APC govt: A continuous assessment

The build-up to the 2015 presidential election provided the premise for an easy-to-predict outcome. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was going to an electoral war decimated at all levels. The ward congresses were either inconclusive or results were announced from Abuja, far from the places of the contests. There was practically no governorship primary of the party that was won according to the wishes of the accredited delegates. The then leader of the party and presidential candidate, former President Goodluck Jonathan, lived up to his self-confessed (un)presidential qualities. Nigerians will always recall that he had owned up to being just a lamb, since he was neither an Army General, a lion, nor a Pharoah. His weakness was legendary, and this aided political and social commentators in deriding him. So, the presidential election of 2015 presented the electorate with the easiest of tasks: vote out an inept, insipid, dour and doomed government. To accomplish the task was almost seen as a divine instruction. In a nutshell, the PDP went into the last presidential election having a self-inflicted (political) eclampsia. The result, predictable as it was, is now history.
On May 29, 2015, Nigerians gave the All Progressives Congress (APC) government an effusive welcome. Not that they were convinced that a better party had come to power; they were just prepared to be without a government than have the PDP continue to misrule them. Credit must be given to the campaign team of the APC who very intelligently chronicled the making of the holocaust called the PDP, capitalising on the gullibility of the average Nigerian and our poor sense of history. The APC provided a unique campaign style, supported by the ‘Change’ mantra, which we had all expected to be positive. They boasted of bold politicians, cerebral technocrats working behind the scene, the goodwill of their presidential candidate (now President Muhammadu Buhari) and the affluence of some political businessmen and jobbers.
The APC has been in the saddle for 11 months, and it is not too early to analyse the emergent signs, so that where necessary, all Nigerians can quickly support or condemn any action of the government as dispassionately as possible, to avoid the type of collateral damage of the past regimes. The early signs are worrying, if not traumatising.
Many Nigerians are beginning to realise that the APC is made up of mere politicians whom we had inadvertently clothed in a cure-all medicine. The president appears to be a cloned OBJ, seeing every other person as corrupt except himself. This sweeping belief does him no favours; it rather creates a dual and conflicting personality for himself as a Saint-President ruling over a corrupt nation and wooing foreigners to come and do business with us. We are gradually coming to terms with how he treats us with contempt, telling us about ourselves only in foreign lands. Our ministers have largely remained anonymous, maybe, to prove the President, who had labelled them mere noise-makers, wrong.
In a fit of unprovoked test of ability, the President in August last year had ordered the military to see to the end of insurgency in the North East by the end of November. A post-insurgency reconstruction programme was announced immediately thereafter. The order was tactless as the situation today suggests. The PDP was accused of lack of cohesion, but the APC has fared no better. With a majority in the National Assembly, the President has not been able to get the 2016 budget passed. Those accused of budget-padding are not ghosts; they are most probably APC ministers and other sundry card-carrying members. The trial of the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, does more harm to the APC than it can be claimed to be a clear determination to fight corruption. If we endured darkness under the PDP, what we have endured in the past six months is a total eclipse of the sun. The numbest approach of the APC government is the old, irritating, brainless resort to blaming saboteurs for our lack of electric power and petrol. You are to bring positive change and not to plagiarise the PDP’s thesis on failure.
President Buhari has told us that his age is one of his draw-backs, together with our legal system which has tied his hands in his fight against corruption. This is cheap talk! He did not tell us this during his electioneering. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Department of State Security (DSS) have been hounding Nigerians into various detention camps, accusing some of them of keeping millions of dollars in water tanks, under their beds, and inside their tummies. Such allegations are now routine and less believable. We have been told that many corrupt Nigerians have returned looted funds. Instead of making the details public and receiving some acclaim, the government, not trusting itself, appears to have stopped spreading the unconvincing propaganda.
Has it been all gloom these past 11 months? Not totally. Former President Jonathan’s lack of political sagacity was compounded by an insidious and colourless Namadi Sambo as Vice President. Nigerians today have an erudite Professor Yemi Osinbajo as Vice President, who possesses oratorical excellence and intellectual endowment to mellow down the harsh criticisms of President Buhari as an ethnic/religious irredentist and lacking in non-military acumen. The political will of the APC government to implement the Treasury Single Account (TSA) is worthy of praise, as it is expected to give government the opportunity of knowing at a glance the finances of the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs). The increase in allocation from 18 per cent to about 30 per cent of our national budget for capital expenditure shows a desire to tackle our decrepit infrastructure.
In all honesty, the APC is already living tenuously on the residual goodwill of a few of its members, and on the patience of Nigerians. Unfortunately, the PDP has no moral standing to criticise this government, having itself presided over our worst period of developmental inertia. Can the APC government turn things right? It is possible, albeit the morning does not as yet offer a quantum leap to our “change” expectations.
On May 29 (three weeks from now), let us all pay attention to the President’s speech and see what the APC has achieved in 366 days. Hopefully by then, the government may have re-purchased the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN), flooded everywhere with petrol and begun to deploy the Chinese loan to paying the N5,000 monthly stipend to poor Nigerians.