PMB wasted Oppurtunity to Boldy Reform Nigeria....By Chimamanda N. Adichie

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie says President Muhammadu Buhari has squandered the massive goodwill and support he had upon his inauguration as President and missed an opportunity to set Nigeria on the right path.

“President Buhari ascended to the presidency with a rare advantage not only did he have the good will of a majority of Nigerians, he elicited a peculiar mix of fear and respect,” she wrote in an opinion for The New York Times, published on Tuesday.

“For the first weeks of his presidency, it was said that civil servants who were often absent from work suddenly appeared every day, on time, and that police officers and customs officials stopped demanding bribes.”

“Perhaps the first clue was the unusually long time it took him to appoint his ministers. After an ostensible search for the very best, he presented many recycled figures with whom Nigerians were disenchanted.

“But the real test of his presidency came with the continued fall in oil prices, which had begun the year before his inauguration.”

She said while the exchange rate crisis caused the price for everything rice, bread, cooking oil and forced businesses to fire employees with some folding, “the exclusive few who were able to buy dollars at official rates could sell them on the black market and earn large, riskless profits transactions that contribute nothing to the economy.”

According to her, although President Buhari believed, rightly, that Nigeria needed to produce more of what it consumed, and he wanted to spur local production, local production could not be willed into existence if the supporting infrastructure was absent.

“His intentions, good as they well might be, are rooted in an outdated economic model and an infantile view of Nigerians.

“For him, it seems, patriotism is not a voluntary and flexible thing, with room for dissent, but a martial enterprise: to obey without questioning.”

Adichie also faulted Pres. Buhari’s handling of the herdsmen/famers clashes in the country.

She said, “Since President Buhari came to power, villages in the middle-belt and southern regions have been raided, the inhabitants killed, their farmlands sacked. Those attacked believe the Fulani herdsmen want to forcibly take over their lands for cattle grazing.

“He was no less opaque when the Nigerian Army murdered hundreds of members of a Shiite Muslim group in December, burying them in hastily dug graves. Or when soldiers killed members of the small secessionist pro-Biafran movement who were protesting the arrest of their leader, Nnamdi Kanu, a little-known figure whose continued incarceration has elevated him to a minor martyr.”

In terms of the war on corruption, she said, “Nigerians who expected a fair and sweeping cleanup of corruption have been disappointed. Arrests have tended to be selective, targeting mostly those opposed to Mr Buhari’s government.

“The anti-corruption agencies are perceived not only as partisan but as brazenly flouting the rule of law.”

Source;Punch News