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Nobody is sabotaging Buhari

By Editor
08 December 2015   |   2:52 am
SIR: More than five months into the presidency of Muhammadu Buhari (PMB), Nigeria is experiencing agonising fuel shortage and price increases. Probably out of ignorance or deception, many Nigerians around me are saying, “They don’t want him to succeed.”
President Muhammadu Buhari

President Muhammadu Buhari

SIR: More than five months into the presidency of Muhammadu Buhari (PMB), Nigeria is experiencing agonising fuel shortage and price increases. Probably out of ignorance or deception, many Nigerians around me are saying, “They don’t want him to succeed.” Who are the “they”? It means, in the context of the discussion, saboteurs. I then ask a series of questions.

Was it saboteurs who prevented PMB from choosing his ministers until more than five months after his own inauguration as the President? What was happening in those ministries in the fallow period? Was it saboteurs who asked PMB to be selling dollars cheaply to pilgrimage-makers, and to spend N70 million to celebrate Nigeria’s 55th anniversary notwithstanding the economic downturn and the downtrodden? Where lies his focus and priority?

After election, PMB had some weeks to prepare for taking-over power. What did he do in those weeks that he could not strategise for effective take-over? He alienated himself from the economic situation and what was happening in the ministries, including the petroleum industry. Yet, we have to assume that he has been in charge of the petroleum ministry and the other ministries since he took over on May 29, 2015.

Might is right is the order of the day in Nigeria. It led to the Boko Haram insurgency. Nigeria’s Army threatening the Biafra agitators may mean another long struggle, because Nigeria lacks leaders but dictators who rely on coercive resources to settle scores, rightly or wrongly.

I met my mother in America. Rosemary Curcio would say to me: “You are highly opinionated”, where my biological mother, Babayemi Okugbesabi Abioje, would say: “You can be very repetitive”, meaning being focused and insistent. Nigeria is currently unsustainable; it needs reordering, for which PMB and his All Progressives Congress are not ready. Previous rulers were also not ready.

• Pius Abioje,
University of Ilorin

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