What exactly do they mean when they say Buhari is righting Jonathan’s wrongs?

by Roqeebah Olaoniye

If you’re like me and have been a bit confused about this statement that is starting to sound too much like the kind of propaganda we’ve been warned to shun, welcome. If you’re not, and you need a reason to be confused this lovely evening, Isime Esene has reported HERE how APC chieftain, John Oyegun recently responded to criticisms by the opposition party, PDP.

Cryptic no? I think so. Well except you’re into decoding proverbs and that kind of stuff then help me decode this:

”What is happening now is clear: Just because the farmer has not checkmated the thief, he (thief) has become so emboldened that he is now making a move to even cage the farmer from whom he has been stealing.”

Now that we are all caught up on what the Buhari-is-fixing-Jonathan’s-wrongs story sounds like, let’s break it down using much more relatable issues and see how it tests out.

The campaign stage

Gen. Muhammadu Buhari in his 2015 manifesto wasted no time at all. It starts like this: “My commitment to Nigeria. This is how, with your help, I will fix it.” He went right on to state his belief that our “politics was (is) broken …”

Though the text of the manifesto did not make any outright accusations, and thankfully so, the words, if you get through them, leave you with a general sense that ours was a country in need of saving, fixing, reforming, repairing and you know, general salvation.

Months on, we are still where we started. Well not quite, since the narrative now is that we are a country has been admitted to the ICU and Buhari is the doctor getting us slowly back to out-patients’section.

This has been the story. Whether one complains about the state of the economy or the state of insecurity in the country, the answer you are likely to get in return usually hovers somewhere above the total failure of the last administration or the last few administrations, depending on who is providing the answer. Essentially, our President “inherited” the worst situation and it is very hard to fix.

Buhari’s dilemma: using the Nigerian economy as case study

According to the Minister of Science and Technology, Ogbonnaya Onu, Buhari simply ‘inherited a bad economy from the Goodluck Jonathan administration. It is this kind of accusation (which by the way we are used to enduring from Nigerian elders) that was repeated by APC chairman, John Oyegun recently which earned him backlash from PDP’s Deji Adeyanju.

Well, while this might seem unfortunate for the APC chieftain, it may just be what we needed to provoke some facts from either side. In a series of tweets posted on Friday, the PDP dropped a few economic facts to prove that the economy was better off before the current administration.

You can find the tweets in a previously published article HERE

More facts

Unlike the propagand-ish kind of responses to criticism that PDP director of new media, Deji Adeyanju has called “invective”, the former governor of Lagos and now-busy-juggling-three-jobs Minister, Babatunde Raji Fashola in an April article published on his website, gave a little more explanation.

Defending the president’s constant travelling, and using the trip to the China Investment Forum to which he accompanied Buhari, Fashola said it was “repair our reputation severely damaged by the last government, and to assure our partners that Nigeria has CHANGED. And from there to re-negotiate an existing funding agreement to complete critical Transport infrastructure.”

According to him, China is a destination to seek cooperation in the pursuit of economic development and at this particular event, Fashola reports that Buhari had to apologize for Nigeria’s previous failures on an agreement made to part-fund 4 airport projects in Lagos, Kano, Abuja and Port Harcourt and Abuja-Kaduna rail project. He said the Chinese had provided their agreed part of 85% but the remaining 15% Nigeria did not honour during the last administration.
Moving on?

While it is hard to argue that we were better off before Buhari’s administration, it is equally hard to support the current dispensation’s policies. It looks like we have been thrown under a constant barrage of accusations just flying over heads. The Buhari camp will do well to accept some responsibility for what we are experiencing under this administration or give detailed explanations for policy choices and the PDP will do better as an opposition to continue their job in the manner that was displayed last Friday as opposed to knee-jerk reactionary accusations and responses.

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