Two years on the saddle, the required heavy lifting has sadly not commenced

Two years into his sojourn in power as President and half-way into his four-year term of office, Senator and former Lagos State Governor, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is on the spot to point Nigerians to how much of the needle he has moved. And truth be told, there is very little to show in real terms.

One factor in the equation is the lacklustre tenure of his predecessor and fellow co-founder of the ruling party, the former military head of state, Muhammadu Buhari. At the time of the presidential elections in 2023, one of Tinubu’s biggest challenges was the underwhelming performance of Buhari. On about all of the scoring points by which governments are judged and assessed, Buhari had failed to impress.

Surviving the Buhari drawback and going on to be declared President is evidently thanks to several other factors, chief among which would be Tinubu’s ebullient political machine. Take away many things from Tinubu, but here is one man who eats, sleeps, and breathes politics. And he stops at almost nothing to achieve his political objectives.

But governing a country is of a higher mettle than playing political games. And that is why even as the Tinubu political machine has already revved up its engines, one and a half years before the next political season is expectedly to get into full drive, the jury remains out as to whether that would be enough to get him his much-desired second term in office. Or whether the public would insist on a practical governance dividends display.

Should the pendulum tilt in the direction of the display of dividends, one of the first points of contention would be the nation’s very challenging security situation, and more notably, the onslaught of jihadists, terrorists, land grabbers, criminal herdsmen, bandits, and kidnappers. While things began to go South in this sector in more recent times during the closing days of the Jonathan presidency, as evidenced most notably in the Chibok girls saga, the very worrisome expansion of the challenge during the presidency of a lavishly decorated general in the Nigerian Army is to say the least, most embarrassing.

Given this very clear drawback, Tinubu was expected to don a literal new cloth. But alas. The evidence from the field is that the crisis has even become more troubling. In Plateau and Benue, no week goes by without reports of multiple incidents. Niger, Kogi and Katsina boil again and again and as we write this, the Governor of Borno State, Professor Babagana Zulum has literally moved his bunkers to one of the besieged theatres of conflict in his domain.

Part of the challenge with security management today is the President’s politics. Given the critical nature of security and against the backdrop of the gross failings recorded here by his predecessor, Tinubu’s choice of top brass to superintend over the offices of the National Security Adviser and the Ministry of Defence have not impressed many. And his not moving a tough hand to make adjustments both in personnel and policy terms is clearly not ennobling.    

If security was going to be a hard sell for Tinubu from the onset, the economy was not seen by pundits as an insurmountable piece of cake. But even here, the administration is struggling to deliver real dividends that the people can use. The excuses routinely given by the Buhari presidency for its underwhelming economic performance were low crude oil prices and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tinubu has not suffered any of these. However in electing on the short-term option of hastily raising more funds directly from the public through a spike in petroleum products pricing and the devaluation of the naira over and above the more wholesome recalibration of the productive engines in the economy, the administration succeeded in gaining and putting more funds in the hands of hard-to-monitor public officials across the three tiers and arms of government and the bureaucracy but at even more grievous costs overall to the more crucial and impact-bearing real sector.

The situation in the states is overall not too dissimilar but there are flashes of hope, including in states like Abia where until the coming in of the incumbent administration the ordinarily normal situation of going to work and getting paid at the end of the month had become such an unattainable and complicated puzzle for months on end. The muddle even spread further afield to afflict the more socially vulnerable retiree community. Today, not only has that situation been considerably addressed, but the government is once more investing in infrastructure and other areas of service that had also equally suffered in ‘the years of the locusts.’

To be sure then, while it is obvious that Nigeria really does not have all the money it needs for meeting all of its developmental objectives at the moment, the bigger truth however is that the greater lack is in urgently filling our government spaces with people of vision and honour who will come to their tasks with the same sense of responsibility and dedication that the likes of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Michael Okpara brought to their beats as Premiers of the defunct Western and Eastern Regions in the season just before and immediately after Independence, respectively.

Beyond personnel rightsizing however, there is yet another very grievous cog in our development wheel that Tinubu as beneficiary in part of the long-drawn historic drive of the people of the South West for a more just and egalitarian Nigeria was expected to champion and drive as soon as he emerged on the saddle, namely the restructuring of the country. And truth be told, without restructuring, we may yet just be engaged only in a Sisyphean exercise of ‘building castles in the air.’