Dear President Bola Tinubu,
It is exactly five months since you mounted the saddle as president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Although the controversies around the elections that brought you to the office are yet to settle, what is not in doubt is that you have the responsibility to steer this ship called Nigeria to safety. It is a job you asked for and got. So, I do not pity you because I take it that you were aware of the enormity of the task before you while you were seeking that office.
Permit my choice of medium to communicate with you. However, you will agree with me that as an ordinary everyday Nigerian, there is hardly any other option open to me.
First, the daunting task before you was not created by you nor can we blame you alone for the rot that has become the lot of this nation, but you share a huge blame in the declining fortunes of this country, and you must brace up and be prepared to roll up your sleeves and face the job before you.
Clearly, from your experience, so far, you will now agree that the easiest part of becoming a president is the campaign and elections. After these, the real job, Mr. President, is governance.
That is where you are now; you will not be excused for failing; you will be judged by the promises you made during electioneering and the manifesto you presented to the people while you were going from region to region to sell your candidacy.
Mr. President, if I tell you that Nigerians are famished and dying in installments, it will only amount to stating the obvious. The nation is in dire straits. Hardship and the pangs of hunger are getting more menacing by the day.
The ranks of beggars are swelling by the day and people living in tipping positions are ready to snap at the slightest provocation. Again, you are not entirely responsible for this but you have a responsibility to at least arrest this nation’s slide into the abyss of corruption and deprivation.
The optics are not good, Mr. President. The only reason we are where we are is as a result of poor leadership, poor fiscal and monetary policies, and discipline; bloated cost of governance, executive recklessness, and emasculated judiciary and legislature; increasing budgetary allocation for concurrent expenditure at the expense of capital expenditure; doubtful borrowings for consumption rather than production, to mention but a few.
Mr. President, it is a wonder how Nigerians are still hopeful and patient in the midst of biting and excruciating hardship. However, this patience is growing thin by the day. For how long can we hold out amidst the opulence and lavish lifestyles of political officeholders? I do not know.
Today food inflation is currently over 30 percent, and over 71 million Nigerians are extremely poor, according to the World Poverty Clock. The National Bureau of Statistics classifies 133 million people as multidimensionally poor.
Nigeria has the unenviable distinction of being the world capital of poverty. To contextualise it, millions of people will wake up every day having no idea when or where their next meal will come from, and many will go to bed today without eating anything.
Nigeria’s annual inflation rose in September to its highest level in about two decades at 26.72%. The September inflation rate rose for a ninth straight month from August’s 25.8%, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said last Monday, that millions of Nigerians are impoverished due to the impact of your administration’s reforms. Food inflation, making up the bulk of Nigeria’s inflation basket, rose to 30.64% in September from 29.34% in August.
Similarly, the effect of the withdrawal of subsidy on petrol, which we all agreed should go, has left the cost of transportation extremely high, and given that our economy is road-driven, the concomitant effect is that the cost of everything is now sky-bound, while the standard of living of Nigerians is nose-diving.
Mr. President, the implication of this is that the prices of goods increase on a daily basis. For instance, one can buy a kilogram of gas for N800 today only to return the next day and be told that the price is now N1200. That is how dramatic the survival experiences of Nigerians are on a daily basis.
Mr. President, we have been told that you are not a magician. That much your dear wife, Remi, has told Nigerians. But we are worried, that even though we do not expect a magical transformation of the situation of the people, the least we expect is that you do things differently from what subsisted in the past which has seen the people languishing in abject poverty while a few of the political class live in opulence. Sadly, you are not. That is why we are worried. The very same reckless financial lifestyle that has put us where we are is still prevalent today.
The expanded size of your cabinet of over 50, billions of naira to national legislators and the judiciary, the N160 million for each of the 360 legislators to purchase SUVs; your very high retinue of aides during trips, the last one to UNGA which we hear cost the nation almost half a billion naira in hotel expenses and other travel expenses for 7 days; the planned N5 billion for state governors to do whatever they like, in the name of providing palliatives to the suffering masses, all fall short of our expectations of you giving our lean resources as a nation.
Therefore, Mr President, how would you want to be remembered after your tenure in office? This question is very pertinent because if you want history to be kind to you, the time to do that is now. There is no time to prevaricate.
The problem with being in office is that there are many around you who because of what they stand to gain will not volunteer the right information that will be beneficial to you but rather tell you what they think you would like to hear, just to keep their jobs.
But, you know what? These same people will be the first to scream that they advised you but you refused to heed their advice, when you are out of office.
Therefore, Mr. President,, it is incumbent on you to start to do things differently if indeed you are sincere about bequeathing a prosperous nation for our generations unborn. A Nigeria we will all be proud of.
It was your predecessor in office who said we must stop corruption before it kills the nation. But what did he do instead? He simply fiddled, sorry picked his teeth, while the nation burned and corruption maintained its foothold in Nigeria.
Mr. President, the least we can do today, if we can’t launch our satellite in orbit from Nigeria, is to feed ourselves. Sadly, we can’t and that is why we are hungry. Under the watch of your predecessor, he looked away while bandits, terrorists, and killer herders chased our farmers away from their farms.
He was busy rationalizing the evil murderers rather than hunting them and making the stead safe for our farmers. Should these killings continue unabated, it means you will also fail.
Mr President, power has remained elusive and the business climate has remained hostile to investors. Therefore, chasing investors around the globe, and wasting the hard-to-find resources on foreign trips will only amount to a double jeopardy as, at best, only minimal success will be achieved.
Fix security, improve power supply and the ease of doing business and that magic, we were told not to expect, will happen. Investors are not philanthropists, if anything, they are Shylocks looking for opportunities wherever they can find any.
Mr. President, one of the weaknesses of your predecessor was that he stood aloof while his political appointees rode the nation roughshod. It was obvious that he outsourced that office while anyone with the slightest affinity with him exploited it to the detriment of the nation.
You have been accused of appointing only your Lagos boys or that your appointments have only favoured your Yoruba brethren. Sincerely, I do not really bother, so long as they deliver the goods. I know the importance of spreading these appointments so as to give every part of this nation a sense of belonging, but pray, of what use is it if in the end those appointees only end up seeing their appointments as their own share of badly depleted so-called national cake?
Mr. President these tasks appear insurmountable but believe me they are not intractable. All it requires is a leader with vision, commitment, dedication, and the will to do what is right. Are you that leader?
Charles Okoh is a journalist driven by the passion to contribute his little quota through the instrumentality of the pen to right the myriads of challenges that confront the society. He has traversed the entire spectrum of print journalism.
