Let’s not pretend about this: Nigeria is in trouble, big trouble. The poor vision or lack of vision of past leaders has caught up with over 170 million people and has, as it now seems, hamstrung their liberties and right to good life. At the core of this humungous problem is corruption. The C-word is the harbinger of our collective pain; the precursor to doomsday. This is why no reasonable Nigerian would fault the militant spirit with which President Muhammadu Buhari is fighting graft and its many cousins.
I really admire his courage to go at the leviathan which is what corruption is. It has become a principality, entrenched in the land and has over the years refused to bow to anybody, any government. In fact, no Nigerian government at all levels has ever dared the monster of corruption in the manner Buhari has done. It is a compliment which fittingly epigraphs his credential as a ramrod straight retired Nigerian General. Most of his colleagues who served with him in the military are now billionaires without any real, visible and feasible entrepreneurship. They became billionaires and super rich because they stole public funds, Period! But not Buhari!
I like the fire and spunk he has injected into the EFCC to go after the suspects and perceived looters of our national patrimony. Even admirable is the zeal he has deployed in probing the Goodluck Jonathan government and the major actors of that administration which in the final analysis may get an Oscar nomination for a yet-to-be scripted movie – Art of Looting. But it will be more admirable and indeed more patriotic if Buhari could just extend the name-and-shame inquest to the various outstanding corruption matters like the Halliburton scam, the Siemens bung, the Abuja light rail scandal, the 2016 budget padding soap opera in which his own budget was violated, mutilated and corrupted with all forms of viruses, especially those viruses that specialize in adding three or more zeros to a figure to convert millions to billions of naira.
I wish Buhari could summon the courage to investigate some persons who are in his cabinet and some within his party, the APC, who have acquired both local and international reputation as murky and unclean in all their ways. There are many perceived filthy pigs fawning all over Mr. President and they simply do not add colour or grandeur to his government, instead their presence around the President adds a drossy veneer to his government. The world is watching and waiting.
Corruption is evil; it has cankered the soul of the nation and that is why Buhari sees it as enemy number one. I concur; but there are other enemies President Buhari must deal with before they cause a cataclysmic implosion in the nation’s political agora. I call them Buhari’s enemies within. They are Lai Mohammed, the former propaganda-in-chief of the APC now upgraded to Minister of Information and Culture of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, the septuagenarian National Chairman of Buhari’s party, the APC.
These two men, individually and collectively, constitute a nuisance in the political arena. They are the blight Nigerians see in Buhari’s otherwise brilliant white ‘Agbada’. Nigerians tolerated them and their clannish propaganda during electioneering. At that time, nobody should have begrudged them; even their main rivals, the PDP, had its tribe of gassy and garrulous men in the mould of Femi Fani-Kayode and Dr. Doyin Okupe. But that was the era of politics. Now is the era of governance and delivering on electoral promises but Mohammed and Oyegun do not seem to realize this.
Lai Mohammed, typical of him, has continued to insult and abuse critics of Buhari and the APC government. He still talks, speaks and acts as the spokesman for his party rather than as the minister of information and culture. As the person in charge of the ministry of information and culture, his primary duty is to engage the publics, Nigerians and the rest of the world, in cultured language permissible in contemporary marketing communications milieu. It is his duty to inform Nigerians and the world about the actions and inactions of Nigerian government and not to engage in endless shadow-boxing with the so-called opposition. Mohammed’s office has grown from party spokesman to spokesman of the whole nation but the occupant of that office has refused to grow with the office. He has remained at the very best tethered to the old stump, unwilling to see beyond the limited aperture of his party hence he blunders and does not know when to rake the muck or sling the mud.
Just imagine this! When the budget scam broke and there were insinuations that the 2016 budget has undergone midnight surgery when the President was fast asleep, Lai Mohammed was the first to blurt that the budget was not padded. He was emphatic about it. “A lot has been said about the budget. Let me make it clear that nobody can ever accuse this government of padding any budget”. That was Lai Mohammed last weekend. A few days later, President Buhari, the man who submitted the budget to the National Assembly humbly admitted that the budget has been rejigged and that those behind such deviously criminal scheme must not go unpunished. Between Buhari and Lai Mohammed, one person must be lying. And of course you know who!
The case of Oyegun is more damaging and pathetic. He no longer speaks for his party, he now speaks for Buhari, and doing damage to the President’s image. Yet, the President has one of the best media teams ever assembled in the history of Nigeria’s Presidency. Recall the vile tirades and accusatory jabs he threw at the Justices of the Supreme Court for upholding the election of Nyesom Wike of Rivers State and Udom Emmanuel of Akwa Ibom. Let’s even pardon him on this but what about his latest display of unreason and suffusion of hollow thinking? When Buhari in one day sacked 26 heads of parastatals and agencies (his prerogative to do so, anyway) without explanation, it was Oyegun who volunteered to tell Nigerians the mind of the President. He said the ‘victims’ were sacked because “they were saboteurs”; all of them without exception. Chai!! And this man will be 77 years by August, this year.
These are the real enemies of President Buhari and only the President can call them to order. Let’s show some decency and civility and not insult the intelligence and sensibilities of even the most ardent Buhari supporters. By the way, let the anti-corruption music boom loud and clear.
Author: KEN UGBECHIE
