the purview of political parties. Many of our ‘Change’ icons scattered all over the world are not necessarily politicians. In particular, Nigerians living abroad have the right to contribute their quota to nation building and you should give then the opportunity as their exposure and experience to the kind of development this county needs is invaluable.
Once you are able to have a world class team, you would be able to work more effectively and, hopefully, you will find those who share your attitude to issues of corruption, frugal management of resources, matters of discipline and so on. The problems at hand are just too plentiful that I sometimes wonder where you will have to start from. I shall try to highlight some in order to constantly remind you that the next four years won’t be a bed of roses. Those already warming up for their own turn of jamborees had better have a quick rethink because I predict that it is not goinbg to be that rosy this time around.
The first doomsday forecast from me is that you’re going to meet a virtually empty treasury. I’m under no illusion that the outgoing government would bequeath any tangible assets and you should prepare for more of liabilities. Everything would have to be re-assembled and re-packaged from scratch. Austerity measures would have to be put in place. Government officials should return to those good old days when the gulf between the government and the governed wasn’t so wide. Those who wish to live lavishly can augment their government allowance from their private business where that is allowed. The cost of running democracy in Nigeria has become rather outlandishly scandalous. It would be necessary to urgently call a meeting of stakeholders across party lines as soon as you assume power in order to agree on how to streamline what has become a disgracefully unwieldy prodigality.
Sir, you would need to block most of our drain-pipes. You would have to focus a proper searchlight on our crude oil cash cow as attendant oil and gas offshoots have brought us more pain than relief. Nigeria seems to make more money than some of the industrialised nations and yet remains a beggarly country. All the scams attached to all manner of subsidies should be exterminated. We’ve frittered away too many resources through under-cut deals as well as brazen theft of our commonwealth. Power should return to the Nigerian Navy in particular and other security forces in general to stop the unheard of rascality of pilfering 400,000 barrels daily before our very eyes. Hopefully those ugly days should be over soon.
It would be impossible to run your government within a few months if you don’t jerk up every identifiable demon soonest. I do not know how you wish to sort out our refineries but it should be obvious to all and sundry that we are going nowhere until we stop the unholy importation of refined petroleum when we have refineries that can be made to function properly within a short time if adequate attention is paid to them.
The same is the sorry case of power generation and distribution in the country. Most businesses cannot survive in Nigeria as a result of the prohibitive cost of generating electricity at home and work. Your Government must immediately start working on a holistic and realistic power policy which combines all the natural resources that God has deemed fit to bless our country with in abundance. The traditional power sources of coal and hydro power must again be carefully looked at. You must also get boffins to work on solar, wind and bio power because ultimately that is the future of power generation. It is depressing that we still cannot properly harness our extensive gas reserves to power gas plants which has meant that any previous power policy hinged on that was doomed to fail. A country of Nigeria’s population, size and capacities cannot be proud of generating and distributing less than 5,000megawatts of power. It is disgraceful and is the reason that we have lagged behind for so long.
Employment is another burning issue that you have to contend with. The need to improve the conditions and standard of living of government and private employees is urgent. The problem is that it is difficult for our governments and private companies to properly tackle these matters when they themselves hardly realise enough income to be able to survive. How would any company or organisation employ new staff when the existing ones are barely able to exist, living as they do from hand to mouth? The issue of unemployment remains on the front burner of any reasonable society and nowhere is this more desperate than Nigeria.
Many of our challenges are intertwined, which means you can’t solve one without sorting out the other. The economy has so much to do with the general security perception of a nation. Who would ordinarily wish to invest in a restive environment where lives and properties cannot be ably protected? Thank God, you are a retired Army General, defence and security should be of utmost priority in your check-list. The Boko Haram menace must be decisively dealt with and many are saying that how you deal with this insurgency will be first major litmus test of your administration.
A comprehensive overhaul of our military is long overdue. The state of our security forces despite all the grandstanding of the Jonathan administration leaves much to be desired. Our Police force requires serious attention. I have a simple observation to make sir. Since most of our VIPs enjoy the protection of our security forces, even including the military and DSS, a special VIP unit should be created with branches nationwide. They should be separated from the regular Police Force, in order to let the real police do and concentrate on their jobs. This elite unit of the Police should be strictly funded from proceeds of payments made by the VIPs. Under no condition should civilians be protected by soldiers again. It is a gross abuse of power and privilege.
An illiterate society is a useless one in words and indeed. The collapse of education in Nigeria has contributed in no small measure to the general malaise afflicting and ravaging our land today. What is worse is that the amount of dollars being wasted on acquiring certificates abroad from mostly mushroom institutions now runs into billions. Since all our schools cannot be upgraded immediately, you can start with the upliftment of a few in each geo-political region. Everything necessary must be done about creating a conducive atmosphere for learning, improving the conditions of service for academic and non-academic staff and formulating a more useful curriculum for the students in order to make them more employable. It would be wonderful to encourage the return of technical schools for the training of our artisans. Most of those around today operate on the principle of trial by error and many of us have paid dearly for the ensuing fatal calamities.
We need a major revolution in the area of aggressive and visionary infrastructural development. I don’t know of any oil-rich nation that looks as miserably comatose as Nigeria. Many of our rich men and women are living in the most expensive ghettos except those who have been able to create their own paradise by providing everything that government ought to have done in normal places.
There are so many other areas requiring immediate attention. They include endemic corruption, the Justice system, healthcare, social welfare, information management, transportation, agriculture, investment opportunities, and so on.
Sir, you and your Vice-President truly have so much to work on and your tables are very full. With the right people around you, I’m certain you will be able to carry this cross successfully. I wish you both God’s wisdom and the best of luck.
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