President Buhari, it’s time for action

By now we expect the euphoria that greeted the election of Muhammadu Buhari on March 28 and his eventual inauguration, three days ago, as Nigeria’s fifth elected president to have died down. It is now time to get down to the real business of rebuilding the fractured Nigerian state.

The task before the new administration is indeed enormous, and the expectations of Nigerians are very high. These high expectations arise because the citizenry, in the last few years, 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. Nigerians have not had the best of deals in the past 16 years under the rule of the People’s Democratic Party at the centre, with some observers describing those years as “the years of locusts and caterpillars”.

The change mantra that came to define the electioneering campaign of the All Progressives Congress (APC) came in the nick of time, and Nigerians bought into it basically because change was the only tonic needed in the 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.

Nigerians wanted a total break from the old order, where a tiny clique of individuals, mainly of the political class and a much smaller clan of capitalists, fed fat from the commonwealth, reeling in stupendous wealth and leaving the larger society in want and woe. And on March 28, they demonstrated this when they voted en masse for Buhari and the APC. The inauguration of Buhari on May 29 therefore presents a chance for a new beginning.

For us, therefore, Nigerians deserve the change they have been promised, the change they massively voted for, whether it is from the APC as a party or Buhari as a president. And this change, in our opinion, will not require rocket science to happen. What Nigerians want from their government are, perhaps, not as many as even the government may be thinking. The change they want involves simply building stronger institutions of governance, fixing the broken economy, and getting the infrastructure right such that the problems of power, transportation, housing and potable water will be things of the past.

It inspires great hope that the newly sworn-in president has shown, through his inaugural speech, that he understands what the issues are and has committed to tackling them headlong. As President Buhari has said, “Insecurity, pervasive corruption, the hitherto unending and seemingly impossible fuel and power shortages are the immediate concerns. We are going to tackle them head on. Nigerians will not regret that they have entrusted national responsibility to us. We must not succumb to hopelessness and defeatism. We can fix our problems.”

It was Mario Matthew Cuomo, the 52nd governor of New York (1983-1995), who once said that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. In other words, there is often a wide gap between politics and governance. What politicians say during electioneering campaigns is most often at variance with what they do when they assume office. This must not be so for the Buhari administration.

As Cuomo also said in his 1984 Democratic National Convention Address, “We must get the American public to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship, to the reality, the hard substance of things.” The Buhari government must now go beyond pious pronouncements and begin immediately to take decisive actions that will positively alter the hopelessness and despair of the last few years. Nigerians are impatient, and the countdown has begun.