The power play and political intrigue that brought in President Bola Tinubu two years ago are still very fresh in our memories. So also, are the nation’s social-political and economic challenges that require solutions at that material time.
Just as the lacklustre dispensation of President Mohammadu Buhari was ingloriously winding down, Nigerians were eager to know what to expect and through which of the political gladiators from the array of the good, the bad and the ugly that the murky waters of politics threw at our face to “choose” from at the time.
And so Bola Ahmed Tinubu came calling, bestriding a Trojan horse, as one with political sagacity, to lead us to our expected destination as a nation, or at least, set the stage to change the excruciating pain of a failing economy and the resultant hunger unleashed on the citizenry.
Ever since then, we’ve been here waiting, watching and sometimes, gasping for breath against the backdrop of galloping prices of goods and services amid the daily promises of hope in hopelessness by the government of the day.
The very first salvo fired at the economy, nay the people, was the subsidy removal and the “twin evil” of floating the national currency at the same time. While the policies on their own may harbour positivism ( especially that of the unification of exchange rate), as has been argued and over-flogged by the neoliberal economists in our midst, its simultaneous implementation was like a last bullet fired at the remainder of the waning purchasing power of the average Nigerian. And this is terrible!
Two Years have come and gone, yet this government (which is the largest in History with more Ministries and Government Agencies than any government before it, despite the recommendation of the Oransaye Committee of yore which seeks to reduce the cost of governance) is still grappling with the burden of governance and the delivering of “democracy dividends” to the people.
Nevertheless, the birth of the largest single-stream petroleum refinery in the world, the Dangote Refinery, which is capable of meeting the needs of PMS and other fuels, even to the level of exporting the product to other African nations and beyond, became a flicker of light, hope and a great achievement so far in the all-important petroleum sector. Even with the alleged attempted sabotage and the ‘roforofo’ fight between the government and the visioner, Aliko Dangote, the refinery has come to stay, courtesy of Bola Tinubu’s government.
Road infrastructure has received the deserved attention from President Tinubu’s two-year-old administration so far, too. The audacious Lagos – Calabar Highway is ongoing, kudos to this government. Yet so much is still being expected as several agrarian communities are still inaccessible due to bad roads.
With the increased revenue coming to the States every month as a result of subsidy removal, which translates to more financing of security votes, many states are still battling insecurity within their state, even though it has become a national malady. It is still in doubt whether the challenge of insecurity is better handled now by this administration than by previous ones.
As an individual, my community in Edo North has lost six people to killers masquerading as herdsmen and several farmlands abandoned to these marauders out of fear, all in the period of this administration alone. The recent upsurge in the activities of Boko Haram in Nigeria’s Northeast and bandits in the North West is a pointer to this administration’s low performance in the fight against insecurity.
National politics and governance have taken a nosedive in recent times, no thanks to the administration’s obsession with the “politics of consolidation” which ordered its focus away from the much-needed daily governance and development initiatives to the 2027 general elections. Officials of President Tinubu’s government do not hide the strong desire to let the opposition know that there’s no vacancy in the presidency for anyone outside them and the ruling APC.
This is obviously the reason for the mass influx of politicians to the ruling Party from other parties to have “a piece of the cake” in a zero-some political environment that has neither tolerance nor concessions for losers.
In Nigeria, the first two years of the first term of a two-term tenure of any democratic regime are spent on governance while the remaining two years are spent on politics of power, party supremacy and consolidation by incumbency. In President Tinubu’s era, this is being elevated to a new height as everything and anything politics and politicking are already excessively on overdrive, silencing political pluralism, as it were.
The goal is the 2027 election. Every other thing can wait. Or so it seems, as far as the self-proclaimed and widely acclaimed “owners” of 2027 have declared. It has really been a long and tortuous journey, these two years.
