An Open Letter To The President-Elect, Gen. Buhari By Oyigu OnucheOjo Elijah
Dear Sir,
THE JOURNEY OF A NEW DAWN
I congratulate you on your heroic victory in the just concluded presidential election in which you emerged victorious, defeating your focal contender with over two millions Nigerian electorates’ votes. Your victory at the polls was incidental to the stanch nostalgia with which Nigerians craved for change.
Your Excellency Sir, the manner in which your victory was accepted by the generality of Nigerian people across religion, region, ethnic and racial backgrounds could be seen as empirical evidence, indicating the love that the people of Nigerian have for you. It also justifies the magnitude of confidence they reposed in you as their new king with a father’s heart, with open ears to hearing and listening to the lumber of his people and whose hands are always opened to his sons and daughters. Most Nigerians addressed you as ‘Baba,’ this of course may not be traced to your biological age but could be seen from the stand point of your paternal affinity for the welfare of your people.
Mr. President Sir, Nigerian people elected you to occupy the highest edifice of the land, the Aso Villa, in such a time when there was a palpable lacuna in the national leadership. With their bare hands they thumb-printed the ballot papers for their cherished president. They procured your victory through their permanent voter cards as well as their determined resolve to set a platform for the journey of a new dawn. The poor and the ignored people of the society were mostly the ones that fought for your victory. With their sweat they graded the road for your safe trip to Aso Villa. They may not be dignitaries in the land but they settled on combating a common course for the sake of their destiny. They may not have billions like other cabals to contribute to the financing of your campaign activities but they rather lay down their lives in pursuit of the course for a good Nigeria. They defied rain and sunshine to ensure that they cast their votes and that the vote counts.
The 2015 presidential and other elections have proven that, democratic power belongs to the people, to them sovereignty belongs. The electorate has come to see election as a way of electing the leaders that will spearhead the affairs of their destiny and the interests of the land. Elections are meant to be seen as a constitutional way through which people either vote out leaders who in their views have not worked to expectation by delivering electoral promises, and perhaps vote in leaders who in their anticipation will be able to safeguard the fatherland by upholding the territorial integrity of the land as well as being passionate about the welfare of the citizenry through effective leadership that abhors corrupt and sharp practices. With confidence, Nigerians voted for you, hoping that you will not let them down.
As you enjoy the honey moon of your electoral victory, your electoral bride, the Nigerian people are pining for an obsessive, ardent and fervent love from their newly married electoral husband whose union was consummated at the various polling units across the country on March 28th, 2015 as impeccably officiated by the nation’s electoral umpire, INEC. As it is obtained in the conventional wedding event between a would-be couple, regardless of the glamour that follows the event, they remain unmarried until the officiating minister declares them husband and wife, which marks the beginning of the conjugal journey. In the same stratum, Nigerians could not sleep but were held tight to their television sets to hear the victorious voice of Professor Attahiru Muhammud Jega, the main officiating minister who declared you winner, having polled 15,416,221 of the votes with which Nigerian people vowed their love for you. While you were proposing to the then love bird which has become a legally married entity within the gamut of the nation’s electoral acts as amended, you promised to love her throughout the period that such a conjugal but electoral and social contract will last. The greatest need of the country is the need for a loving leader.
Your Excellency Sir, Nigerians are appealing to you to consider the filial relationship that will exist between you, your administration and the people of Nigeria the same way that a newly married couple loves each other. You have said in many fora that your cardinal reasons to remaining in active politics was occasioned by your love for the welfare of the people of Nigeria and good governance which in the view of many people was lacking in the country. Though, political pundits who have been keenly following the electoral periods and transitions in Nigeria have seen the Fourth Republic as the longest democratic journey in the country whose emergence has not witnessed any military interference. I will also agree that Nigeria as a country has made an infinitesimal and minuscule success compared to what we had in the previous Republics. Though, it worth celebrating that the country has enjoyed 16 years of democratic governance with five elections in a row without obstruction, especially that the first Republic lasted for five years and three months, the second Republic lasted for four years and two months and the third republic was a still-birth. However, what Nigerians have been ravenously seeking is a passionate leader with a lover’s heart. A leader that is filled with love and that will see the citizenry as core members of his family.
The 16 years of our democratic leadership has no doubt resulted to some successes, but it is also obvious that between the leaders and the led, there seems to be a master-servant relationship which has culminated to sharp inequality in our Nigerian society thereby besmirching the core values of an egalitarian state. The leadership that Nigerians are expecting from you sir, is the kind that is rooted in love. This is further buttressed in the first stanza of our most respected National Anthem which says, “…To serve our fatherland with ‘love’ and strength and faith…” Love remains one of the core ingredients for service as its absence will wreck the motive for leadership. When love is absent, leadership becomes hardship and instead of constructing and improving on the lives of the people, the leaders will end destroying the institutions in the land as well as the people he leads. With love, Nigerians brought you to power through their votes and in the same token, you will lead them to the desired shoreline of their prosperity. As a God elected father over Nigerian state, you have said in many of your speeches that, in your regime, there will not be disparity between you and the people that elected you. Only love will make you work that talk. Only a love filled regime will confer its people with basic needs where according to you, no Nigeria will go to bed with hunger. A love filled policy is what a leader needs to fighting poverty in the land.
Your Excellency Sir, may your love for democratic shepherd-hood over your new bride (Nigeria) be so lavished on her to a degree that she may not have a need to look somewhere else to filling her love tank. Nigeria has been in and out of love for over a decade and half, the love union which has been marked with spiky infidelity. As known in a conventional connubial union, conjugal infidelity stems out of unfaithfulness between the married people. However, infidelity in leadership occurs when a leader fails to practice what he preaches and the followers are not loyal to obeying the law of the land. Sir, Nigerians have suffered infidelity in the hands of its handlers before now. Infidelity in leadership is when a leader goes to another country for medical services and allows its bride to patronize the country’s ‘panadol’ filled hospitals while those in the rural areas suffer most. Infidelity in leadership is when a country’s leader sends his children abroad to school while the education sector in the land remains in comatose allowing only the poorest of the poor in the society to patronize. To balance up the love equation and obviating emergence of infidelity, the couple should eat the same food and patronize the same institutions. There should be a legislative endorsement mandating the country’s policymakers to patronize the various public institutions they make policies for, this will help in procreating institutional revival and revamps the almost-to the-grave sectors of our economy as there will be commitment to funding. According to your speech at your party’s presidential primary election held in Lagos on 11th December, 2014 in which you emerged winner, you said you had no foreign bank account, houses nor companies in other countries. Your antecedent has shown your true love for the fatherland, making people describing you as “Baba Integrity.” On this, you stand out among others, who could not in a clear term, tell Nigerians about their assets before, during after being in power. It is however, hope that, your love for Nigerian people will be seen in the welfare of the people of Nigeria to put an end to problem of leadership infidelity which Nigerians have suffered in the past few years.
The youth wing of your new bride is clamouring for the declaration of emergence in job creation. They have been staffed from enjoying the essence for education. The glorious papers they called certificate no longer have values in the land anymore. Day in, day out, youths are being graduated from schools and there seems not to be a way of absorbing them into the country’s labour force. Majority of them depended on their parents to be educated and also depend on their parents after graduation, thereby perpetuating their parasitic dependence on their parents. In some states, the parents’ salaries are not paid and even when it is paid, in other states, it has been 30% of the salary. This has indeed affected the cost of living among your people and endangers them when challenged health wise. Jobs are always given to cronies of the people in the corridor of power while in some cases, government’s job are sold at exorbitant rate, where the highest bidder has the day without recourse to whether or not competence should be considered. This systemic failure has culminated to giving free posthumous employment to some youth after their departure to the great beyond in some job seeking situations that could have been avoided should there be sound job creation policy. The private sector has ceased the opportunity to marginalize your youths as graduates could be subjected to a job of 20,000 Naira monthly, yet with irregular payment of the said amount. Though, Nigeria has been singing the song of being the highest economy in African Continent, but the reality of such claim has not materialized in the lives of the people. With Our GDP valuing at $510 billion and our economy rated 26th in the world, it was expected that such economic reality should have reflected in the lives of the people. I am however, in total agreement with your speech, during your visit to Chattham House in UK, when you delivered a lecture on ‘Prospects for Democratic Consolidation in Africa: Nigeria’s Transition’, at the gathering you averred that, “ …But it is more of paper growth, a growth that, on account of mismanagement, profligacy and corruption, has not translated to human development or shared prosperity. A development economist once said three questions should be asked about a country’s development: one, what is happening to poverty? Two, what is happening to unemployment? And three, what is happening to inequality? The answers to these questions in Nigeria show that the current administration has created two economies in one country, a sorry tale of two nations: one economy for a few who have so much in their tiny island of prosperity; and the other economy for the many who have so little in their vast ocean of misery.”
It is also obvious that you have started taking a real battle to the gate of corruption. Some reports have it that, the fear of Buhari is the departure from corrupt practices. The land is indeed in need of sanity. We have lost the basis of prosperity to corrupt leaders who delight in looting our collective patrimony. Our health sector has been thrown into the Dead Sea of health services delivery because of the virus they called corruption. The education sector is ever crying for help, yet with little or nothing to substantiate its transformation. We have many universities in the country but out of 1.6 million candidates that sit for UTME every year, only 520, 000 of them could be admitted by our tertiary institutions thereby leaving over 1million candidates sitting again for another UTME, a situation which is best seen by many as “Water, water everywhere but none to drink.” Nigerian Admission Seekers have been made to be generating revenue for JAMB and government every year. It is yet unknown, why a result obtained by UTME’s candidates could not be made valid for three years instead of subjecting them to this annual ritual and hemorrhaging their parents financial resources. The Big Fish in that Big Sea called “corruption” has swallowed the vim of our land. Our collective patrimony has been injudiciously used thereby leading to a disharmony that is now making our people to beg for alimony in the name of stomach infrastructure. There should not be need to institutionalizing Stomach Infrastructure, should there be structured and well funded institutions in the land. The empty stomach in the land is as a result of a few people who have decided to use pen and ‘cabalistic-links’ to filling their financial tanks at the expense of the good people of the land. Corrupt wind has blown off the crown of the land, leaving the land empty of what should have glamorized it. A sanitized institution with an ardent political-will will go a mile away in dealing with the monster called corruption. The people of Nigeria and indeed the entire world will applaud you, should you garner the audacity to wrestling corruption head-on within the purview of the nation’s law.
More also Sir, I’m aware of the fact that most of the challenges confronting the Nigerian state predate your administration but I am also convinced that effective leadership is aimed at either alleviating or totally obviating the hardship of the people that the leader leads through strategic and realizable policies regardless of the age of such hardship. You are assuming the throne of leadership at a time that Nigeria is facing plethora of problems ranging from insecurity to poverty, unemployment to inequality. But, according to Dr. Myles Munroe (of blessed memory), he said, “A leader will be remembered by the problems he solved and the ones he created while in leadership. On May 29th, 2015, you will be sworn in as the country’s fourth democratic president since the return of the Furth Republic. It is hoped that, your regime will be remarkable in the history of Nigeria as the whole will be looking unto you to converting all your promises to performance. We have so much depended on oil since its discovery even though we could not boast of having a functional refinery. We plead that you consider repairing our refineries to put a stop to importing our own organic product.
As a trained Geoscientist, I am made to know that there are blessings within the soil and when such blessings are properly harnessed, they will not only bring succor to the people but they will also enhance a metamorphic change in the economical status of the people. Such geological blessings which in most cases appear in the form of mineral deposits are part of God’s plan to better the lives of the people that live within the land where such soil containing mineral deposits are found. Nigerians have canvassed and are still canvassing the needs for revenue diversification as a way of remedying the economical impasse and logjam facing the Nigerian state. We have seen that, Oil money can no longer meet the need of Nigerian people despite the robust nature of petroleum resources in Nigeria which made the country rank as one of the first ten Oil producing countries across the nations of the world. Nigerian is blessed with many solid mineral deposits. But it seems that, our attentions are concentrated on oil at the expense of other non-organic minerals deposits. There is no state in Nigeria that is empty of one or two mineral deposits. Scientific findings have shown that, only in Kogi State, there are about 29 mineral deposits, the highest in the country which is seconded by Nassarawa State with 25 mineral deposits. There should not have been a need for austerity measure when oil price dwindled if we had looked inward into exploring and exploiting the solid minerals we have while we also give attention to agriculture. This however, justifies the saying that, only a producing land prospers while a consuming land attracts poverty. It is high time we move from a consumption inclined nation to a production nation through structured policies.
Your Excellency Sir, there was a Nigeria before 1958 when oil was discovered. There was a Nigeria though without oil but with robust economy. There was a Nigeria without oil but with Good educational institutions which was seen as one of the best in the continent of Africa. There was a Nigeria though without oil but was powerful enough to feed her people and was exporting food to other nations of the world. There was a Nigeria without oil whose graduates were not looking for jobs but jobs were handy even before they graduated from school. That Nigeria has not gone on extinction but perhaps there is a change in the managerial approach employed by those who were at the corridor of power then compared to what is obtainable in the present dispensation of Nigerian leadership.
Finally Sir, Nigerians are solidly behind you both to cooperate and pray with you to seeing the beauty of the land through a people centered administration. It is our prayer that you will leave Nigeria better than you met it. May God give you the required wisdom to tackling the herculean tasks ahead of you. May God increase your strength and empower you to do your job faithfully. May God keep you in good health and protect you. May Nigerians laugh and rejoice under your watch. May your people celebrate and eat the good of the land during your regime. In your regime, through the power of God, Nigerians will sing a new song even as they celebrate the dawn of a prosperous Nigeria.
God bless you and your team. God bless the federal republic of Nigeria.
Thank you.
Yours faithfully,
Oyigu OnucheOjo Elijah
OYIGU ONUCHEOJO ELIJAH, is a Kogi born Creative Writer and Author. He writes from Abuja, Nigeria Capital. He is reachable on prophoyigu@yahoo.com and 07066492727 (SMS only)
