As President Muhammadu Buhari returns to his Daura home, he will be leaving Nigeria less secure, poorer, more divided and more in debt than when he came to power in 2015. While his motley crew of officials and aides can argue disingenuously about his record, what is crystal clear to most Nigerians is that the past eight years saw a brutal demystification of the retired general.
Justice Tsoho declined the DSS request on December 9, saying that it did not provide any concrete evidence to substantiate its claims against Emefiele. As grave as the allegations were, the president and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, said nothing. He also saw nothing wrong and so “picked his teeth” while the CBN governor spent more time in 2022 scheming to fly the APC flag in the presidential election than he did attending to the economy. The dreadful currency redesign policy was another matter. Nigerians were needlessly thrown into agony. People could not withdraw their money, families starved, some lost their lives, and adults went naked in banking halls, weeping and wailing. Today, the new currencies are nowhere to be seen.
All through his reign, accusations of budget padding between national assembly members, ministers and presidency officials became more frequent without any casualty. Aisha Buhari, his wife, told a bemused nation some years ago that Aso Rock Clinic did not have “a single syringe” despite billions budgeted for it every year. “We need to know how the budget is spent,” she declared, speciously to the chagrin of her husband as nothing was heard from him thereafter.
Buhari also watched helplessly as Chris Ngige, the minister of labour and productivity, and the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund engaged in a public spat, with the minister announcing the sack of the management claiming that he had the president’s approval to do so, while the management rejected it and for a long time continued to carry on with business as usual.
Even though he was the minister of petroleum, fuel shortages continued unabated often without a word from him about what was going on. Between three and four million barrels of crude oil were reported stolen monthly, while millions of litres of petrol are smuggled across the borders daily with the retired general in charge of the ministry!