by Owei Lakemfa
I pledge to Buhari, my President, to be , faithful, loyal and honest. To serve him with all my strength. To uphold his honour and glory so I will not be counted amongst his enemies. So help me God. Knowing that he is an ‘ol soja’ I need to pledge my one hundred percent loyalty to him as he marks his first hundred days in office.
Those who asked him to present a score card of his one hundred days in office, are trying to introduce an American culture to which we are allergic. There are also those who want to claim that he is not implementing the party’s Road Map. They fail to realise that this was merely a road map to the Presidency, not the programme he is expected to implement. In any case, who but the unpatriotic will expect him to implement his manifesto when we did not know things were so bad? All we can do is hope.
I do not think the ruling APC set out to deceive Nigerians as some claim; it is only that it got its facts wrong. It was also not dialectical; in its hurry to move the country forward, it did not go back to see where we are coming from or where we are. But we must believe the APC when it told us, that President Buhari achieved far more in four weeks, than former President Goodluck Jonathan accomplished in six years. With such first class performance, he can politically be said to have completed his tenure and can retire to Daura.
But my fear is that such suggestion can be misconstrued, and I may be counted in the camp of retired Colonel Sambo Dasuki, the former National Security Adviser who was caught planning treasonable felony by having seven high calibre rifles in his house. That arsenal is enough to overthrow the combined governments of Russia, United States and China!
The President is too modest to present his monumental achievements in his first one hundred days. So as show of deep loyalty, I have decided to attempt a summary. First is insecurity. I echo the popular singsong; Buhari has degraded the capacity of Boko Haram. We now have a Commander-in-Chief who stays up to bolt the doors, when we all have gone to bed. When in two months, Boko Haram would have been pulverised; the attention will be on kidnapping, banditry, and cultism.
As Nigerians, we have suffered power blackout since birth. Now without buying transformers, generating more power, laying additional cables or building any new system, this is now a thing of the past. My brother, Garba Shehu, the President’s Spokesman in explaining this phenomenon, said it is Buhari’s body language that changed the performance of the privatised power sector. I put it down to a miracle; Buhari said, Let there be light. As a patriot, I now want to sell my generators and inverter. A similar miracle saw the refineries sprouting back to life. Na God win o!
The signs have been there; but disbelievers have been blind. In his first one hundred days, the President has run the country quite efficiently without Ministers thereby saving us a lot of money. If he goes on like this for another hundred days, we will save more money that can be used to build schools, hospitals, roads and fund social security. My only regret is that he was too much in a hurry to inaugurate the National Assembly.
He has also cleansed the Directorate of State Security by sacking the mouthy Marylyn Ogar and other senior spooks while also curtailing their powers in the Presidential Villa.
Our President has also publicly declared his assets. My fear which he has confirmed, is that relative to his fellow generals in office, he is a poor man. But our amiable Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo rescued the image of a poor Presidency.
I support all the actions and inactions of President Buhari, although I confess to being confused sometimes. For example what are the summersaults on foreign exchange about? What really is the policy?
Within hundred days, the war against corruption is in its last stages. He must resist pressures to probe beyond the Jonathan years; you don’t because you want to scratch your body, peel off your skin or scratch yourself to the bone. Leave Halliburton, leave Power Sector, leave Pentascope-NITEL, leave PTF probes!
We should not be so impatient as to assess a man in his first hundred days in office; I have no doubt that President Buhari will make all the necessary changes and fulfill his electoral promises; all we need is patience and good luck. It is heart warming to see so many professors and educated people speaking up for the President and endorsing all the actions he has taken, or may take in future. If all the good people he can find, even for ministerial appointments are from Daura, he should go ahead and appoint them.
I am learning to be as patriotic and loyal as one of my old acquaintances, Sola Salako who declared on her wall “Just so they know; there is nothing PMB (Buhari) can do right or wrong that will ever make me regret supporting his candidacy or make me wish we had kept GEJ (Jonathan) in office. NOTHING! No matter how slow, nepotistic, outdated, self-righteous or insensitive you claim he is, he is still 100,000 times a better option than GEJ…I don’t care if he fills the whole country with his family members”
This is so brilliantly put, that I recommend we replace the National Pledge with it. I am tempted to go on, but I need to stop here so I don’t get invited to a duel on the social media where thoughts are cheap and words are used and discarded like rain water. I hear that the masses in our country drink champagne through the throats of their leaders; on the occasion of a hundred days in office, let champagne pop, and let them drink on behalf of the citizenry. Hip, hip, hip, hurrah! Hundred gbosa to the peoples general!
Editor’s Note: This is satire.
Owei Lakemfa is former secretary general of Organisation of African Trade Unions Unity, OATUU. He is a columnist with Vanguard where this article was first published.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
