Fellow Nigerians, from what I can see of the presidential campaigns against the background of the hardship, economic and social decay brought by the cluelessness of the current leadership and that of the previous leadership, it is pertinent to present a case scenario of what may happen if we continue in our business as usual trajectory. Nigerians say prayers every day for God to deliver us from hardship but we feel scared to walk the talk. We feel scared to reject tyranny and oppression. So, let us try a new leader with the qualities listed below.
First, let us vote for a leader who has lost the ability for coherent speech and thoughts; who would not be able to articulate issues or find responses to our myriad of challenges. Yes, we need a leader who is afraid of the media and who believes being asked questions by the local media amounts to a trap or a plot to humiliate him. A president who will set up attack dogs to tackle anyone who asks questions of his administration because transparency and accountability are not part of citizens’ constitutional guarantees. We need a president without a conscience, who cannot condemn murder simply because it was committed by a member of his ethnic and religious group. We need a president obsessed with power, who has no sense of balance, even if it means power will reside with his section of Nigeria forever. Furthermore, we need a president who once he gets elected, will ensure his party continues in power forever through bare-faced rigging and continued nomination of all contestants from his party until death separates him and Nigeria. He needs to be a god-father who can replicate his antics at a former federal capital nationwide.
Nigeria needs a leader who will not fight the insurgency and insecurity in the land. He will ensure that terrorists and bandits continue to dominate our forests. Indeed, he will tell Nigerians to tolerate their brothers and sisters since the forest belongs to no one. He will refuse to take steps to stop Boko Haram or the agitation in the South-East but simply watches the situation deteriorate. He needs to appoint all the service chiefs from one tiny corner of the country and when other sections complain, he will tell them that they have no right to be part of the security architecture since they did not vote for him.
We need a man who is ready to sell off all national assets under the guise of privatization to his cronies as he may have done in the past. He needs to sell off the assets for peanuts to persons who have no technical, managerial or financial capacity to manage them. And these assets will include the refineries. We need a president who will tax us to death but will resist any attempt at accountability. He will introduce his financial management and tax firm to take the place of the Federal Inland Revenue Service. He will regale us with great figures of new revenue raised with little or no accountability for what the new revenues have been used for.
We need a president who will outperform the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari’s medical tourism history. The greater part of his time will be spent in hospitals outside our shores. He has no need to tell Nigerians of his ailment, medical conditions and history but it will be his right to spend taxpayers’ money as he likes for his health. The president need not oversee the building of new hospitals and medical establishments or refurbishing and equipping existing ones. Rather, he needs to ensure that doctors are perpetually on strike and commit to a guarantee of the mass exodus of the remaining doctors and nurses to foreign lands. He will get an international award from the World Health Organisation for the feat.
We need a president who will assure and reassure us of his commitment to lift over 100 million Nigerians out of poverty but will lift no finger in that direction. He will appoint members of Nigeria’s tenth eleven into his economic team, especially persons from his ethnic and religious group. The economic aides will invent new terminologies of economic governance, and refuse to listen to superior advice. Their policies should ensure that two-third of Nigerians will fall into poverty. Even when the National Bureau of Statistics produces evidence of poor performance, they should contest the facts. Evidently, they need to continue the borrowing spree until creditors refuse to give new loans or we simply default in debt service. He needs all the media spin, including media aides who abuse anyone who dares call him out. Towards the end of his tenure, he’ll appoint the aides to very important positions and their qualifications will be – abusing the president’s enemies.
The last strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities should be a joke. The Minister of Education must ensure that schools are locked down for over a year; sign agreements with ASUU or similar groups without the least intent to fulfill the government’s side of the bargain. He may feel the need to establish more universities, colleges of education, etc., without any idea of where funds to finance them will come from. The minister need not be an academic but may be a tailor, a musician or just any artisan without any knowledge of academia. It may be imperative to introduce a policy outlawing the completion of tertiary institution courses on schedule. For instance, anyone who dares to complete a four-year course in four years will be liable to not less than two years imprisonment to complete the time he would have used to end the course.
Overall, we need an emperor who will tell us to shut up when we complain, a dictator who simply will be fulfilling his life ambition and nothing more. It is the choice of Nigerians and we will live with it. Let us follow and vote for those who put us in this mess. Even though they have not offered apologies for their misdeeds, let them continue. But no one should start looking for human rights activists, moral leaders, the media, etc., to challenge oppression, repression, poverty and denigration of the rule of law once the new leader is sworn in. Let us quietly live with him and stop any new noise. We shall all live happily thereafter.
