THE ALTERNATIVE STORY
with Reno Omokri
Last week, President Muhammadu Buhari did not attend the Executive Council of the Federation meeting because, according to Lai Mohammed, he was attending to ‘other issues’. This week, the Executive Council of the Federation meeting did not even bother to hold.
While I was wondering what excuse Lai would give us this week, some ideas flashed through my mind. Maybe the President was busy in the ‘other room’ attending to ‘other issues’! After all, a lot of ‘other’ issues appear to dominate the mind of this administration and they rather seem to have pre-eminence over the major issue of governance!
But seriously though, could it be that President Muhammadu Buhari is a secret Efe supporter and that the cancellation of this week’s Executive Council of the Federation meeting was…based on logistics?
I wonder, I just wonder. Well, at least there is some good news. The Secretary to the Government of the Federation and the Director-General of the National Intelligence Agency have both been suspended indefinitely pending investigation into allegations against them.
I can quite clearly understand why Ambassador Ayo Oke, the Director-General of the National Intelligence Agency would be suspended pending investigations, but why would Babachir Lawal, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, be suspended pending investigations? By now he should have been investigated.
The allegations against Babachir Lawal came to light five months ago. The President himself even wrote a letter to the Senate defending the Secretary to the Government of the Federation. So why only suspend him pending investigations now? What was the Presidency doing in the five months since this incident came to light in December 2016?
You see, it is precisely this slow pace of governance that has seen the Buhari-led administration take a cavalier approach to governance and this is not helping it or the nation it purports to govern.
The Buhari administration is one and a half years older than the Trump administration. Even more so, Donald Trump has never been in government before 2017, either in an elective or appointive capacity. By contrast, President Muhammadu Buhari has been in government almost all his life and has been a governor, minister, a member of the federal executive and a former head of state.
The point is that President Buhari has enough experience in governance and one would have expected that his experience would have at least given him an edge over a neophyte like President Trump when it comes to executive ability.
President Donald Trump appointed Lt. General Michael Flynn as National Security Adviser on the 20th of January 2017. Immediately he was appointed, Flynn was accused of inappropriate communications with Russian officials. Two days after his appointment, it was revealed that Lt. General Michael Flynn was being investigated. Three weeks after it was announced that Lt. General Michael Flynn was being investigated, he was forced to resign from his job as NSA and President Trump accepted his resignation.
The total time that elapsed between accusation and his exit was three weeks.
Now contrast that experience with President Muhammadu Buhari’s treatment of Babachir Lawal. And yet President Muhammadu Buhari is meant to have more experience in governance than US President Donald Trump.
If this administration was really serious about its anti-corruption war, it would not have waited for five months to suspend (not sack) and investigate Babachir Lawal.
And it does seem like the suspension itself is an afterthought because this same President had himself written a copious letter defending the same Babachir to the Senate.
But in all of this, I have one question: Now that the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Babachir-Lawal has been suspended, will Dino Melaye receive 5% of the ₦220 million fraudulent grass-cutting contract he exposed? This is the first real public test of the Muhammadu Buhari administration’s whistle-blowing policy. We await Dino’s bank alert!
But seriously though, this administration must bring back a sense of urgency into government. It cannot keep taking forever to do the needful. Its slow pace is affecting the development of Nigeria.
The 2017 United Nations Human Development Index was released this week and Nigeria made no progress from the 2016 index. We maintained the same position. To put this in perspective, Nigerians may want to recall that Nigeria made progress EVERY year between 2010 and 2015. Why have we stopped making progress in the last two years? What has changed between 2015 and now? Do we have to change the name of the APC from All Progressives Congress to All Retrogressives Congress?
I have so far focused on the SGF, but what about the events surrounding the Director-General of the National Intelligence Agency, the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the $43 million haul of cash?
Why for instance has a usually garrulous government not come out to brief Nigerians on what it does know about the affair? Yes, an investigation is going on, but so that Nigerians will be sure that what is going on is an investigation and not a cover-up, we need to know the facts of the matter that have already been established.
When a usually talkative Lai Mohammed is slow to comment on the $43 million Osborne Towers cash, the public may begin to wonder if his silence is because of the well-known fact that it takes time to cook good lies?
Two things that the public is itching to know, a. Who owns the Osborne Towers apartment. b. Why would the EFCC go ahead to raid an apartment if they had actually been warned beforehand that it belonged to a security agency?
Could it be that the best script writers are not in Nollywood or Hollywood but are working for the APC-led administration?
I started this piece by linking Efe with President Muhammadu Buhari and it seemed like a joke, but to be honest, the two of them have more in common than the President would like to admit.
Efe is an entertainer and he chooses his words with great effect to entertain his fans and give them an escape from the dreariness of life in the new and improved Nigeria under President Muhammadu Buhari and it seems his success has inspired the President to imitate him.
What else can you call the President’s statement in his Easter message to Nigerians that he has fulfilled our expectations in the last two years? Those words are just so outlandish as to be entertaining. Surely, no one can take the President serious when he says that!
The headline from the Vanguard Newspaper aptly captured his words. On the 15th of April 2017 the Vanguard ran this headline, ‘We‘ve met Nigerians expectation in 2 years – Buhari’.
If the President wants to know the veracity of that statement, he should go to the comments section of that story on Vanguard newspaper to read the comments of the Nigerian people whose expectations he thinks he has met! Their responses to him may prompt him to banish the commentators to some ‘other rooms’ at DSS headquarters!
Precisely, what expectations has the President met in the last two years?
He promised Nigerians 3 million jobs in two years but rather than add jobs, the National Bureau of Statistics says that Nigeria under President Buhari has shed 4.58 million jobs.
He boasts of technically defeating Boko Haram but Fulani Herdsmen have become so emboldened that whatever we gained from the containment of Boko Haram has been eaten up by the onslaught of herdsmen.
The Naira can only get you half the dollars it got you two years ago and we have gone from an inflation rate of 9% in 2015 to almost 20% today. The price of petrol for cars has almost doubled as has the price of staple foods.
And despite all this, the President says he has fulfilled our expectations.
About the only promise that the Buhari administration can be said to have kept is the promise of one meal a day that was so widely advertised. That promise has been kept because many Nigerians can now only afford to eat one meal per day.
If I have been unfair to the President and you know one expectation that he has met, I will like to be fair to him. Please email the expectation to me at reno@renoomokri.org.
Nasir El-Rufai Versus Yakubu Dogara:
The recent kerfuffle between the Kaduna State Governor, Malam Nasir El-Rufai and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr. Yakubu Dogara has exposed a hollowness in the assertion by El-Rufai that he has no security votes.
If Nasir El-Rufai says he has no security votes, then with which money did he pay the Fulani herdsmen he claimed to have paid compensation as part of his efforts to stop the killings in Southern Kaduna?
El-Rufai’s exact words on the 3rd of December 2016 were as follows:
“We took certain steps. We got a group of people that were going round trying to trace some of these people in Cameroon, Niger republic and so on to tell them that there is a new governor who is Fulani like them and has no problem paying compensations for lives lost and he is begging them to stop killing. In most of the communities, once that appeal was made to them, they said they have forgiven. There are one or two that asked for monetary compensation. They said they have forgiven the death of human beings, but want compensation for cattle. We said no problem, and we paid some. As recently as two weeks ago, the team went to Niger republic to attend one Fulani gathering that they hold every year with a message from me.”
Cleverness is not intelligence. If El-Rufai says he has no security votes, was the money his government paid the Fulani his personal money? Was it appropriated for in the 2016 Kaduna State budget? And if there was no such appropriation, did El-Rufai misappropriate funds? The more El-Rufai points the finger at others, the more the finger is pointed at him.
I will advise the Speaker to ask El-Rufai to produce the statement of the accounts from where he paid the Fulani. Malam Nasir El-Rufai is well versed in misusing and misapplying the principle of Taqiyya to serve his Machiavellian purposes and the speaker must not play into his hands. He may be small in size, but from his reptilian brain comes some of the most ingenious manipulations.
Reno’s Nuggets
And now for my nuggets as I promised I would do every week. You can get more of the nuggets from my new book, Apples of Gold (a book of Godly wisdom).
If you hurry to marry, you marry to worry. Marriage is not a race. If you rush, you get disgrace. If you take your time, you get grace. If as a girl, you want your future husband to worship the ground you walk on, then keep your virginity until marriage. The only way to do this is to date men interested in marriage not men interested in SEX. SEX rhymes with EX because when they get sex from you, you may become an EX.
