A President and His Legacy

THE FRONTLINES BY Joseph Ushigiale

Every President serving his country is always conscious of the legacy he wants to leave behind after leaving office. A President’s legacy is always framed around how well he has been able to deliver on his campaign promises or not. Thus, if a President, during his campaign, promised his people that he would take his country to the moon. After serving his term, his legacy would be how well he has been able to fulfill that objective or not.

So as we gradually inch towards the end of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration, it is important to begin to look at the Buhari legacy. In doing that, a reflection on his campaign promises which he hinged on ‘Change’ and a very disinterested assessment of his performance within the six years out of his eight years of two terms become imperative.

Buhari swept into office under the blaze of tremendous goodwill. It was not surprising. Before now, Buhari had tried thrice to win the presidency without success. However, in 2015, the merger between CPC and ACN that created the APC gave Buhari a much assured and acceptable platform linking him with people like Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, Akande, and others of like minds. With the merger, the new party represented the proverbial handshake across Niger and provided the much-needed energy to fire up his campaign of change across the country.
Buhari promised to improve Politics and Governance, National Security and Defence, Conflict Resolution, National Unity, And Social Harmony, Foreign Policy, Economy & Infrastructure and Equate N1.00 to $1.00.
He promised to generate, transmit and distribute electricity on a 24/7 basis whilst simultaneously ensuring the development of sustainable/renewable energy, by 2019.

He said he would embark on a National Infrastructural Development Programme as a Public-Private Partnership that will ensure 5,000km of Superhighway including service trunks and building of up to 6,800km of modern railway completed by 2019.

In the Oil and Gas Industry, he said he would revive and reactivate our minimally performing refineries to optimum capacity; Increase the number of physicians from 19 per 1000 population to 50 per 1000 through deliberate medication education as epitomize by nations such as Ghana.
He also promised to increase national health expenditure per person per annum to about N50,000 (from less than N10,000 currently); Ban medical tourism by our politicians from May 29, 2015, and several other promises that space can not permit here.

So expectations were very high and most Nigerians had reasoned that, now that Buhari had finally clinched the presidency after losing thrice previously, an opportunity had presented itself for him to showcase his burning passion to serve the country and people.

It’s been a little over six years since Buhari ascended the presidency and has less than two years to the end of his second term of eight years. Now with such a short time left to go, the jury is out and of course, it is the President himself who is already rolling out the drums to celebrate his sterling performers with his spokesman, Femi Adesina concluding that the President is more popular than Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, etc.

According to Adesina: “I am old enough to have seen our colourful and even swashbuckling politicians in action. I have seen the great Obafemi Awolowo. The charismatic Nnamdi Azikiwe (Zik of Africa). Shehu Shagari. Amino Kano. MKO Abiola. Bashir Tofa and many others in action. But I have not seen anyone with the kind of attraction, magnetic pull, that Muhammadu Buhari has. And that is around the country, North and south. People swarm around him as bees do to honey.

“I have been around the country with the president. I have also been to several countries of the world with him. I have not seen any other Nigerian leader, past or present, with his kind of allure, pull, fascination, magnetism.” He declared. Well, Adesina should not be in a hurry, he only needs to read Reuben Abati’s account of what happened the very day after former President Goodluck Jonathan lost the presidential election. Let us see what happens after Buhari leaves office in 2023.

Now, Buhari and his aides have the right to engage in self-adulation, it is within their inalienable right to do so. After all, the lizard that fell from a baobab tree, seeing that no one celebrated it, decided to nod its head in self-praise. In real terms, a president’s performance is better scored by the people. It is the people who feel the pains or enjoy the dividends of democracy provided by any sitting President, anything less is not credible.

So how has Buhari fared? To the limits of his capacity, Buhari has done the best he could. On infrastructure, the administration has built on the foundation left by previous administrations. In the transportation sector, a lot has been achieved in the railway expansion from Lagos, Abuja, Kaduna, Kano, and Maradi in the Niger Republic. Other railway lines linking Lagos with Abeokuta, Ibadan, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Calabar, Uyo, etc are at different stages of development.

It has also done tremendously well in agriculture through the Central Bank’s various interventions like the Anchor Borrowers’ scheme, microcredit support for Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises covid intervention funds for households, etc. These interventions have helped in stabilizing businesses belonging to the citizenry ravaged by the harsh economic conditions brought about by Covid- 19 pandemic.

The administration has also impacted the people positively with its populist conditional cash transfer, Tradermoni (even though many categorize that as vote-buying), school feeding programme, raise in the minimum wage, including for corp members. Although most states are unable to pay the minimum wage citing lack of funds, federal workers are already enjoying the new salary.

Buhari should also be credited with clearing the backlog of Nigeria Airways workers’ salaries and pensions, payment of benefits accruing to soldiers and policemen who deserted to join Biafra, and the building of the second Niger bridge. He has also made an appreciable impact in the area of road construction, expanding road networks across targeted states.

Having said that. The question is: Have all these and several other interventions not mentioned here changed Nigeria? No, they have not. If anything, these are mere artificial or cosmetic interventions that would not stand the test of time if matched against the change mantra Buhari campaigned on.
So where did he go wrong and what needed to be done? Given the change, he promised Nigerians, Buhari needed to take office on an entirely new trajectory by jettisoning the old ways of doing things. For instance, Buhari would have embraced a Private Public Partnership model from the get-go where infrastructure funding would have been undertaken by the private sector.

Had he adopted that model of financing, he would have charted an entirely new course for Nigeria. In addition, he would have saved Nigeria all the billions of dollars that his administration has mortgaged the country to now in the name of borrowing to finance infrastructure and lastly, he missed an opportunity to build very strong governance structures and lay a permanent foundation to eradicate corruption.

In choosing to follow the same old beaten path of past administrations, Buhari failed woefully in adding value to the system. At best, it was business as usual and corruption has festered more under his watch than previous administrations before him. So where is the change he promised Nigerians?

He promised to stabilize the naira by equating it N1 to $1. In 2015 when he took over, the naira was N160 to $1, today, it is floating between N540/570 to $1, the worst it has exchange so far in the history of this country. The President has literally ruined the economy. For a President who promised an annual growth of 16%, it was under his watch that the economy went into recession, the first of its kind in 25 years.
Is it inflation that has hovered over 16% for the most part and rendering the few nairas in the pocket as worthless as tissue paper? The purchasing power of the naira has completely been eroded and Nigerians are barely struggling to survive the harsh economic realities under Buhari where food has become a luxury to the common man.

The truth of the matter is that Nigeria under Buhari has grown an insatiable appetite for consumption without production. The reasons are that even the 24 hours electricity he promised has remained solely on paper six years after taking over the government. In fact, the electricity supply is so epileptic and has gone from worse to worst. Yet, we hear that thousands of megawatts are added to the grid on paper without an appreciable impact.

Given the important role electricity plays in production, the lack of it has led to low capacity utilization, loss of jobs, and revenue even to the government. For a government that promised to put millions of Nigerians to work including new graduates, the promises remain an illusion without the right environment for companies to produce goods and services.

As an oil-producing country, Buhari, a former federal commissioner for Petroleum Resources who roundly condemned the subsidy regime of the previous administration, describing it as non-existent, could not turn around the fortunes of the sector by taking steps to end the importation of petroleum products. Six years on the saddle, the refineries he promised to rehabilitate remain comatose and have become conduits and drain pipes for waste and corruption.

While Nigeria imports petroleum products through the highly inefficient state oil company, the NNPC, the comatose refineries are posting huge losses running into billions of naira. The biggest scam perpetrated by this administration is that the dead refineries still employ staff, carry out promotions and engage in local and foreign training at huge costs without earning a kobo in return.

With the change Buhari had promised, if it was dutifully deployed, with the PPP model, Nigeria would have attracted billions of foreign direct investments to impact on infrastructure. Take the healthcare sector for instance where the President had promised to end medical tourism the day he was sworn in. It turns out that, the President himself is the biggest culprit in the area and has patronized medical tourism for most of his tenure.

Rather than attracting and retaining doctors, Nigerian doctors are leaving the country in droves to the extent that some countries have the temerity to invade our shores to recruit our doctors while the government watches. Only recently, the National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD) called off its protracted strike which they used to ask for improved working conditions. Yet, in terms of facilities in the hospitals, they remain “mere consulting clinics”.

When he announced that he was going to sell off the presidential fleet and float a national carrier, Nigerians took him seriously. Today, his administration spends billions annually to maintain the presidential fleet. Yet, after spending billions in a bid to establish a national airline, the money has gone and there is no national airline.

A national carrier is an asset to a country like Nigeria because of its multiplier effects and contributions to GDP. Turkey’s Turkish Airline contributes about 5% to its GDP annually, employs over 300,000 direct and indirect staff, flies to over 120 countries parading 371 aircraft, and flying the Turkish flag across the world.

If Buhari wanted to walk the talk, opportunities in the power sector, roads, railway, healthcare education, and several other sectors were yearning to be tapped. Today, Nigeria would have been on the rise, a destination for foreign direct investors and Nigerians would have been proud that they truly voted for change and were witnessing it in their time.

Nigeria would have been manufacturing components for intervention in its railways, electricity sector, oil and gas, and auto manufacturing. The huge opportunities in the health sector for which Nigerians spend an estimated $2.1b annually according to statistics from LASUTH remain largely untapped under the Buhari government.

In my view, Buhari missed a golden opportunity to etch his name in gold and may possibly end up as the most hated President of all time. Having failed to secure both the country and citizenry, his brand of politics is divisive, clannish, and set the country back by several years. For a country he assumed leadership with a debt burden of $10b, Nigeria’s local and external debts are a referendum on how well Buhari has managed the economy and the country.

It seems to me that Buhari was barely coveting the presidency as he had nothing tangible to offer. Perhaps, he would have lent a few lessons of how to serve a country selflessly from Former President of Uruguay José Alberto “Pepe” Mujica Cordano, a politician and farmer who served as the 40th President of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015, the same year Buhari swept to office.