Buhari change mantra and great expectations

The change mantra that has come to define the All Progressives Congress (APC) which beat 13 other political parties in Nigeria to produce the country’s next president was well thought-out and couldn’t have come at a better time. Nigerians bought into this mantra not so much for its alliterative and/or chorus-chant appeal. Indeed, change was the only tonic needed in our circumstance when disillusionment and frustration ruled our collective psyche over the arrogance, impunity and insensitivity of the political class coupled with the corrupt, inept and rudderless disposition of leaders at all levels of governance.

The change Nigerians wanted was a total break from the old order and now that that change has come, expectations are mounting to a point where we fear it might turn out to be Charles Dickens’ kind of great expectations.

Dickens, a celebrated English novelist, busied himself with fictionalising the social and economic conditions of the English society of his time which favoured the upper and middle class but further impoverished the lower class where the likes of Phillip Pirrip belonged.

Young Pirrip, the chief protagonist in Dickens’ novel Great Expectations, spent all his childhood years waiting for an anonymous benefactor who, he expected, would bring his needed freedom from the iron grip of a distant relation who “brought him up by hand”. The benefactor, a poor, dishevelled old man, turned up later in Pirrip’s youthful life to be a great burden almost too heavy for him to bear. Needless to say, he was disillusioned and heart-broken.

It is not difficult to draw a parallel between Dickens’ English society and Nigeria of today where a tiny clique of individuals, mainly of the political class and a much smaller clan of capitalists, feed fat from the commonwealth, reeling in stupendous wealth and leaving the larger society in want and woe.

Expectations from the incoming government of Muhammadu Buhari are high, and understandably so, because the citizenry has been so traumatised and the economy so bastardised that the present doesn’t any longer excite interest in the future with life steadily dovetailing into hopelessness.

It is pertinent for us to caution, considering the way everybody is talking about this change and expectation, that as individuals and as a collective, we should not overstretch our imagination, just as we advise that the incoming government should not allow the hope of the people turn out to be Pirrip’s kind of expectation.

We strongly believe that there is nothing wrong in Nigerians expecting a better deal from the incoming government than they have got in the past 16 years of democratic governance in the country under the leadership of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

Whether it is from APC as a party or Buhari as a president, Nigerians deserve the change they have been promised, the change they massively voted for, and this change, in our opinion, will not require rocket science to happen. What Nigerians want from their government are not three square meals on daily basis. Their needs are, perhaps, not as many as even the government may be thinking. The change they want involves simply getting the infrastructure right such that the problems of power, transportation, housing and potable water will be things of the past.

Experts in economic development theory say that availability of power and efficient transport system are the major drivers of the economic growth and power of the developed nations of the world. We can’t agree more.

We consider Nigeria’s less than 4,000MW of electricity for a population of 170 million people and a GDP size of $510 billion as a travesty of economic development. We also believe that an economy where mobility is impaired is dead because when men and materials cannot change location, both the economy and its growth are deadlocked, and that is the case of Nigeria at the moment.

So, the Buhari and APC change mantra will only make meaning when homes and businesses start getting a minimum of 20 hours of electricity a day, and the country is opened up through an efficient transport system. It is our hope that Buhari and his team will live up to this change because 21st century Nigeria cannot afford dashed expectations, like Pirrip in Dickens’ Great Expectations!