Dear President Muhammadu Buhari,
How time flies! This time last year, the voters were gearing up for your election, which came up on March 28, 2015. In a few months, on May 29 to be precise, you would have exhausted a good 25 per cent of your tenure as President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. To be sure, your arrival on the presidential scene has been felt in various areas of national life. Nevertheless, a lacuna remains to be filled: there is no comprehensive policy on change to which all your projects could be related. As a result, there appears to be no cohesion to all your efforts.
It will be recalled that your path to victory had change written all over it. It was the slogan of your campaign, and it remains the slogan of your party, the All Progressives Congress. As I indicated before on this column, nobody really asked you what you were changing the country to, because they were tired of what they had and wanted to change from it. Today, Mr. President, the people are asking: What are you changing the country to? In other words, where is the country headed? Where is the template for change that the citizens and investors could recognise and relate to?
The people are raising these questions now because your administration’s path to change remains unclear because there appears to be no holistic plan for achieving change. Yet, such a comprehensive plan is necessary for forging linkages among otherwise disparate projects. Let me explain.
It is not the case that your administration has done nothing since you came into office. Indeed, a lot has been accomplished. You’ve been fighting the insurgency in the North-East with considerable measure of success. You’ve been fighting corruption with tangible result. You implemented the Treasury Single Account. You bailed out many states that defaulted on salary payment. We’ve been told that your administration plans to reform the tax system, employ some 500,000 teachers, feed schoolchildren, and support poor and needy families. You’ve talked about diversifying the economy. There are also indications that you would like to remove fuel subsidy. And the list goes on.
The problem, Mr. President, is the lack of linkages among these disparate projects, making them appear more or less as a wish list. Take, for example, the employment of teachers and the school feeding projects. Upon which education policy are they based? What does the education policy say about secondary and higher education? When will vacant Vice-Chancellor positions in some federal universities be filled and when will their Governing Councils be (re)constituted? How does the education policy relate to your overall change agenda? What exactly is the change agenda and how do other projects like the fight against terrorism; the fight against corruption; the diversification of the economy, and so on relate to the change agenda?
Let me elaborate on these questions by citing a recent comparative case. Recall, Mr. President, that there was an American President, whose campaign slogan was “change” like yours. His name is Barack Obama, now in his second term. I campaigned for him in 2008 and 2012. Between his election on November 4, 2008, and the first inauguration on January 20, 2009, Obama rolled out a comprehensive change agenda and put it online for all Americans, and, indeed, the whole world to see. It was called American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan. Although the immediate motivation for the plan was the looming economic recession in the United States, Obama was careful enough to link all national projects–economy, education, health, energy, and so on–to it.
Obama’s radio address on the plan is worth quoting in some detail: “To build a 21st century economy, we must engage contractors across the nation to create jobs rebuilding our crumbling roads, bridges, and schools. To save not only jobs, but money and lives, we will update and computerise our health care system to cut red tape, prevent medical mistakes, and help reduce health care costs by billions of dollars each year. To make America, and our children, a success in this new global economy, we will build 21st century classrooms, labs, and libraries. And to put more money in the pockets of hard-working families, we will provide direct tax relief to 95 per cent of American workers.”
Obama preceded the above statement with an invitation to all Americans to work together, regardless of party or ideology: “However we got here”, he said, “the problems we face today are not Democratic problems or Republican problems. The dreams of putting a child through college, or staying in your home, or retiring with dignity and security know no boundaries of party or ideology.” Obama successfully achieved these objectives during his first term, which was why he was overwhelmingly re-elected in 2012.
Mr. President, the similarities between the American and Nigerian cases are too striking to ignore: Economic recession; unemployment; crisis in education and health sectors, security challenges, and so on. Moreover, Obama has had to bail out the American auto industry just as you had to bail out states from salary arrears. True, ours is compounded by corruption, but that too is still an economic problem deserving of linkage to an overall national plan for change.
Coming back home, Mr. President, you will recall that previous administrations since 1999 each had an overarching plan to which all other projects were related. For example, former President Olusegun Obasanjo had the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy and the accompanying State Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy, while the late President Umaru Yar’Adua had the Transformation Agenda, which former President Goodluck Jonathan elaborated upon.
No one doubts that your administration has a similar overarching plan, which should provide necessary cohesion within and across various sectors. The problem is that no one seems to know about it as it exists neither in hard nor in soft copy. It is high time one was produced and circulated. Such a plan should specify how change will be achieved in each sector of national life, complete with specified objectives, a timetable, and what should be accomplished at each stage.
This presupposes that each sector would have produced a comprehensive policy document that links all projects and programmes within the sector to one another and to other projects and programmes in other sectors. This gap is clearly evident in the ongoing fight against corruption. In the absence of a comprehensive anti-corruption policy, the ongoing arrests and prosecutions appear rather ad hoc, leading to insinuations of a witch-hunt.
The gap is even more evident in the 2016 budget, which seems to be an assemblage of unrelated fiscal activities, lacking in cohesion. For example, most legislators I have spoken to about the 2016 budget expressed frustration with internal deficiencies in the budgets in the ministries assigned to them, as if each budget heading was composed without regard to the others and to the administration’s change mission. Besides, the allocation of funds to certain ministries, such as agriculture, is deemed insufficient, given the potential of agriculture to provide not only food security but also generate employment.
True, Mr. President, your administration inherited a dwindling economy, worsened by a dip in oil prices, the devaluation of the naira, and flip flop policies by the Central Bank of Nigeria. Care must be taken to ensure that the financial situation you inherited is not conflated with your tenure as President. Yet, this may happen down the line, unless you take measures to ensure that your administration’s change policy is clearly spelt out, emphasising the need to change the nation’s financial fortunes from the ones you inherited.
PUNCH
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