Buhari’s mid-term report, so far, so good
As the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari clocks two years in office, it is pertinent to take an X-ray of the regime in terms of its performance in the critical areas of its campaign promises and in those areas that Nigerians wanted action taken.
Though Nigeria is still battling economic difficulties, the time for applause is coming slowly but surely as the nation commences the laborious march out of recession.
The Buhari administration has performed fairly well in dealing with the insecurity problem that once loomed large on the national horizon. President Buhari got the nation’s armed forces to rout the Boko Haram, degrading the latter from a confident and rampaging band of insurgents to a rag-tag nuisance that now seek to ambush and throw bombs at the gallant soldiers of the Nigeria Army. Boko Haram can no longer stand and fight as in the days when they held sway. Today, they have lost the nerve and initiative to stand in battle and life in general is coming back to the troubled North east zone of the country.
The icing on the cake in the area of security, which is a good anniversary package for millions of Nigerians and the people of the troubled North east, is the release into freedom of 82 additional girls hitherto kidnapped from the Government Secondary School, Chibok in Borno State on 6th May, 2017. Freedom for this large number of girls is a source of great joy to anyone who comes from a family or community bearing in mind the long period of their captivity.
In the area of anti-corruption, it is a boom! Never before has the anticorruption agencies in the country exposed so much graft, so much greed, so much wickedness and so much lack of compassion among the nation’s elite. It is a sort of bonanza. Everyone, including the ordinary citizen now knows those who betrayed them, stole their patrimony, leaving the nation prostrate and incapable of providing them the basic means of existence, jobs, salaries and their meagre pension benefits. The Whistleblower policy activated by the Buhari administration to enable citizen participation in the anti-corruption war is the single most important catalyst now driving the war against corruption and given it a life of its own.
Under the Social Investment Programme (SIP), thousands of indigent Nigerians across the country have been receiving the five thousand naira stipend promised by the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) during the campaign for the 2015 elections. While this does not amount to much in view of the high inflation in the economy, at least it gives confidence and promise of better days for these class of Nigerians. Second, thousands of unemployed graduates who would have remained a pain in the neck of their families have been massively employed under the emergency teacher’s programme of the present administration. This class of educated Nigerians would have the self-esteem of earning a salary with the expectation that as the economy improves in the nearest future and the nation exits recession, according to the skills and knowledge of these young and educated, they would be absorbed into other critical areas of the economy. This is the popular N-Power job scheme which as we are told, would be expanded in 2017, to accommodate a total of 350,000 young and educated persons of different grades.
Perhaps, most revolutionary in the effort to revamp the economy and create employment is the steady and successful diversification of the economy. Agriculture and food production has taken the lead here. The administration of PMB has put in place the Anchor Borrowers Scheme under which farmers across the country are able to borrow money and improve their activities. So far, millionaires in large numbers have been created in a number of States across the country in the area of rice production. Rice farmers in Nigeria are not only becoming wealthy, they are able to provide employment to willing hands on the farms as they increase the acreage under cultivation. The magic that is happening here is that with the ban on rice imports, national revenue being used in the past to import the commodity are being conserved while steadily Nigerians have started to export the same commodity and earn foreign exchange while millions of Nigerians now eat locallyproduced rice, which nutritionists tell us is healthier for the body. Louis Okoroma, Abuja.