A Dying Nation, Its Travelling President And The Lying Party

A Dying Nation, Its Travelling President And The Lying Party
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In the run up to the 2015 presidential election,
leaders and members of APC were very vocal in
condemning the then president of the country,
President Goodluck Jonathan, for every step he
took. This even included attending churches on
Sunday, Jonathan's religion's holy day of
obligation. It was Babatunde Raji Fashola, the then
governor of Lagos State and now Honourable
Minister of Power, Works and Housing, that
succinctly captured the mind of the All
Progressives Congress (APC) leaders and
supporters then when at the sixth Bola Tinubu
Colloquium in Lagos some time in March 2014, he
charged at his listeners by asking them if they
wanted "someone who spends most of his time in
church or mosque, or the man who is ready to
spend his time on the job."

That was when life was very sweet as an
opposition party especially with the tolerance level
of Goodluck Jonathan. At least, Goodluck was
spending his time in the country even if, in the
hyperbolic words of Fashola, he was spending
"most" of it in church.

However, fast forward to today, we have the same
Fashola who is currently serving as a minister
under president Muhammadu Buhari who would
remain Nigeria's most travelled president for a
long time in our history. So far, since his
inauguration into office on May 29, 2015, President
Buhari has traversed 24 countries of the world
within a short period of 9 months.

Considering our scarce resources, this is too
frequent, too costly and is a disturbing
development as the nation is in its worst economic
quagmire since independence. Never in the history
of our nation even when we thought we faced
economic recession and hyper-inflation has our
exchange rate run on auto-devaluation as it is
now. The prices of food stuff and basic items are
climbing higher and out of the reach of the
common man. The purchasing power of the
citizens has been badly eroded while people are
not only not getting employed, those who are
employed are losing their jobs in droves.
The economy is at a standstill! No gainful
economic activity going on anywhere.

Infrastructural development that characterised
Goodluck Jonathan's administration has since
been brought to a halt; our revived agricultural
sector is now in a speedy reverse course. While
harmless and armless youths protesting peacefully
within their constitutional rights are regularly
mowed down by mindless security agencies in
Zaria, Aba, Onitsha etc, the supreme court has
come under several severe attacks from the ruling
party as the Honourable Justices of the apex court
have resisted the "body language" charm and
refused to do the bidding of the party in some of
the judgements given by the court recently.

Kidnapping has not only returned but assumed a
more dangerous and fearful dimension, and the
security agents seem overwhelmed. Power supply
has become more epileptic than ever even as the
DISCO's have hiked their tariff by about 40% and
they still expect Nigerians to pay for darkness
supplied in the midst of gross financial
powerlessness. There is general disenchantment in
the land as the Buhari administration has
sufficiently demonstrated a total lack of idea on
how to run our economy to attain its full potentials
at this time. This fact is further strengthened by
the shambolic and embarrassing preparation of a
simple budget that is a normal ritual of
governments all over the world.

Nigerians believe that the budget was fraught with
fraud and an indication of the hypocrisy of the
current government's anti-corruption stance.
Having suffered so much, the Buhari budget is
widely believed to be the "most stolen", "most
missing", "most padded", "most denied", "most
investigated", "most withdrawn" and "most re-
presented" budget, yet, there is no outrage in the
land over that garbage. If PDP had made that
"mistake" during its time, of course, the country
would have been on an uncontrollable
conflagration, set on by APC.

Despite the rapid descent of the country into
catastrophic and unbelievable state of socio-
political and economic anomie within a very short
period, President Buhari carries on as if nothing is
wrong. There is no sense of urgency or even
needed level of concern for the state of the nation.
Buhari keeps globe-trotting as if the solutions to
the nation's woes lie abroad.

The sophistry peddled by the administration's spin
doctors, as it was during the presidential
campaigns, that the president's frequent travels
has already yielded much fruits for the country is
only a lullaby-like tale told to children in order to
put them to sleep and prevent their usual late
night tantrums. Obviously, the complaints of
Nigerians about the worrying situation of things in
the country would no doubt have been sounding
like tantrums to the ears of government.

Given Fashola's lamentations about former
president Jonathan's frequent presence in church,
one would have expected this same man and his
likes to caution the president about his needless
travels, sit back at home, consult with his cabinet
and concerned Nigerians on how we can all move
this country forward rather than junketing all over
the world in search of foreign solutions to local
problems.

The argument that he is in talks with some oil
producing countries to see how they could help
increase the value of oil in the international market
by scaling down on output is akin to pouring water
in a basket for the purpose of storage. If we are
able to get Saudi Arabia to reduce output will a
country like Iran not take advantage of that and
flood the market with their own oil especially as
they have a lot to unleash on the market having
been shut out from the international market for a
long time as a result of US sanctions until
recently.

This is more so especially when one considers
that Iran would be very happy to do the exact
opposite of what Saudi Arabia does even if it is
just to spite the Saudis owing to the frosty
relations between the two countries. In addition,
the pro-Shiite Iranians expressed very strong
diplomatic reservations over the recent killings of
Shiite Muslims in Zaria by a band of military men
led by the Chief of Army Staff, Lt Gen Tukur
Buratai. This might just be an opportunity for a
pay back by them.

It is also instructive to note that a majority of our
oil patrons have either found new buyers or have
embraced alternative sources of energy. So,
whichever way one looks at it, embarking on
extensive and expensive diplomatic shuttles
majorly for this purpose is not only illogical, it is
also antithetic to common sense and beats the
imagination of even elementary economists. Little
wonder then our president seems to be the only
president among the oil producing countries who
think the best way to shore up the price of oil
worldwide is by diplomatic shuttles. No other
president worldwide is travelling for this purpose.

Our nation is dying, the president is travelling and
his party is parrying the truth about the situation of
things and the true outcome of the president's
frequent travels. Let the president return, sit back
and spend quality time at home and stop working
like a distant learning student!

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