Sometimes, it is easy to lose perspective in the moment. That’s why politicians while on campaign trail promise the moon but deliver cheese when they get elected. American journalist and historian Robert Allan Caro, captures it succinctly when he said that “what leaders do while they are trying to get power is not necessarily what they do after they get it”. If you take stock of the incalculable harm that the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari has done to the economy and to the lives and livelihoods of Nigerians, you perhaps wouldn’t have remembered Sunday was Christmas and the reason for the season. But our spirit has remained unbroken, resilient, despite the hardships inflicted on Nigerians by poor and incompetent leadership . We should take comfort in what the Catholic pontiff Pope Francis said, that “God never gives someone a gift they are not capable of receiving. If He gives the gift of Christmas, it is because we have the ability to understand and receive it”. Wise counsel, isn’t it?
With the low-key Christmas festivities and celebration still in the air, the significance of the birth of Jesus Christ provides a time of sober reflection. To borrow the words of former British Prime Minister David Cameron, “Christmas gives us an opportunity to pause and reflect on the important things around us”. This includes how we have been governed over the last seven and a half years. The vital question is : Are you better off today than you were before this administration came to power? Only a negligible number will answer in the affirmative. For the vast majority of Nigerians, it’s never been this bad. The bleak Christmas in many homes tells the grim story of what most Nigerians are going through. Never before have I seen my friend, Chijindu feel so sad as he was last Sunday when I visited him to drop a Christmas gift for his family. His face looked so solemn, his mind was troubled. You can touch it. It was as if the future had died. As he leaned back in his chair with his hands clasped together in his lap, I knew something was wrong. He used to be a vivacious fellow. In my own difficult times, I used to draw strength and inspiration from him. But, not this time. His strength failed him. I asked him what the matter was. Choosing his words carefully, he said he had been under tremendous strain lately. He reeled out some of the challenges, one of them being the death of his mother in-law.
There were other pocketbook issues. His words: “I thought last year’s Christmas was bad, but this year’s Christmas was the worst imaginable in my adult life. Everything seems out of joint. For the first time in 20 years, I couldn’t take my family to my village in the South East. Transport fare was very high, airfares beyond my reach”. He said few days to Christmas, he had just little money to buy things for his children to celebrate the Christmas, because his employers are yet to pay salaries. Cost of food items has increased so high that the money his wife went to the market with could not buy half the items she budgeted for. Chijindu is not alone. About 133 million Nigerians said to be Multidimensionally poor today, are going through tremendous challenges of immediate sort. According to the BusinessDay lead report of last Friday, December 23, the cost of Christmas meal rose by 28 percent over what it was the previous Christmas. It depends on where you live. In some places, the cost of a Christmas meal was beyond what an average household could afford. This is the kind of deep-seated frustration millions of Nigerians have been going through for years now. For many families, they didn’t know it Christmas. You see, every nation, every parent, every leader cannot escape responsibilities. Responsibilities abandoned today will certainly return as more acute crises tomorrow. For our country, leadership incompetence has conscripted us to such a level that, for millions of Christians, moments that call for celebration such as the birth of Jesus Christ, has become a period to feel disillusioned because a climate of fear, of uncertainty not seen in years is upon us, courtesy of bad leadership. If 2020 disrupted lives and livelihoods because of the Covid-19, 2022 has tested our individual and collective determination in ways no previous year ever did. Across the country, this Christmas was celebrated in a sombre and low-key fashion. Nobody needed to tell anybody anymore why this was so. Insecurity has squeezed everybody to a corner. Many who would have wanted to travel could not for fear of been kidnapped. Worse still, the purchasing power of the people has declined greatly. Food inflation, unemployment and poverty have taken over the land. Again, we have been told that tougher times are even ahead next year, regardless of who wins the February 25 Presidential election. Cleaning up the mess left by this government will be a ‘misfortune’ for the new president. For almost 8 years in power, the outgoing administration has always behaved like an overfed father who cannot take care of his frail children. Facts simply spoken is that many Nigerians don’t know where their next meal will come from. Look around your neighborhood, some people are rummaging through the refuse bins for what to eat. Are we still the “Giant of Africa”, the largest economy on the continent? That’s how nations with incompetent leaders fall. Yet government spokespersons continue to malign the truth, and pass the buck.
Many Nigerians no longer believe government is working for their interests. Indeed, the general belief is that those in government are working for their own interests and that of their families. Two years ago, many poor Nigerians were seen in Port Harcourt and Benin scrambling for Christmas palliatives. Some of them died in the melee that ensued . We are almost at that point again where the citizens may engage one another in a fight for survival. Late Chief Tony Anenih once said, when Nigerians begin to fight themselves on the street, that’s when you know things have gotten out of control. We are fast getting to that tipping point. In the face of poverty, how many Nigerians understand the spiritual significance of the birth of Jesus Christ? Do they truly understand that the message of Christ is encapsulated in His unconditional love? But does a hunger, poverty-stricken person see Christmas as Christ in him or her? Understanding this is what makes Christmas worth celebrating. In this season, we need to ask: How much do we care for, and love one another? Does the government care for the people and do what will uplift their well-being? The truth is that, when government and leaders lack vision, they lack the stuff of political life to move the nation forward. This is why our country is getting progressively worse rather than making better things happen for the citizens.
Recall that in 2020, we hailed President Muhammadu Buhari when he lamented the level of poverty in the country. He was quoted to have said that the situation troubled him. Also, recall how in his “Democracy Day” speech on June 12, 2019, the President emphatically promised to “lay the enduring foundations for taking 100 million Nigerians out of mass poverty over the next 10 years”. That would mean 10 million Nigerians will be lifted out of poverty each year . What have we got from that promise? Next to nothing. Instead, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) recently shocked us with revelation that 133 million Nigerians are in extreme poverty, meaning about 63 percent of the population are in the poverty hole. The truth is that pessimism has supplanted hope in Nigeria. Meanwhile, bandits and kidnappers are prowling all over the place. Neither the roads nor the rails are save anymore. It’s because insecurity has reached a frightening dimension.
Price of food items have hit the rooftops. Many families could not afford rice or noodles to eat. Fuel depots are empty. Everywhere you look, hope is fading in Nigeria. There’s a trust deficit in government. Nobody is saying that President Buhari has the magic wand to make Nigeria great overnight or eradicate poverty with the speed of light. What can he do now that he is a lame duck that he couldn’t do in the last seven and a half years ago that has been in power? The bitter truth is that his administration has been incapable of initiating concrete programmes of action to stop the challenges of immediate sort confronting the country. Without a vision beyond one’s own selfish advancement, a leader may be paralyzed once the goal of acquiring power for the sake of it had been achieved. That’s the hole Nigeria is in right now.