Before and since the administration of President Mohammadu Buhari happened on the scene, Nigerians have been fed with hope. Hope that the administration has a magic wand that would immediately solve all the nation’s woes. During the campaign with the slogan of change, the All Progressives Congress (APC) gave Nigerians an overdose of hope of what it would do differently than its predecessor in office. Nigerians were promised jobs.
That the first year of the administration would witness the creation of 3million jobs. That it would stabilize the nation’s currency against the dollar, promise of a meal a day for school kids was made while Nigerians were equally promised that the cost of fuel would go down. I remember former petroleum minister and erudite Professor Tam David-West telling Nigerians that there was no reason why Nigerians should not buy a litre of fuel at N40 per litre once General Muhammadu Buhari became president.
The promises were many, including the provision of power within a few months of assuming office. Indeed, one of the jokes on social media against the Minister of darkness,oops sorry, power, Mr Babatunde Raji Fashola, was his claim that provision of power for Nigerians should not be rocket science. He had said then, “there is a danger that very soon, we will miss the lesson we have learnt over the years. This is because if a government makes a public commitment, the government must fulfill that promise. Electricity was not discovered yesterday, it is over 100 years old and no excuses will be acceptable from the federal government for not providing electricity.
“We are the only nation that has oil and gas and no electricity to its citizens. Angola and Gabon don’t have the kind of oil we have. There are many countries that do not produce oil and they enjoy electricity. Very soon we will make a choice on the next set of leaders and this will be done through the ballot papers”.  The above was said before the election. He has been minister in charge of providing power since more than a year now,  but the situation has not really improved. He is indeed coming to the realization that provision of electricity is really rocket science.
With so many promises, it was not surprising that at a stage, the President was quoted to have said he did not make some of the promises attributed to him. So many were the promises that the actors had even forgotten such promises were made.
It’s obvious that government has fallen short in its contractual agreement with Nigerians. Almost all the promises had not been met. Rather, things had become worse.
Rather than providing 3million jobs, about 4.58million Nigerians have lost their jobs in the last one year, this is according to the government agency, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). Also in the last one year about 272 corporate entities have shutdown, 50 of which were manufacturing companies, according to the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN).
One can safely conclude that the government has fallen short in the performance index. Reason could be that the administration is more clueless than we have been made to believe. It also clearly shows that the administration does not have any idea of what to do to help reposition the economy.
To an economic illiterates like me, it’s obvious that the present economic recession in the country was caused by bad policies. MAN drew Nigerians attention to one of the policies, the restriction on 41 items by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) which has led businesses out of business.
Many other people have also concluded that the economy went south because of the demarketing of the country by its Chief Marketing Officer, President Buhari who never missed the opportunity of telling all who cared to listen that his country men are corrupt. This, they claimed adversely affected investment. The president probably meant well, unfortunately, the call was wrong.
What all these  boil down to is what I have written about here and what many eminent Nigerians have said and are still saying, that the government does not have a clear cut economic blue print. Not only that, the blame game that the Goodluck Jonathan administration brought the country to the present situation has become jaded and many have said so and are still saying so. It is no longer music in the ears.
If the previous administration had done all that is being said, leading to the recession, what did the present government do in the last one year to bring the country out of what it considered the ‘misrule’ of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) government?  In May, when the administration was just a year in office, I had written about its opaque economic policy while assessing its performance after one year.
The piece primarily focused on its policy and I asked then, ‘what led to the flip-flop policy? Is it a pointer to what has been said about this administration that it does not have a clear cut economic  blueprint and is only swayed into decision by prevailing situation? Would that be the reason we looked towards China for economic salvation? What if China doesn’t work, where next would we be looking towards? It is important for the administration to let us have a clear cut policy and economic direction. This would help. Nigerians would then know what to expect at any point in time’,
But not much has changed since then. The noise about China has petered out, thus confirming what I said then.
Former CBN governor and Emir of Kano, Muhammad Sanusi II, had criticized the administration’ s economic direction a few weeks ago and had urged the government to change direction. He followed it up again in a message during the last Sallah break when he called on the federal government to seek expert advice on the way forward for the economy.  It is the same thing from Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, Matthew Hassan Kukah who urged  the president to stop passing the buck and blaming the Jonathan administration for everything.
“We didn’t  vote a government to complain about yesterday, if we wanted yesterday, the new government would not be there. The previous government didn’t only do bad things; he did a lot of good things.
“ No matter how much you praise or abuse (former President Goodluck) Jonathan, he is no more the President of Nigeria. I think that people must understand that you take power to solve problems not to agonise”.
From the above, the president needs to take a cue. Nigerians want solution to the problem of poverty and the different challenges confronting them, not the lamentation we kept hearing on a daily basis. If not, the Ekiti State governor, Ayodele Fayose would have the last laugh and say, ‘I told you so that Buhari has nothing to offer Nigeria’.

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