We all consistently heard the repeated change message the President-elect and his APC kept preaching all through the period of the presidential campaign but shortly after their victory at the polls, the ‘fast change’ message seemed to have ‘changed’ to a ‘a slow and gradual and probably painful change’.
Since his victory at the polls, the President-elect has repeatedly told Nigerians that his and the APC manifesto wasn’t carved in stone and so was subject to change.
He has asked all Nigerians for their support and patience as he emphasised that “Rome was not built in a day.” Speaking at two events last week, he explained that the expectations of Nigerians frightened him, apart from that, his APC party members have continued to say that “The President-elect is not a magician. We will have to be patient.”
And again on Sunday, May 10, 2015, while hosting of some Northern group and the Northern Elders Forum led by Alhaji Maitama Sule, General Buhari told them that the change which Nigerians expect from his administration could not happen overnight. He asked the leaders and Northern clerics to help sensitize the public and pass the message across that the change they crave would take time.
He said that the nation under the PDP had earned more than she had earned since 1914 intimating that it had taken the PDP 16 years to squander and destroy the nation’s economy.
He said, “The biggest message is to try and persuade the people that it is not possible to change the state of affairs now. It took 16 years and those 16 years, most of you know it better than myself, Nigeria earned revenue more than what it earned from 1914 to then.
“You know that we used to have Nigeria Airways, Nigeria National Shipping Line, Nigeria Railways. Where are they now? Where is the infrastructure? Between then and now and what we earned in-between and what is on the ground.
“That is how efficiently how the PDP managed Nigeria in the last 16 years. Now we have invariably inherited all the problems, especially in the north east. So, you have to convince your constituencies that you have virtually arrived at the wrong time and that they have to temper their expectation with some justice towards the leadership.
“I think whatever has to be deployed especially in the churches and mosques, this is the quickest way to communicate this to the ordinary people, continue to remind them if all the things I said in all the states I visited.
“We picked three fundamental problems. The first is security. The country has to be secured before anything can be put in place and then the economy. The fact is that more than 60 per cent of the Nigerian population are youths and most of them, whether they have been to school or not, are unemployed and this is the biggest danger if we don’t know it,” he concluded.
