My
prayer for Nigeria is that President Muhammadu Buhari will not contest another
presidential election in 2019. I hope when the time comes, he will do the
noblest thing: Thank Nigerians for giving him a chance to serve, allow the
transition process to run smoothly without his interference, and walk away with
his head high. That will be the best thing for Nigeria, and one hopes he has
enough of the acclaimed Mandela spirit in him to know when to walk away from
the gambling table. Nigeria is doing poorly under his watch and we cannot
continue this way until 2023. We cannot be munching the same old issues on our
weakened gums every election cycle. If Buhari decides to contest in 2019, we
will waste about half of the electioneering time on enervating debates about
his health; arguing whether he has the physical and mental capability to
continue the taxing job of leading Nigeria or not. His detractors and his
followers will have a lot of material to chew on for many such specious
debates, none of which will improve our lot.
There
will be much talk about Buhari’s disposition: how he not only failed to stop
medical tourism as he promised but has probably spent the highest sum of public
money ever on his health. This year, he has spent almost six months abroad
treating an unknown ailment, and there is no guarantee he will not travel again
before his tenure expires. His foreign trips have cost Nigeria tons of naira,
and knowing how prohibitive medical costs in Britain can be for a non-citizen,
Buhari has probably cost Nigeria higher than the budgetary allocation to the
entire health sector in Nigeria. And the man is not humble enough even to be
grateful to Nigerians whose sweat and blood pay for these luxuries.
When he returned from his last lengthy trip in
August, after some 104 days, his first impulse was to re-establish territorial
dominance to dissidents who had gained ground in his absence. Shorn of either
tact or contemplation, he rode roughshod on an issue that could have been
handled far differently. If Buhari chooses to contest, these issues will come
up and his defenders, will, expectedly, twist themselves into climbing ropes to
defend their “big daddy”. They will blackmail us with religious and cultural
sentiments about not holding a poor man’s health against him. They will whip
out their Red Book and mindlessly spew out their regular jabberwocky about
their poor old man. They will say he is deserving of our indulgence because he
is the messiah who saved Nigeria from the 10 plagues, (never mind that people
are fighting Pharoah’s army and drowning in the Red Sea).
The conversation will expectedly spiral into the
usual argument about Buhari fighting corruption. His aides will argue that for
Buhari’s flaws to be so evident, it could only mean that corruption is fighting
back. At this point, aides will then reach for their favourite whipping boy –
Dr. Goodluck Jonathan – to blame him for everything wrong with Nigeria. They
will do all these to pass the time and by the time we are done with this chaotic
cycle of palaver, more than 90 per cent of the election time would have been
frittered and the election date, close. We would have little time left to
engage the actual issues that matter to our lives as Nigerians and our future
as a country. Time is running out on us as a nation and we can barely afford
distractions. We need to be serious and Buhari’s presence will hardly let us
be. That is why he needs to go in 2019.
Buhari’s government has fallen far short of the
standard it set for itself and it is unfair that we should be called upon to
discuss his underperformance when far weightier matters are at stake. We should
not have to be running through the content of its manifesto to see what
promises he made about reforming the country’s political construct when we
should be having far more useful conversations with a fresher candidate who has
his thought through political reforms and is ready to highlight them lucidly.
In 2019, we should not have to be carrying out a post-mortem of Jonathan’s
government, along with the usual spirit-sapping news of who stole what, when,
and where. We want someone who has thought through the art of fighting
corruption in Nigeria, has viable and workable plans towards achieving them and
is not going to surround himself with people his government should be putting
through the
From 2019, we should not have to listen to about a
mere 55 people who have stolen a whopping $6.2bn from Nigeria’s coffers
anymore. We need to move forward as the stories of corruption are no longer
entertaining; they are now a psychological burden that breeds despair in the
audience and ultimately desensitises them to corruption. We no longer need such
diversion
We should not have to resurrect the old question of
whether Buhari has a certificate or not. Neither should we be consumed with his
aging body when he gets exhausted on campaign grounds and flies out for another
round of medical tourism in the thick of the election. None of that should be
our portion. Come 2019, we should not have to deal with the odium that will
emanate from Buhari’s aides who will dominate the media with their
religious-spiced charade. We deserve more; we deserve better.
If Buhari loves us and loves this country, he should
just go back to Daura so he can free the political space for more deserving
candidates. In 2019, we want to be talking about issues that border on
rebuilding the education sector that has been consistently vandalised by
previous administrations that needed to weaken the mind of Nigerians to make
them more susceptible to administrative abuse.
We need to talk about how we can revamp the Nigerian
health sector so that every Nigerian, from the interior of Borno State to the
cosmopolitan Lagos can have access to quality medical care. We do not want to
hear Mrs. Aisha Buhari talk about how Aso Rock, with all the budgetary
allocation it receives, lacks elementary amenities. If Mrs. Buhari is pained by
what is happening in Aso Rock, she could have conducted an independent
investigation and resolved the issue privately. Bringing it to the public is a
waste of time because her audience has no power to adjudicate. Public access to
medical care is worse and Mrs. Buhari’s complaints, from the top of the
pinnacle where she is perched and enjoys the privilege of her positions, can
barely appreciate people’s health challenges.
From 2019, we should not be dealing with leaders who
gorge themselves on public wealth and then turn around to enter the oppression
Olympics with genuinely disenfranchised people. No matter what the APC and its
governors – especially the likes of Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State who
is an ardent supporter of Buhari 2019 say – I pray Buhari leave the arena and
let Nigeria breathe.
Not that I believe that 2019 will turn Nigeria into
an El Dorado or that a perfect leader is waiting in the wings to take over. Our
walk to freedom is far and the road ahead offers no guarantees. There is a lot
of work in our future to get to the Promised Land and that is why we can barely
afford to waste time beating a dying horse and insisting it takes us home. We
should be looking for candidates who have energy, goals, plans, ideas,
philosophy, and vision. Buhari cannot offer all these for obvious reasons, some
of them not his fault. And that is why he should do all of us a favour and exit
this stage when he can still get some applause.
Source: punchng
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