‘So far so good but it could be better’
By Adie Vanessa Offiong
How do you assess the Buhari Administration at mid term?
So far so good but it could be better. It is difficult to assess because the health of Mr. President has been cause for concern. There is no doubt that his state of health affects the whole pace of governance, so that doesn’t make it easy for us to assess and say this is how far he has gone. The new government started off with good intentions which were well articulated to turn the country around, to secure the nation from what had become an intractable insurgency in the North East, to turn around the economy and to tackle corruption. In the case of insurgency, at least from a purely military standpoint, Nigeria has done what most of us expected for so long. I am one of those who couldn’t understand how a nation like Nigeria suffered the kind of incursion on our territory as we suffered under the Boko Haram for two, three years. That the new government moving in with greater resolve and reporting success is what we expect would happen. Nigeria should be one of the most powerful nations in Africa. A group of terrorists should not be able to hold us to ransom. Mr. President was right when more than four months ago he announced that Boko Haram had been technically degraded. The victory is not yet complete and I think if you ask those who have been displaced from many of the villages in the north east, they will tell you that it is not yet safe to return home. How do you handle that? This is not something you can simply put more battalions on the field for, because they are no longer troops that you can see. It means you have to be patient and my feeling is that more efforts should be put on the various alternative interventions towards peaceful resolution, towards reconciliation and towards de-radicalization. I hear there are things happening in this direction but I don’t think that the average Nigeria is aware of what is happening.
What kind of reports are you getting from Catholic and other churches in the North East that suffered heavily from the insurgency?
We hear two things. There are much publicised reports of huge sums of money, both the ones put aside by the Nigerian government and the millions of dollars that we hear foreign countries and agencies have also pledged or paid for the reconstruction of the North East. There was a time governors from there attended a meeting