Aisha Buhari and husband, Muhammadu Buhari
According to a viral audio clip from the BBC (Hausa Service), Mrs.
Aisha Buhari is worried that the more than 15 million people who voted
for her husband in 2015 would revolt against him because he has disappointed them by appointing “strangers” to positions of power, strangers who didn’t even work for his electoral triumph.
She is right about the potential revolt against her husband, but
she is wrong about the reason for it. Most disillusioned Buhari
supporters don’t care whether the president’s appointees are personally
known to him—or whether or not they campaigned or voted for him. They
are worried, instead, that many, perhaps most, of the president’s
appointees are corrupt and incompetent, but are shielded from any
consequences for their corruption and incompetence.
Let’s start from the president’s first major appointments:
Secretary to the Government of the Federation Lawal David Babachir is so
corrupt that he is now nicknamed “Cash and Carry” in government
circles. He even once publicly bragged about receiving monetary gifts
from the Ebonyi State governor, and has been implicated in the N270
million "grass-cutting" contract scandal for internally displaced Boko
Haram victims. The Chief of Staff to the President has been accused of
accepting a half-billion-naira bribe from MTN to reduce the telecom
company's NCC fine from N1.04 trillion to N330 billion, among other
sordid allegations of corruption against him. And the man is incompetent
and lazy, to boot. It’s the same story all around members of the
president's “kitchen cabinet.”
It took Buhari 6 months to appoint his ministers who have turned
out to be the most questionable and underwhelming cast of characters to
ever be in the Federal Executive Council. Among them is a minister of
budget who doesn’t know Nigeria’s debt profile; a minister of
agriculture (who, tellingly, is a former PDP chairman) who thinks the
cost of rice is high because Nigerians consume too much rice; a minister
of science and technology whose technological vision for the country is
to start local pencil manufacturing in two years; a comically loud- and
foul-mouthed minister of information who says dressing and undressing
masquerades is a strategy of job creation; a minister of youth and
sports who is so clueless he makes you want to cry; a backward,
prehistoric minister of communication who wants to tax Nigerians for
calls they make and texts they send; a minister of Niger Delta Affairs
who was indicted for fraud by a government commission in the 1990s but
still keeps his job even in the wake of this revelation; a minister of
finance who hides her incompetence behind a Cockney accent. The list
goes on.
Add that to the revelations of a series of secretive, illegal
employment of the children and relatives of high-ranking political
elites in this government, including Buhari’s, while millions of
brilliant, hardworking but underprivileged people vegetate in misery
amid a biting recession, and you know that Nigeria is wildly adrift.
Neither the president nor his ministers have a clue. And they don’t
care. If this trend continues, by the end of 2019, Buhari would be so
unpopular that he would be chased out of Aso Rock with rocks by millions
of his own erstwhile supporters. Aisha Buhari obviously doesn't want
this terrible fate to befall her husband. I don't, too.
-Written by: Farooq Kperogi
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