FEATURE ARTICLE

Comrade Ifeanyichukwu MmohWednesday, December 6, 2017
[email protected]
Jos, Nigeria

BETWEEN MR. PRESIDENT AND THE HUNGRY NIGERIAN MASSES


ery many of my esteemed readership would quickly have fingered the many criminals who have successfully surrounded Mr. President as the latest threat to the administration drawing their facts from the week to week episodes of unfolded scandals since the Babachir and the Oke saga earlier on this year. Others would most probably have suggested the seemingly renewed spate of suicide bombings by the Boko Haram secessionist Islamist.

No doubt, many areas would have been fingered as latest threats. This is reality for you; different people with their different opinions. Governance has changed gears (in recent times) from simple routine of coming to the office by 11 am in the morning and staying put till 1 pm before closing for the day into that of spending the whole day and sometimes even the night time strategizing and brainstorming on how best and cheaply, government could put smiles on the faces of the people.

Nigerians, under this current administration, are not smiling for the simple reason of being placed in-between hunger and starvation (on the one hand) and doing something stupid like stealing, prostituting or trafficking persons to the Mediterranean (on the other hand). The government - by her utopian policies - have proofed to be a stumbling block to the common man's ability to earn his daily bread instead of the beacon of hope that they should've been.

Let me say that the immediate ban of the 41 items once blacklisted by the CBN a few years ago just after the successful implementation of the Treasury Single Account (TSA) was a VERY wrong move. If it aimed at cutting off access to government funds through illegal means, it failed to consider the fact that corruption in Nigeria was not because there was surplus monies to embezzle but because the average Nigerian is naturally without contentment as he believed his life consisted of the abundance of the things he possessed!

Hence, the political class and the civil servants who were directly injured by the TSA implementation reacted by refusing to spend their salaries and allowances on those areas where the ordinary man could benefit. They stopped building structures, buying cars, landed properties and even latest textiles. On the other hand, the common man whose injury he blames on the ban of the 41 items, reacts by inflating commodity prices due to the scarcity of those items.

Now the latest threat to this administration has become the fact of being faced with a very hungry electorate who are mostly depressed, confused and stranded! Nigerians are hungry and if my guess was right; the change being brought on board by this government was meant to be applauded by living Nigerians. With the increased wave of sudden death across the land, will there be any well-fed Nigerian left to applaud this government achievements when they eventually come?

Music icon TIMAYA entered this year 2017 with a smashing hit song whose lyrics sounded as follows politicians pity for us. That song told the whole truth about the fate of the common man in the Buhari-APC administration. Yet are the leaders sympathetic to the masses' sufferings in any way? How has the MSMEs and the ERGP affected the common man? I am aware that there has been no conclusive effect of the MSME clinic on the Nigerian on the streets and the government went on to initiate yet another hoax called Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP).

In the end, there is only a well-coordinated media propaganda to give to Nigerians. In plateau state, for instance the governor once said that every first-class graduate of plateau origin would get employed automatically but till date, not one person has been declared employed! What Nigerians yearn for is simple: fight corruption through whatever means but don't starve us to death. Mr. President has enough food to eat and water to drink and, Mr. President sure goes for routine medical check ups but can this be said of the average Nigerian outside the corridors of power?

If the corruption war was more important, Mr. President would've chose to stay back and nurse his illness without traveling abroad for a medical vacation! But since he had sense enough to do what he did then, he should be benevolent enough to consider ameliorating the plight of his countrymen and women. Some of those who ruined the country are still alive today. Does it make sense that - in correcting the damage - the blood of innocent Nigerians was required to lay the foundation?

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