Why Buhari needs four more years!

One of the troubles with Nigeria is that there are too many orators. Orators speak the minds of the people who are sometimes not on point. It is better to pray at this perilous time for emergence of more spiritual men who can be oracles. Oracles speak the minds of the gods who are most times spot-on. The nation will benefit a great deal from columnists, political writers and pundits who are generally respected as oracles. One of the oracles, sorry spiritual men, anointed me the other day and since then I have somehow migrated from the rank of orators to oracles. And I have since been more successful in the art of speaking the minds of the people and the gods. You would have noticed too that I have been looking into the seeds of time and interpreting the times like the children of Issaachar the ancient book tells us understood the times in the Middle East in those days and knew what Israel ought to do.

So, I have been empowered as a Prophet of Hope. Believe you and me will be established. Don’t believe a recent hopeless Prophet of Doom, an artful dodger who sent a WhatsApp message to the simple-minded citizens that as for the future of political leadership here, blessed are you if you are hopeless, for you will not be disappointed! What a cheeky and unchiselled citizen journalist, an ordinary orator! As for me, my household and my readers, we will continue to have confidence in the future of our great country, unarguably, the most populous black nation on earth. What is more, the country is at this time in a safe hand. Yes, Nigeria is in the hand of one of the icons of the ‘Federal Republic of the Nigerian Army’, (apology to General Chris Ali) General Muhammadu Buhari.

And so there shouldn’t be any bitter debate about a second term for such a humble, good man who was so moderate in 2015 that he adopted barely a three-point agenda, namely improving the economy, fighting corruption and insecurity, especially in the North East.

Even members of the opposition and the mainstream media can see from all indications that the economy has been under some stress, thanks to global recession. We have been in and out of recession, Praise God! Even the zero-tolerance for corruption of the Buhari administration is still on Ground Zero. Institutional corruption (especially in the public service) hasn’t been touched at all. The anti-corruption agencies have been bogged down by all sorts of challenges including suspected high-profile sabotage by two key institutions, the Senate and the Department of State Services (DSS). Can you imagine, the President’s own man, the DSS chief executive who hails from Daura, wrote twice to the Senate not to confirm the President’s only clean man in the country nominated as EFCC Chairman, Ibrahim Magu. He (Magu) was nominated as Acting Chairman in November 2015 and today is April 8, 2018 he has not been confirmed by the Senate. Today, technically speaking, the Buhari adminitration’s EFCC has no Chairman since a Federal High Court had declared that the Senate has powers to confirm and reject EFCC Chairmanship candidates.

Now the country should be persuaded that the president was recuperating in the United Kingdom when Acting President Yemi Osinbajo twice nominated Magu who had been acting for about a year before that time. Lest we forget, even the ICPC Acting Chairman, Professor Bolaji Owasanoye who was nominated in August last year has not been confirmed. The stubborn Senate has been asking why the president has continued to retain Magu it had rejected twice. The Senate has not realised that the President’s main ‘Legal Adviser’, the Vice President, is a world-class Professor of Law from the Great University of Lagos. Besides, the Chairman, Presidential Advisory Committee on Anti-Corruption, Itse Sagay, is another Professor of Law. He was a Dean at the reputable University of Benin. ‘The Law’ himself Femi Falana was the luminary who had advised the Vice President while he was acting to ignore the EFCC enabling Act (2004) about seeking Senate’s nod for one and only Magu.

So, in view of the quantum of chaos the big lawyers have caused the president in his anti-corruption warfare, don’t you think the president requires more than one year remaining now to fix the broken anti-graft agencies? Lest we forget, even the rebels in the system have conspired with the National Assembly and Egmont Group of Financial intelligence Units to take away the real power house of the EFCC, the Financial Intelligence Unit to the Central Bank. The battle is on. The unscrupulous fifth columnists and all the saboteurs do not know that the President needs the EFCC and ICPC, not to talk of the Civil Service to fight corruption.

Lest we forget, the President too has been made to forget that the Office of the Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC) has been vacant since March 2017 when Deaconess Joan Ayo’s tenure expired. No one in the presidential bureaucracy has reminded the president that a constitutional body for the recruitment, discipline and promotion of the federal civil servants has had no Chairman for more than a year. You see that was how the Mainagate crept in like a thief in the night – in the absence of a substantive FCSC Chairman.

And here is the real thing, the President who has had some health challenges that have taken some steam out of his time for strategic thinking needs four more years to rethink his presidential bureaucracy. There has been unexpected instability in the presidential bureaucracy headed by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation. In his first term, the President failed to recruit a suitable SGF. The first one, Babachir David Lawal was caught in a grass-cutting corruption snare in his north-east IDP’s jumbo rehabilitation contract. Even the Chief of Staff to the President is yet to answer to an allegation of some N500 million worth of bribe involving a major telecommunication firm fined for some unethical practice. You can see that the president has been managing a rickety presidential bureaucracy he had laboured for about six months to put in place. Verily, verily, I say unto you, the chief executive of the federation needs four more years to get a world-class bureaucracy that will assist him to get the real dynamic capabilities needed to run the country.

The rest of the world can move on with their globalisation forces and all that. This is Nigeria. The world will wait for her to get its act together under President Muhammadu Buhari, easily the only one whose body language can win election for the APC even if they lose Nigeria. It doesn’t and shouldn’t matter. Only four more years will not kill Nigeria in the Federal Republic of the Nigerian Army.

As for insecurity in the North East, it is getting curiouser and curiouser that the more the army declared the Boko haram insurgents technically defeated, the more the insurgents give the nation reasons why $1 billion (USD) would be needed to knock out the national reproach called Boko Haram. There is even a sense in which the nation can say that this year, Boko Haram can be nominated as any major newspaper’s “Person of the Year” because they seem to have had more superior firepower than Buratai’s men. While the nation was still smarting from the pain of 2014 abduction of 276 Chibok Girls in President Goodluck Jonathan’s era, the artful insurgents surprised the Buhari adminitration with the bold abduction of 115 Dapchi Girls from school. No doubt the tragedy in Dapchi has made nonsense of the president’s war on Boko Haram.

Come to think of it, at the weekend, a United States General and Commander of Special Operations Command, Africa, Marcus Hicks described Nigeria’s Boko Haram (under PMB) as “the most lethal terror organisation in the world” despite claims by the federal government that the extremist group had been significantly degraded and technically defeated. The issue of the danger of the Nigeria’s terrorist organisation came up last week in the United States at a press briefing where the need to reinforce development, diplomacy and defence in Africa…
And so because three years of reinforcement and blame of the poor strategy and intelligence management on the previous administration has not produced sustainable result to the extent that a whopping $1 billion would be needed to hit the terrorist group into coma, four more years would be needed to do the strategic plan on how to use the $1 billion war chest to deal ruthlessly and decisively with Boko Haram. Only orators who lack depth of the oracles would not understand these undercurrents to deepen the war on corruption and insecurity everywhere at the moment.

I hope those clamouring for and promising another mirage called change would remember for a moment that there are more security challenges for the reticent General from Daura. For instance, apart from the FCSC critical vacancies, two very important economic agencies, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS are yet to get their Governing Boards dissolved when this administration was sworn in.

Besides, some concerned citizens have been uncomfortable with the style of the Inspector-General of Police who the other day reportedly defied a presidential directive on relocation to Benue State to deal with a crisis. The President has been so busy with other security and perception issues arising from choice of another Katsina citizen as Director-General of National Intelligence Agency (NIA) since the Director-General of DSS also hails from Katsina State, among other allegations of clannishness that he did not know that the IG did not carry out his order. We should understand and note that soon and very soon he will ask for four more years to deal with absence of dynamism and operational efficiency in the Nigeria Police and constant allegation of nepotism and parochialism about his presidency.

All told, since he has found a fighter in one and only Magu, reconnected with Mr. Fix-it, the Jagaban Borgu and Asiwaju of south-west politics, penetrated our oriental brothers in the power-hungry south-east zone, the coast seems clear for four more years to establish cattle colonies, revive a national carrier promised since 2015 and unify Nigeria’s broken bond.

I only hope that the orators in the polity would not misread the elements and claim that the oracles clamouring for four more years are just economic men, the idealised human beings who act rationally and with complete knowledge, seek to maximise personal utility or satisfaction. If the orators do that, (call oracles economic men) we will artfully list them in the ‘black book’ just invented as “looters’ list”. After all, litigation on the blacklist won’t be settled before the Kingdom of God will come upon the human race. See you in the Mirage called 2019…