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SEVERAL high-octane reactions, some of them commendable, others condemnatory or dismissive, have continued to trail President Muhammadu Buhari’s New Year letter to his compatriots entitled: “Nigeria’s decade”. Expectedly, the contents of the letter has been analyzed and interpreted in different ways and contexts. Some critics claim that the President in that letter gave himself away as a poseur and that the letter was draped as a gimmick, a self-glorification and that the nation and the citizens were being misled by unfulfillable promises and unreal expectations. I beg to differ.
First, it was good that the President decided to send his New Year message to Nigerians as a letter and not as a broadcast address. Without oratorical gift, little style and charisma, the substance of the message would have been lost in a speech. Nonetheless, despite the sarcastic sneer of the President’s critics, it’s important to forget the messenger and focus on the message contained in the letter. New Year presents every leader an opportunity to address the challenges troubling the country and her citizens, and Nigerians have gone through rough patches in the year just passed. And these were challenges of immediate sort. Therefore, New Year, a whole new decade for that matter, is an opportune time for a responsible leader to set priorities and his accomplishments as well. Nothing wrong with that.
But whether through speech or letter, the essence is what it intends to achieve. A great speech or a remarkable letter does not just capture the truth of the moment, it can also capture the big lie. It reveals just as it can enlighten. But it cannot mask and distort the truth because truth is constant. It is also a window onto a great occasion in any nation’s history. No matter how anyone might have interpreted the president’s letter , it contains some uplifting takeaways that history can judge him for. As one writer puts it, political leaders in a democracy are not revolutionaries (forget that the word has been misinterpreted and abused). Also, many of them are not leaders of creative thought. The best of them respond wisely to changes and movements already underway. The worst, the least successful, are those who respond badly or not even at all. This category of leaders also misunderstands the direction of an already visible change.
Looking closely at the president’s letter, where do you place Buhari in the reality and scale of power? With three years left in his presidency, I think, perhaps for the first time, Buhari is thinking seriously about legacy and how he will be judged by history. I said this much last week, and his New Year letter has reinforced my thoughts. That’s why in his letter, he looked back, he looked forward, his accomplishments, and sketched the outlines of projects and programmes that will go beyond his tenure, projects that will be his creation, his gift, and the monument to his leadership. In the end, what he has done is to ask his compatriots: Judge me by what I have done and what I intend to do, going forward.
Besides, the president has asked us to watch out for some of the projects that will come upstream from this year. These include : 47 road projects scheduled for completion in 2020/21, including roads leading to ports, major bridges including substantial work on the Second Niger Bridge, completion of 13 housing estates under the National Housing Project Plan, Lagos, Kano, Maiduguri and Enugu International airports to be commissioned this year. Other projects are the launching of an agricultural rural mechanisation scheme that will cover 700 local governments over a period of three years, launching of the livestock Development project grazing model in Gombe state where 200,000 hectares of land has been identified, in addition to the commissioning of the Lagos-Ibadan and Itakpe – Warri rail lines in the first quarter of this year and further liberalisation of the power sector to allow businesses to generate and sell power. These are noble projects that can impact lives and bolster the economy.
Undoubtedly, he has also sensed that the mood and circumstances, coupled with the attitude and behaviour of some sycophants, may have created an unusual opportunity for any leader to want to stay in power beyond the constitutionally guaranteed maximum tenure of eight years. Which perhaps was why, for the umpteenth time, he slotted in the sentence: “I will be standing down in 2023 and will not be available in any future elections. But I am determined to help strengthen the electoral process both in Nigeria and across the region, where several ECOWAS members go to the polls this year”. Was this assurance necessary since he is acutely aware that by the provisions of the Constitution, he cannot contest again for the presidency or was he trying to gauge public opinion or that of his diehard, servile supporters who may see him as Nigeria’s “messiah”? Our history teaches that there’s no place in our polity for any leader, no matter how powerful he might be.
For the first time in his presidency, Buhari has given substantial content and thus, by inference, intended as history’s legacy for his administration. It is not lost on him that challenges of immediate sort still face him, that many of the promises that brought him to office remain unfulfilled, and time is gradually running out. He acknowledges that power supply remains a conundrum despite huge investment in the sector and insecurity squeezing everyone to a corner. “We know we need to pick up the pace of progress. We have solutions to help separate parts of the value chain to work better together “, he said. The solutions, he said, would include ensuring fiscal sustainability for the sector, increasing both government and private sector investments in the power transmission and distribution segments, improving payment transparency through the deployment of smart meters and ensuring regulatory actions to maximize service delivery. Walking the talk is what Nigerians want to see. Talk is cheap. But let’s believe him, in his words that “the next 12 months will witness the gradual implementation of these actions, after which Nigerians can expect to see significant improvement in electricity service supply reliability and delivery”.
It is important that the President touched on the agriculture and manufacturing sectors and how his administration intends to create new opportunities in this long neglected sectors this year. While statistics show that these two sectors have received a boost in recent years, especially through the Anchor Borrowers Programme , initiated by the Central Bank of Nigeria, the irony is that prices of staple food items have risen so high. So, where are the gains in agriculture and manufacturing sectors of the economy? No progressive action when a government gives with one hand and takes away with two hands. That is why, in spite of the president’s assurances to lay enduring foundations for taking a “100 million Nigerians out of mass poverty over the next 10 years”, the country is sliding into extreme poverty. The World Bank last week projected that 30 million more Nigerians will fall into the extreme poverty trap in the next 10 years if nothing is done to increase productivity and inclusive growth in the economy.
The worry is that the administration’s economic results in four years fell short of projection. For instance, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) expanded below potential, making economists to fear what they call ‘lost decade’. If the same trend continues this year, the risk of another recession increases and the implications could be dire. The president should wish that the current tension between the United States and Iran would escalate so that oil price will soar to unprecedented level to enable him realise enough revenue to finance the projects he listed and stop the present borrowing binge.
Altogether, if there’s one thing the President’s letter reveals, it is the fact that power makes meaning when a leader can use it to accomplish goals that will stimulate growth and development. It is when power is so used that hope, optimism and fresh possibilities can happen. But he should heed the advice of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of the United States, who said that history has provided many cases where the sound of the bugle can put an immediate end to the hopes and dreams of the best reformers.
This is so because, sometimes, history and fate meet at a single place, in a single place to shape a turning point in many a leader’s destiny. My unsolicited advice is that president Buhari should believe in his own gut and stick to his set of priorities and not hacken to ‘yes men’ in the corridor of power. It’s in his best interest when the judgment of history comes.
