Dear Mr. President,
May Allah (swt) continue to give you sound health, strength and wisdom to accomplish the enormous tasks ahead of you! Mr. President, you need to be reminded that you have already spent about 3 months in London attending to your health. Good news is that Nigerians still trust that you have what it takes to deliver dividends of good governance to them. As a veteran in the art of leadership, and as the democratically elected captain of diverse and complex political behemoth, nothing should surprise you concerning developments during your absence from the country. With your second medical trip lots of people, friends and foes alike started behaving as if you are not going to make it back to Nigeria alive.
At a critical point of your illness in London, information was not filtering to Nigerians on the true state of your health. There was so much speculation on what should be done, as if you have just left Nigeria without assigning anybody to look after the affairs of Nigeria. Your detractors especially think that you should call it quits. They are even calling for an outright invocation of constitutional provisions because you are absent from office for almost 90 days. Your supporters however stood their ground against the taunting of your political opponents. Anyway, I’m sure you know very well that handling the affairs of Nigeria is not a task for the faint-hearted.
Although you have left the country in the safe hands of your able Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, the nation is however feeling the impact of your absence in so many ways. Mr. President, your absence has created a kind of vacuum in which your diehard supporters have almost become like orphans despite their astute defense of your rights as democratically elected president of Nigeria. Other people are even beginning to think that you have lost the steel in you. While others still think you are made of sterner stuff. Obviously, some people are of the opinion that you have lost your mystique through your attempt at becoming a democrat. They believe you have lost that sense of invincibility either due to the wisdom that comes with age or your civil understanding of African democracy. That’s why they are all complaining that you are no longer the tough no nonsense Buhari they used to know during your first coming as military head of state in 1984. These people are also complaining that lots of things that shouldn’t be happening under a purposeful leadership are now happening under you.
Sir, these are some of the clear reasons that have compelled me to write this letter to you. It should be on record that I have written to advise you on what you should immediately do on arrival from London. The first task you must embark upon is to get a new set of advisers. This is very necessary because the first set of advisers you have appointed when you were sworn into office have, from the estimation of your admirers, failed to carry out their duties and responsibilities. Instead of channeling their energies to clear the gargantuan mess that your government has inherited, most of these trusted advisers are more concerned with carrying out the bidding of other vested interests. Nigerians are not expecting that from those you have entrusted to advise you candidly, honestly and disinterestedly on serious matters of state. Any adviser that would put personal interest over and above collective interests of the greatest number of Nigerians is not a good adviser. Such adviser should be shown the way out of the villa. I assure you most Nigerians will agree with my altruistic advice, except of course if those Nigerians are among those that are not willing to see the virtue that your fans are seeing in you.
The next action you should take is to reshuffle your cabinet immediately. I know you are going to find it a little bit difficult to get rid of some of those members of your cabinet because of their unalloyed loyalty to you and their association with the ideals you cherish as a person. Definitely, a greater number of them have made invaluable sacrifices, financially and logistically, in order to ensure that APC has moved from being an opposition party to a ruling party. That is no mean achievement to anybody who knows the difficulties involved in wresting power from a ruling party by a hurriedly cobbled opposition party like APC. A magical act like this one can only happen in Nigeria, a country where impossible can easily be turned into something possible.
Similarly, I wholly agree with that submission because Nigeria is a country where hustlers see opportunity where others see scarcity. Mr. President, people are everywhere talking. In case those that should be gauging the pulse of the nation on your behalf are not ready to tell you the truth, a cross-section of us are ascribing failure to especially your ministers. Some of them are said to be failing in the responsibilities because they do not have the requisite experience to face the challenges of the ministries you have assigned to them. For others, it is out of sheer incompetence. It is said that some other ministers cannot perform their functions effectively even in the most ideal situations.
Sir, your relationship with other arms of government; the legislature and the judiciary, is also questioned. If those with the ear to the ground around you have decided to overlook the whispers of the people, I will not do that to you Mr. President. The fact of the matter is that you are blamed for the way you ignored the politics over who gets appointed into important offices of the National Assembly. It is said that you have turned your face the other way when Senator Bukola Saraki, went against the aspiration of the APC, as he maneuvered to become the president of the upper chamber. That was not the arrangement of your party, was it? And a number of senators were poised to slug it out with Saraki camp together with his PDP supporters, but you refused to intervene because you don’t want to be seen as a dictator.
Mr. President you have become completely oblivious of the fact that you are elected to cure the injuries inflicted on the nation by the previous regime. There are still some people among your supporters that will not forgive you for that costly miscalculation, especially the manner in which you ignore the chicanery of recalcitrant powerful members of your political party. You can now see how those senators from your party the APC are doing everything to frustrate your change agenda. On two occasions Mr. President, last year and this year precisely, they have tinkered with the budget you painstakingly prepared and sent to them for ratification. When people raised questions about such untoward behavior, the senators said they did it in the name of constituency projects and need for equitable spread of projects across the nation. Though I have not clearly captured the objections of the Acting President, I wonder how constitutional is this act by a legislative body?
Next, you must investigate what the state governors did with humongous amounts of monies doled out to them in the name of Paris Club refund. The monies came at a time when majority of states owed their workers salary arrears. Don’t forget, people were given the impression that those monies were allocated to state governments to off set backlogs of salaries and allowances of their hapless workers. Some of us even believe that an undertaking, a sort of gentleman’s agreement, was given by the governors in which they pledged to use the Paris Club refund for the purposes of alleviating the suffering of workers.
You may wish to know the truth Sir, that most of the governors have diverted the monies as they used it to pay contractors that executed unverifiable contracts in their own states. Yet, other governors have the temerity to fleece the monies and convert huge percentages for personal use. In some northern states, salary arrears have not been paid; workers are still told that there is no money to pay them salary arrears because of economic recession. In one instance, it was alleged that a governor of one of the rural states has “invested” the money allocated to him in hotel business in far away Lagos, the economic capital of Nigeria. Sir, ordinary folks in Nigeria are really suffering out of no faults of theirs. Politicians and their associates are solely responsible for corruption and economic mismanagement. They do not give a hoot about anything whatsoever outside self-aggrandizement. Only few states care about pursuing development agendas.
Many states are endowed with abundant untapped natural resources but they care less about those resources. Ideally, in northern states where there is expanse of agricultural lands, apart from the need to mechanize agriculture, there is also the need to move it to the next level of industrial processing, especially in locations where different varieties of agricultural commodities are produced directly. That way the teeming unemployed youth that have become nuisance to society through drugs, crime and violent behavior will become transformed by means of gainful employment. Nobody is doing anything to take agriculture to the next level. Sir, I always know that agriculture is the basis of industrialization. But I don’t know how to advise you to come up with realistic policy incentives that will encourage state governments to go in that direction.
In your absence, Nigeria has relapsed into a state of insecurity. Boko Haram violent attacks have come back with vengeance after all the noise making the rounds that our soldiers have beaten them into a retreat. Within just a month, Boko Haram has targeted and killed hundreds of people mainly in Maiduguri despite the heavy presence of our soldiers there and western military bases along Nigeria’s borders with Cameroun, Chad and Niger. In other parts of Nigeria, kidnapping is becoming endemic. Though the police have made some arrests, cases of kidnapping are as rampant as night rain. Sir, there was this allegation that is hush-hush at the moment. Some security elements are allegedly colluding with kidnappers. Thus, where they are not supplying the criminals with information on victims; they are supplying them with arms and ammunition. There are still pockets of rural banditry, armed-robbery and farmers and herders clashes. There is therefore the need to overhaul our security apparatus once again.
Thank you for having the patience to read my letter, Sir.
Sincerely yours
Abubakar Aliyu Liman
