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WHERE IS NIGERIA GOING UNDER BUHARI's SECOND TERM?


The reality of uncertainty and hard time ahead for Nigerians in the next four years is already within everyone's glare even before Buhari's second term inauguration. I was very engaged on this platform for one year leading to the election, with the hope to sensitize friends and family about the danger of perpetuating an unproductive leader in office, many called me names and questioned my rationale and effrontery to comments on Nigerian matter when I do not reside there - that I am clueless because I live abroad, they have forgotten I am still a Nigerian and I know the country like the back of my hands. My response was that people like me who have left home could see the decay in our nation better because we see the stack difference every time we return home, whereas those who daily witness the decay are unconscious of how low the nation has reached. The nation is on the verge of a big crisis if nothing is done to salvage what is left.

At the core of Nigeria's problems are:

1. Majority of our leaders lack the capacity to lead and are not prepared in any form to solve our problem. The only things they have are wishes and desires to lead, they have nothing upstairs.

2. We have leaders who are completely far away from ordinary people and are completely in dark at the state of decay in the nation. The same people who tell our doctors to leave, if they can not take the peanut they pay them, will go abroad for medical treatment while they frustrate the few doctors left to treatment Nigerians. They refused to fund the educational sector and they send their wards to expensive schools abroad, sometimes on taxpayers money.

3. We have leaders who are inherently corrupt - morally and financially. The value system in Nigeria is so decayed that people only know their level of idiosyncrasy when they travel abroad to know how crazy they are in their thought as to what good governance means. Allocating tens of millions of naira for a haircut; allocating money to a clinic for the same equipment every year. Lawmakers collecting a jumbo salary for doing next to nothing - more than lawmakers in the developed world like UK or USA. Buhari's mantra for the campaign was an anti-corruption fight. Ask him what his strategy was in the last four years, there is none. What is the strategy going forward? Buhari's government has recovered trillions of naira in stolen funds but ask them why they have borrowed more money than any government in the history of Nigeria, they have no answer. Ask them what are the SIGNIFICANT projects executed from this money, they have no answer. You would expect that Nigeria would be on its way to look like Dubai with all the recovered money, borrowed money, increased IGR, revenue from petroleum, no, it is not. We see the railway projects started by Jonathan's government being completed, which are good. You call to question the quality of some of these projects that are executed by Chinese firms on bad loans.

4. There are ZERO strategies to address the free fall of the economy that is creating all kinds of social ills - from increased kidnapping to more yahoo-yahoo boys and all kind of criminal activities, to Nigerian PROFESSIONALS leaving the country in droves to seek asylum as a refuge in many countries since Buhari became the president. Buhari's government has spent trillions of naira on projects, yet the economy has gone worse. This does not add up, capital projects execution supposed to stimulate the economy because money is in circulation - but the exact opposite is what we see with Buhari's government. I posited this before that the reason for this is their strategy - most of the contracts in Buhari's government goes to a few people (his family and political supporters like Tinubu, Amaechi, etc.) instead of being open to all. These few people are stacking up their gains in investments that would not create jobs or physically keeping the money in soakaway somewhere, or the project is given to Chinese companies who hire Chinese to top positions and take all the profit back to China on a project executed by Chinese loans - how will the economy grow under this type of circumstances? There is still significant corruption going on within the national assembly; on our roads, at the seaports, at the airport, in various agencies and government parastatals. The reason for this inadequacy in the fight against corruption are lack of a solid plan, lack of complete transparency in the process where party (APC) members are immune from prosecution if they stole, corruption in the judiciary and the wrong person leading the anti-corruption agency

5. Security - no will to fight the Fulani menace and onslaught. They are the president's kinsmen and he is wary of clamping down on them with force as he did with IPOB. The increasing spate of poverty is further fueling this menace and kidnapping is now an organized crime scheme. Boko Haram is still ravaging despite Buhari's government false claim that they have defeated BH.

The bad sign on the wall for Buhari is that all but one of the previous living head of state or president were not at his second inauguration. Mr. President had nothing to say to Nigerians on his inauguration with the current state of the nation, can you imagine? The lack of awareness of the state of the nation by Buhari is concerning. I believe in its totality that re-electing Buhari was a mistake Nigerians made - that is if he was truly re-elected by Nigerians in the true sense of it because the demographics of voting is questionable as far as I am concerned. Ukraine just elected a young leader, whose only experience was playing a president on the TV. We begged Nigerians to consider the alternative candidates in the last election and by so doing, perhaps force a re-run to overcome lack of consensus candidate among them. No, the majority chose between two evils. Nigeria will pay the price for a bad choice for another four years. My hope for the nation is waning and very soon, I may stop commenting about Nigeria in its entirety. I am just frustrated that the nation is not moving forward, and there is ZERO sign that things will get better in Buhari's second term, especially if he continues to rely on carrier politicians for executive positions instead of technocrats with reputation. I am bewildered that a nation so blessed is home to the poorest people per capita, the most children out of school per capita, the most decayed infrastructures and nothing seem to be working in Nigeria. Free money from petroleum that is at the root cause of this problem will soon finish or become irrelevant because of the global trend towards renewable energy. We should not wait to re-experience the crisis of the fall in the price of petroleum we saw in 2014, another will be devastating and we may not recover as a nation. This is the time to take advantage of all the free gifts that God has blessed the nation with. Time to build a strong foundation for ALL of our children. God bless Nigeria.

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