Sheikh (Dr) Ahmad Abubakar Gumi has advised Nigerians to reject President Muhammadu Buhari, his party, All Progressives Congress, APC, and opposition party, Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, insisting that the masses are suffering despite the promise of change by the president and his party.
The Islamic scholar said this in his assessment of Buhari and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in the last two years.
He noted that the general assessment of government’s performance was below the expectation of Nigerians, and urged Nigerians to reject both the APC and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) if they really desire a new lease of life.
His words: “The problem is that no matter how good you are as a leader, you should have a team. If you put Maradona in a bad team, no one will pass the ball to him in order to score a goal. The APC government has failed for lack of a team”.
“Every failure has reasons. When a patient dies in the hospital, there is usually a post mortem examination to determine the direct cause of death. We have symptoms but they may not be the cause of death.
“The widespread suffering in the country is a symptom of an underlying disease afflicting the nation that needs to be tackled. But if the government has been listening all along, it could have alleviated the problem or it could have done more than it is doing.
“I can imagine somebody who has nothing. How is he surviving? How is he paying his children’s school fees? How can he treat his children when they are sick? How can he feed? So, when you look at all these indices, you will know that it is a miracle that we are still existing.
“So, if we want to do a post mortem on this government, you have to look far beyond the inception of the administration. Like I said, they inherited some of the defects and the solution would have been to manage Nigeria as a critically ill patient”.
Gumi, a medical doctor, also stated that Nigeria is not united. He said the APC took over a divided country and that what political scientists needed to do at that time was to design a template without dividing Nigeria.
“Now, there is too much hostility and bad blood in the country. All I know is that all Nigerians are one. What we need was someone to correct us”, he told New Telegraph.
“This is the time to bring people together, the kind of leader that Nigeria needs at this critical time is the one that can pacify. Not one that will show that he is clean and the other person is dirty. No. He should show that we are all dirty, let us all come and clean ourselves.
“So, the so-called clean party which has the broom, who is it trying to sweep? It is so antagonistic. It is so provocative that it has divided the country. If your house is also dirty, you cannot clean someone’s house. People thought that change is coming when it was not possible to effect that change.
Gumi fumed that top officials were getting away with stealing and corruption and cited examples.
“The allegations of corruption are already been made against the (suspended) Secretary to the Government of the Federation, of a government that is fighting corruption. And the government cannot do anything besides suspension.
“The present administration came to rule Nigeria using the slogan of war against corruption and this is disrupting the unity of the country. The unity of the country is more important than the money that people stole; more important than the current underdevelopment that we are witnessing”.
Asked the way out of Nigeria’s problems, Sheikh Gumi advised that before 2019, politics has to change completely and drastically.
“No more APC or PDP”, he declared, adding that “once they continue, Nigeria’s problems will continue. What I am saying is that they should metamorphose, they should change. When you see a butterfly, there was a time when it was a larva.
“The parties have to change; PDP has to change, APC has to change or it will break because it is an alloy which is not well moulded. We want these parties to change because of the future of our children.
“The major defect of APC is that it is a party which was grown by the power of individuals; Buhari in the North and Tinubu in the South West. And there is danger in this kind of politics. Look at Mugabe now, he has suppressed and pinned down everybody in Zimbabwe and he has been winning elections in quote.
“If we continue along this path, Nigeria will be like that. When we have somebody who feels that he is the Messiah, then we are in trouble because as I am speaking to you now, not everybody in the North can speak to you like this.”
