According to a viral audio clip from the BBC (Hausa
Service), Mrs. Aisha Buhari is worried that the more than 15 million people who
voted for her husband in 2015 would revolt against him because he has
disappointed them by appointing “strangers” to positions of power, strangers
who didn’t even work for his electoral triumph.
She is right about the potential revolt against her husband
but she is wrong about the reason for it. Most disillusioned Buhari supporters
don’t care whether president’s appointees are personally known to him—or
whether or not they campaigned or voted for him. They are worried, instead,
that many, perhaps most, of the president’s appointees are corrupt and
incompetent, but are shielded from any consequences for their corruption and incompetence.
Let’s start from the president’s first major appointments:
Secretary to the Government of the Federation Lawal David Babachir is so
corrupt that he is now nicknamed “Cash and Carr” in government circles.
He even once publicly bragged about receiving monetary gifts
from the Delta State government and has been implicated in the N270 million
"grass-cutting" contract for internally displaced Boko Haram victims.
The Chief of Staff to the President has been accused of accepting a half-billion
naira bribe from MTN to reduce the telecom company's NCC fine from N1.04
trillion to N330 billion, among other
sordid allegations of corruption against him. And the man is incompetent and
lazy, to boot. It’s the same story all around members of the president's “kitchen
cabinet.”
It took Buhari six (6) months to appoint his ministers who
have turned out to be the most questionable and underwhelming cast of
characters to ever be in the Federal Executive Council (FEC). Among them is a
minister of budget who doesn’t know Nigeria’s debt profile; a minister of
agriculture (who, tellingly, is a former PDP chairman) who thinks the cost of
rice is high because Nigerians consume too much rice; a minister of science and
technology whose technological vision for the country is to start local pencil
manufacturing in two years; a comically loud- and foul-mouthed minister of
information who says dressing and undressing masquerades is a strategy of job
creation; a minister of youth and sports who is so clueless he makes you want
to cry; a backward, prehistoric minister of communication who wants to tax
Nigerians for calls they make and texts they send; a minister of Niger Delta
affairs who was indicted for fraud by a government commission in the 1990s but
still keeps his job even in the wake of this revelation; a minister of finance
who hides her incompetence behind a Cockney accent. The list goes on.
Add that to the revelations of a series of secretive,
illegal employment of the children and relatives of high-ranking political
elites in this government, including Buhari’s, while millions of brilliant,
hardworking but underprivileged people vegetate in misery amid a biting
recession, and you know that Nigeria is wildly adrift.
Neither the president
nor his ministers have a clue. And they don’t care. If this trend continues, by
the end of 2019, Buhari would be so unpopular that he would be chased out of
Aso Rock with rocks by millions of his own erstwhile supporters. Aisha Buhari
obviously doesn't want this terrible fate to befall her husband. I don't, too.
-Prof.Farooq Kperogi, an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at Kennesaw, wrote in from USA.
Pix: Aisha Buhari and Prof. Farooq Kperogi
