By Ola Oyeleye
The first gaffe of the messiah was his inaugural speech; he stole a quote that was not his, “I belong to everybody and I belong to nobody”. Yeah, plagiarism was not a big deal in Nigeria anyways. So we unlooked.
Then he decided to run the country as a loner. It took him 3months to appoint a chief of staff, 6months to form a cabinet and over 30months to constitute chairmen and members of boards of agencies. We made excuses for him that he was taking his time to select angels in human form as ministers and members of his cabinet.
In the first 6months of this government, Mr President practically flew across the earth. In fact, he lived more on AIR than in Aso Rock. We joked about it and kept quiet.
The ‘Traveling Episode’ gave us lines such as; “you don’t expect those that gave me 5% votes to be treated as those that gave me 97% votes”. “President Michelle of western Germany”. “Ministers are noise makers”. “Nigerians are corrupt”. As usual we laughed and unlooked.
Again, he fully implemented TSA without recourse to MDAs and other economic stakeholders, floated naira and subjected FX to the market forces, ban importation of rice and raw materials for the manufacturing industry and crashed the economy. Our GDP contracted in the successive quarters and we entered recession. “Oh, well it was not his fault, it was GEJ’s fault”-as hypocrites, we unlooked.
100days in office, nothing to show. “Damn it, a 100days milestone is not enough to right the wrongs of PDP’s 16yrs of mismanagement”. We unlooked.
He targets leading opposition voices and goes after dissents, tags them with graft, incarcerates them, tries them on the pages of Newspapers and social media but fails to provide evidence to nail them in court. In most cases, the court would throw away and discharge the cases based on lack of evidence. In others, the court would grant the defendants bail but he would refuse to honor the court verdicts. Such are the impunities of the ‘messiah’.
He goes as far as carrying out a gestapo assault on judges at night using the DSS. Instead of holding him responsible for those repugnant acts, we exclaim, “oh the judiciary is corrupt”. We unlook still.
He would make appointments that would require the ratification of the Senate. When the Senate pulls the plug on the appointment based on gross misconduct or corruption, he would retain the same appointee with impunity. And here we go, “let’s suspend the constitution to allow Buhari fight corruption”. Excuse me?
Again, he keeps making one-sided and nepotic appointments. If someone calls him out on it. The pseudo-intellectuals would pounce and say, “Allow Buhari to work with the people he can trust. Federal character does not matter as much as trust and competence”.
1year in office, nothing to show as achievements, he starts denying all his campaign promises. This time it becomes ridiculous, APC says Buhari is not aware of the campaign promises, in fact it was the party that made the promises, not Buhari. The lies are still not enough, they would turn to their punching bag, GEJ and blame him for their failures. We keep mute and unlook.
Instead of resigning to take care of his health, he spent 104days in UK hospital without disclosing what ails him or how much of tax payer’s money he spent throughout the medical tour. Recall that N3.87billion and N3.2billion were appropriation act allocated to the State House Clinic for 2016 and 2017 fiscal years respectively. And one of his campaign promises was to stop elite medical tourism. At the end, we made some noise, but the noise sounded more like ‘We see nothing. We hear nothing’.
