YNaija Editorial: Buhari’s 1 year in office – An assessment

Toward the end of his inaugural address, President Muhammadu Buhari referenced Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

He said: “Our situation somehow reminds one of a passage in Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar: There is a tide in the affairs of men which,
taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life,
Is bound in shallows and miseries.”

The use of that passage, in which Brutus urges Cassius to attack when at his strongest, gave the impression of a man who fully understood the import of the circumstances around his second chance at the Presidency, and was fully prepared to meet those circumstances with the urgency they deserved.

It gave the impression of a man who knew that 4 years will come to an end quickly, and knew he had to move fast to deliver on his promises.

In many important ways, this urgency has not materialized. A nation watched, bemused, as it took 7 months to install a cabinet, the longest a President has ever gone without a cabinet in Nigeria’s history.

The narrative from the administration was that the President needed time to study the handover notes and ‘clear the ground’, but the benefits of that delay, if any, are not obvious.

The first budget of his administration became a farce wrapped in a fiasco. The President gave his budget speech in December, but only signed it into law earlier this month.

In between, the document was sent to the Senate, turned up missing, was withdrawn, and then resent, all the while accompanied by controversies of ‘padding’ by a ‘budget cabal’ of top civil servants.

There are areas in which the President has done well. He has pushed back Boko Haram and gathered significant support from the Lake Chad countries, as well as the US, UK, and France.

The result of this has been the gradual resumption of something approaching normalcy in Maiduguri, the Borno state capital, and the rescue of hundreds of people from terrorist captivity.

On corruption, he has attained a credibility that is rare in Nigerian leaders, prosecuting people and implementing criminal justice reforms at home, while campaigning for a denial of safe haven for stolen funds abroad. And yet, there are worrying signs that this is a one-trick Boko Haram/anti-corruption pony.

A lack of leadership concerning murderous herdsmen attacking communities in several states, has led to Ayo Fayose filling the vacuum with tough talk, to significant acclaim.

It further drives home the point that often, people will take whatever looks like leadership, whether or not the solutions being put forward will improve the situation.

There is also a pattern emerging of a President who only changes course after significant damage has been done.

Months of petrol queues finally forced the acceptance of the fact that petrol subsidies could not continue, to little resistance from an exhausted citizenry who also realized that the party was over.

By far the biggest indication of this pattern has been on the economy. Last week, GDP figures from the National Bureau of Statistics revealed that economic activity contracted in the first quarter of this year.

With inflation and unemployment also on the rise, it is the culmination of the pursuit of a ruinous foreign exchange policy that many experts have warned, including both of the last two CBN governors, would put Nigeria into recession.

A recession now looks virtually assured, and it is only now that the CBN shows signs of heeding the conventional wisdom and allowing a flexible exchange rate regime, but even then, that is not certain.

In the meantime, the private sector continues to gasp for air with job cuts aplenty.
No matter what else the Buhari administration does, people have to feel that they are better off economically, and that starts with getting the basics right.

Fighting corruption is good, but it cannot become the fixation, the be-all and end-all of a Presidency. You can fight corruption and ensure economic prosperity at the same time.

The necessity of multi-tasking comes about because time is finite. It seems like only yesterday when the Daura-born former military ruler quoted Shakespeare from the podium at Eagle Square.

The concluding part of that quote ends like this:
“On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”

We hope, for Nigeria’s sake, that the President does not lose his ventures.

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