New Telegraph

You’ve enough time to fix Nigeria, Afenifere tells Buhari

Pan-Yoruba socio-cultural organisation Afenifere on Wednesday urged President Muhammadu Buhari to use his remaining period in office to tackle the security and economic challenges facing the country. In a statement by its Secretary General, Sola Ebiseni, the group told Buhari not to resign but should clean up the mess in Nigeria, insisting he has enough time to do so. It advised him to implement reports of the 2014 National Conference and the El-Rufai Committee on True Federalism. Afenifere said: “It was not clear the real import of President Muhammadu Buhari’s statement when he described his seven years in office as tough and that he was eager to go. “If it were before the parties’ conventions when it was thought that there was a hidden agenda to perpetuate his tenure beyond the constitutional limit, it would have been right to suggest that the statement was an assurance to Nigerians and the international community of his commitment to honouring his departure date.

“His assertion of the toughness of the assignment is rather amusing for a man that has seen it all both as a military ruler and democratically elected leader of his people. “Like he has done in the last seven years on vital national issues, the President merely lamented the six months strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) without proffering any solution or giving any assurance on how soon the youths of this country would return to school. “It is his stock-in-trade to merely lament the mass killing of the people by terrorists who have become most emboldened and unruly in his seven years so far.

“Notwithstanding, the laughable self-assessment of surpassing his predecessor in the provisions of infrastructuresandthesomewhat juvenile nostalgia of having not visited his hometown in one year, the Daura lamentation is both an admission of incapacity and failure, the natural consequence or effect of which is to take a bow andrelievehimself of further torment by a duty of mutual disaster to the labourer and more so to the farm owners.” Ebiseni said: “The call, only two months back, for a Government of National Unity, or for the resignation of the President would have no doubt found justification in this admission.

Yet the situation today is quite different from the factors that made such suggestions then plausible. “For what it is worth, the nation is frenzied by the electoral activities which in itself suggests that Nigerians are more eager than Buhari himself to see the end of his most uninspiring if not disastrous tenure. “Besides, thisgovernment is virtually now a ghost of itself with the players so deflated by the air of legitimacy that even the most vibrant deputy has lost steam having been tricked into a disastrous popularity contest within the ruling party constituted only by a few Nigerians. “Inotherwords, thereisno onebetterhandthanthePresidentleftinthisgovernmentto beinvestedwiththedestinyof Nigerians.” He added: “All the instruments and facilities to do this are present in the reports of the 2014 National Conference and the El-Rufai Committee on True Federalism. The task is not as daunting, even if as filthy, as the Augean stable. “It takes the Herculean spirit and ingenuity, which he summoned by diverting the course of two Rivers to clear it in one day.”

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