By Richard Maduku
These days, some apologists of President Bola Tinubu are hailing him as a master strategist. Ironically, it is not for what he has done that led to the end or even the reduction of some of Nigeria’s major challenges that earned him that title.
Hunger for instance, remains the number one problem facing a good majority of Nigerians today. Given our vast arable land and the teeming young population, hunger should have been a stranger to us. We are not supposed to be the poverty capital of the world as it has been for some years now.
Mr. Tinubu has not reduced the hunger in the land for the past two years he had been in office as president. He has instead increased it more than tenfold with his whimsical removal of petroleum subsidy during his inauguraion on 29 May, 2023.
It’s true that the removal of subsidy on petroleum products was a bold step but it was taken blindly. President Tinubu and his team had no idea where the step would land us. The bold step broke open a box of problems that have overwhelmed everybody. It has skyrocketed the price of everything beyond the reach of the majority. Foodstuffs is the most felt.
Another cause of high foodstuffs prices is their scarcity due to the killing of farmers in the rural areas by Fulani herdsmen. The torching of their homes, raping of women in their farms, letting their cattle loose to feed on farms crops and the illegal occupation of indigenous peoples’ forests have made many to abandon farming for other occupations or to end up in camps for displaced people.
For the past two years, the scorge of the Fulani herdsmen which Tinubu inherited from his predecessor has not abated. It is as if he also subscribe to the agenda of the Fulani which is to subjugate the middle belt and southern Nigeria as they had done to most parts of the North. During the administration of Gen. Mohammadu Buhari, making Nigeria the homeland of all the Fulani in the world was added to this agenda.
The Nigerian Taliban that goes by the name Boko haram, are also sacking military outposts and entire communities again in the northeast as they did less than two decades ago. One or two other terrorist groups from the sahel have since moved into the scene. Like the terrorism of the herdsmen, farmers have also abandoned their farms in the northeast thereby worsening the food shortage in Nigeria.
The activities of the terrorist groups apart, hardened criminals are in every part of the country kidnapping people and demanding huge amount of money as ransom before releasing their captives. As a result many Nigerians no longer emabark on long journeys within the country nowadays. This has badly affected inter state movement of food crops.
The field day terrorists and kidnappers are having these days make Nigeria look like a nation without a Police Force and an Army. But we have an Army and a Police Force that had distinguisted themselves in in their respective roles abroad.
As if we don’t really have a Police Force and an Army the Tinubu administration is reported to be muting the idea of setting up a Forest Guards to rid our forests of these terrorists. This is going to be another exercise in wasteful spending. Who is going to train these forest guards?
Securing every inch of the country is the job of the Police who could invite the Army in if they could not cope. The Nigerian Army has been training its men for all types of scenarios including insurgency and jungle warfare for decades now.
What Tinubu as commander-in-chief should do is to task the Army commander on whose Area of Responsibility (AOR) insurgents or terrorists the Police could not subdue are found to clear them and pronto the job will be done if the commander in question was given what he needed for the task. Everybody knows that the herdsmen were untouchable when Buhari was president but has the story changed under Tinubu in the past two years? Not at all!
Did I hear you ask what then is President Tinubu a super strategist for if these existential challenges still plague Nigeria?
To his lackeys, it is the instability that has been sown in the leadership of major oppostion parties that had led to a gale of defection of their elected members including a state governor to the ruling party headed by President Tinubu.
A week hardly passes these days without a member of either the national assembly or one of the state assemblies crossing to the ruling party. All these defections that is giving our democracy a bad name is to ensure Tinubu and the defectors are not challenged by any formidable candidate during their re-election bid in 2027.
To even the casual observer of the Nigerian political scene, what is happening to the opposition political parties is an overkill. Tinubu does not need to go all this length in order to win in the next general election. Since he was able to win the 2023 presidential election despite the staggering odds against him, what he needs to win that of 2027 is how to endear himself to the populace from now on. It can be done within the next six months.
One of the things he should do is to prune the high cost of governance and plough the money realised into other sectors such as education, health, agriculture and the security services. Most Nigerians would vote for him any day if they noticed improvements in these areas.
If drastically reduced, the billions of naira paid to senators and house of representatives members as salaries and allowances every month could get into schools millions of children now begging in the streets or doing menial jobs because their parents could not afford the cost of their primary school education.
The foreign exchange and the naira the president has spent on buying planes, a yacht, expensive cars, renovating the vice president’s complex, junketing to meetings abroad with a large entourage at the drop of a hat, hibernating for weeks in France as well as sponsoring pilgrimages to the so-called holy lands would have been enough to put millions of out-of-shool children into schools.
It is the prudence especially the cuts on the cost of governance which Mr Peter Obi made as a state governor and promised to make if elected president that made him very popular during the 2023 general elections.
When Chief Obafemi Awolowo of blessed memory was asked where he was going to get the money to fund his proposed free primary education from, he included the money he was going to save from the removal of tea breaks! Little savings from here and there could go a long way in doing great things!
Initially many Nigerians had thought that Mr Tinubu, given his age (many believe he is above 90) and already fantastically rich, would as president, shun ostentatious displays and focus on what would endear him to the populace. Regrettably, the opposite has been the case. He wants, from the look of things, to endear himself to only some politicians.
But endearing oneself to the populace is the best way to go for any leader. The populace is against the tsunami that has befallen the major oppostion political parties which has made Tinubu’s admirers to see him as a super schemer. It could end up destroying the only undisputed thing history has in his favour: his role in NADECO during the Abacha nightmare.
Richard Maduku, a retired Nigerian Army (Infantry) Captain and novelist, lives in Effurun-Otor, Delta State