No father should want to leave debts for his poor children. Let us remind Oga Femi, again, that President Obasanjo met the country’s external debt at $28 billion and left it at $2 billion; President Umaru Yar’Adua subsequently left it at $2.6 billion; President Goodluck Jonathan left it at $7.3 billion, but President Buhari left it at $41.6 billion!!! That is what he actually did for the poor – he left them an humongous volume of debt that they cannot pay. What an ore mekunu indeed!
“We shouldn’t accept mediocrity as the best a politician can do.” – Joe Manchin
The job of a presidential spokesperson must be a nightmare. One’s schedule includes projecting the image of the principal by all means necessary. But it becomes Herculean when the government is evidently mediocre and has little to show the public.
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Sometimes last week, former President Buhari celebrated his birthday. We congratulate him and pray that God grants him more years to be of service to himself and his family. Family, friends, admirers, and other well-wishers should have just bought spaces in newspapers to post some AI-generated messages, and that would have been OK. But Femi Adesina had to come again and trigger the already harsh environment by writing on how his principal was a compassionate president and how he cared for the poor. With all these attempts, I now truly sympathise with Oga Femi, but he should know that there is little evidence that shows that history can be re-written, especially when there is data to corroborate a documented state of affairs.
The summary of the piece is that former President Buhari directed that because of the challenges of the pandemic and revenues that were bound to ebb, the payment of salaries must not fail. In his words, “that was the vintage Muhammadu Buhari, always thinking of the poor and underprivileged” and based on that, he should be called “Ore mekunu” (friend of the poor) in Yoruba language. Part of the President’s job was to maintain the security of government jobs, so that he could be able to pay salaries. Adesina also wrote about, “The Big Elephant in the room. Removal of fuel subsidy”. Did you think the government didn’t know that the money guzzling monster had to be slain? It knew. But who ensured that subsidies remained as long as it did? Buhari. And why? The people, the ordinary people”. The rest of the piece is on how the Buhari administration turned everything into a joke, including by acknowledging that although the civil service was over bloated, the President would not heed advice on streamlining it because he, at least, wanted to be remembered as someone who was paying salaries.
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So, based on Femi’s logic, the true friend of the poor is the one who would maintain the status quo of inefficiency, paying an over bloated service, with ghost workers, to a point where we were once using almost all of our national revenues on recurrent expenditure and the servicing of debts. The country was borrowing to pay poor people’s salaries, which kept ballooning year-on-year from 2015 to 2023! The government was not interested in making the system efficient and leaner so that the savings could truly go to the poor. That was too much work.
How much was their administration paying as fuel subsidy? How much NNPC was remitting to the federal purse? How many people were prosecuted for oil theft during their time in office? How many tankers of fuel being smuggled out of the country were the Nigeria Customs Service arresting then? Can he also explain how much the Buhari administration spent in fixing the four refineries in eight years, so that fuel imports would reduce?
On fuel subsidy removal, they left it because of the poor? Good, we believe them. Can Oga Femi please state how many barrels of crude were stolen daily through our shores when they were in government. How much was their administration paying as fuel subsidy? How much NNPC was remitting to the federal purse? How many people were prosecuted for oil theft during their time in office? How many tankers of fuel being smuggled out of the country were the Nigeria Customs Service arresting then? Can he also explain how much the Buhari administration spent in fixing the four refineries in eight years, so that fuel imports would reduce? Even in terms of the present day inflation, can the administration that Oga Femi served tell us what they did with the N27 trillion that they printed, which is the equivalent of $50 billion. Were they printing the money to pay salaries as one of their legacies? Where would we be if a substantial part of that $50 billion were invested on behalf of the poor in education or health? Which hospital could the poor go to in any part of the country?
No father should want to leave debts for his poor children. Let us remind Oga Femi, again, that President Obasanjo met the country’s external debt at $28 billion and left it at $2 billion; President Umaru Yar’Adua subsequently left it at $2.6 billion; President Goodluck Jonathan left it at $7.3 billion, but President Buhari left it at $41.6 billion!!! That is what he actually did for the poor – he left them an humongous volume of debt that they cannot pay. What an ore mekunu indeed!
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Let Oga Femi publish the Buhari administration’s data on education, early child care, access to healthcare, nutrition, energy security, housing, living standards, social protections, employment, housing, amongst others, and not on how printing money to pay salaries seemed to have been an achievement.
Before infrastructure and social investment programmes are flaunted, it will also be good to state that the average economic growth rate during the Obasanjo administration was 6.9 per cent; it was 7.1 per cent under Yar’Adua; 6 per cent during Jonathan’s tenure, and Buhari managed only a measly 1.4 per cent economic growth. So how did he love the poor with such a low growth? Spending is supposed to spur growth, so what happened that the Buhari administration printed and borrowed more money than the past three regimes and yet all this did less to spur economic growth? While the Sustainable Development Goals advocate that we halve poverty by 2030, we actually became the poverty capital of the world under ore mekunu!
These are macro-economic data that reflects the micro-economic issues that affect the poor. Not everything can be laundered through PR articles divorced from the reality. Let Oga Femi publish the Buhari administration’s data on education, early child care, access to healthcare, nutrition, energy security, housing, living standards, social protections, employment, housing, amongst others, and not on how printing money to pay salaries seemed to have been an achievement.
Umar Yakubu writes from Abuja.
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