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President Muhammadu Buhari’s New Year broadcast has been described as meaningless and lacking the benefit of the nicety of ‘sound and fury’.
Associate Professor of Political Science at the Lagos State University (LASU), Dr. Sylvester Odion Akhaine, who gave the verdict, said the president’s speech “can only come from someone who has lost touch with realities – Nigeria’s contemporary realities.” He said: “First on the fuel scarcity, the prevailing scarcity is a consequence of the dynamics of the global price of oil and the failure of the government to live up to its responsibility, by ensuring that we refine our oil domestically. Indeed, the government intends to increase the pump price of petrol and Nigerians must gird their loin to resist it.”
He said “the incumbent leadership does not know that the country is sitting on a keg of gun powder, and the peoples feel emasculated by the prevailing political structure, dominated by a tiny arrogant elite that controls the material force of the state and employs the resources of the country in a patriarchal mode.”
Akhaine said the Nigerian State, as presently constituted, is brimming with inequities. “Structures of government are not only skewed in favour of sectional interest, they are, indeed, structured to atomise the federal essentiality of the Nigerian State. It is this distortion that is at the heart of the political crisis in the country. To deny it, is tantamount to postponing the doomsday.” While he admitted that railway network for the country is desirable, Akhaine said “a project based on credit facilities in a context of mind boggling corruption remains at the level of imagination. It will interest the public to know that even portions of roads constructed by the last administration are being adorned by Sukkuk signposts. This indicates that someone, somewhere is fooling Nigerians.”
