When, in the first week of September 2016, President Muhammadu Buhari launched a national re-orientation crusade tagged “Change begins with me”, many people laughed uproariously because they saw it as another government propaganda. People were unimpressed. They had valid reasons for mocking that campaign. After more than seven years during which the government failed to fulfil its election campaign promises, only a few citizens would be prepared to give Buhari and his officials the benefit of the doubt.
There are now more people who doubt rather than believe that their lives have improved under the All Progressives Congress-led government. Buhari’s “change” slogan, the proposal on which he was elected President in 2015, has obviously run out of energy. It took many people more than one year to realise the large chasm between the promises made by Buhari and the APC during the 2015 election campaigns and the haunting reality of the deprivations that people suffered since the government was elected.
After Buhari’s election, he requested that he should be given extra time to implement the ground-breaking and radical changes he promised during the campaigns. Unfortunately, the more an entire nation waited, the more people expressed frustration, disappointment, anger and hopelessness. Clearly, rising expectations that are ignored by the government always lead to rising frustrations. People realised they had no jobs and the little money they had could afford little or nothing in the marketplace.
During the official launch of the “Change begins with me” campaign, the aspect of Buhari’s speech that offended many people was embedded in the statement that read: “Our citizens must realise that the change they want to see begins with them, and that personal and social reforms are not theoretic exercise. If you have not seen the change in you, you cannot see it in others or even the larger society. In other words, before you ask ‘where is the change they promised us’, you must first ask how far have I changed my ways, what have I done to be part of the change for the greater good of society’.”
Essentially, Buhari shifted to citizens the responsibility to make changes to their lives. Yet, it was Buhari and the APC that promised to introduce radical changes in the country, if they were elected. What a shocking turnaround of policy. As I argued at the time, it is not the responsibility of ordinary citizens to play a central role in changing the nation. Ordinary people did not destroy the country economically and politically. More important, Buhari and the APC promised the citizens that they would experience changes in their socioeconomic conditions and their lifestyle.
As the dates for the 2023 national elections draw near, federal ministers, presidential advisers and assistants, and the APC have started to feed citizens with a diet of fabricated stories about the government’s tremendous achievements over the past seven years, even when evidence on the ground does not sustain the tall stories. APC officials undertaking fishing expeditions in the desert have a reason to do so. They are emboldened by the 2015 experience when APC leaders sold the message that convinced voters that Nigeria needed a change and that the government led by Goodluck Jonathan lacked vision, was incompetent, uninspiring and was lifeless.
Ahead of next year’s elections, the APC salesmen are on the move again. They want to reproduce the 2015 magic message, albeit a message constructed on the platform of falsehood, deception and unverified claims that persuaded Nigerians to vote for anybody and any party but Jonathan and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). The message worked. Jonathan was removed from office and the APC, a party largely unknown and untested, was given the mandate by voters to govern in the national interest.
In 2015, the nation was informed that Jonathan had failed to improve national security, that law and order had broken down, that the country had been swarmed by criminals, that infrastructure had collapsed completely, that the economy was in a coma and needed emergency surgery, that the socioeconomic conditions of citizens had declined sharply rather than improved, and that basic healthcare, quality education at primary, secondary, and university levels, agricultural production and jobs had become inaccessible and unaffordable.
During the 2015 presidential election, Nigerians found the APC message of change appealing because conditions at that time were depressing. People yearned for change. And the elections produced the much-needed change. What voters did not know was the complexion of the change, how the new government would perform and whether our living standards would be better or worse under the APC government. People who voted for the APC took a gamble. It turned out to be a gamble with severe consequences. Nigerians are still paying the high price of a decision they took to empower a political party more than seven years ago.
The APC evangelists are on the road again to test and sell their refurbished manifesto that says the government of Bola Ahmed Tinubu would grant Nigerians everything they ever wished in their lives. Their unique selling point is that the economy, battered and bruised by the incumbent APC government – we must remember – would be resuscitated rapidly under Tinubu’s presidency.
How wonderful it is to experience life under a different government. Consider this. Over the past seven and half years, Nigerians have lived a life of agony and carried undeserved burdens imposed on them by a government that promised so much but delivered virtually nothing, and still manages to manufacture trivial reasons to defend its failure to provide for the basic needs of citizens. We have experienced a government that promised to transform the country into an economic Eldorado but succeeded to make life unbearable for everyone. We have seen little action from a government that pledged to destroy corruption but watched sleaze and financial scandals become extensive.
In 2015, Buhari and the APC kingmakers made bogus pledges and swore to annihilate the Boko Haram insurrection in the North, to suppress ethnic-driven uprisings across the country, to create a stable society by enhancing law and order across the country and to halt rising youth unemployment. So far, the government has achieved none of these grand promises.
The experiences have left many people confused and disillusioned. When a government promises to transform the lives of citizens in meaningful ways but makes little or no effort to accomplish those expectations, citizens become shell-shocked, mentally disoriented, unsettled, stressed and upset.
There is little or no debate about whether the government has reduced poverty considerably in the country or whether it has piled more gloom on citizens. Public opinion is conclusive and adverse. That is not surprising. In 2015, there was unprecedented propaganda and aura around Buhari. He was presented to the nation as the man who would liberate the country from 16 years of poverty caused by the PDP government.
In the past seven years, the government and the APC leaders operated on the assumption that Nigerian people were naive, subservient, easy to fool, uncritical and unable to distinguish between propaganda and truth. Surely, many people are stressed, angry and disappointed with the government because of the state of the economy, citizens’ deteriorating living conditions, widespread corruption and the government’s inability to make a difference in the lives of people.
The 2023 elections will differ significantly from the 2015 and 2019 elections. Next year’s elections will be contested on different grounds; and they will be affected or influenced by factors that are fundamentally different. Things will not be the same again.