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| Abba Kyari Chief of Staff to President Buhari |
In
an essay published on ThisDay with the title: “No Matter What, Tomorrow Never
Dies”, the President’s Chief of Staff declared that Buhari was stubborn and
resolute in defence of Nigeria’s democracy. Stating that that “there was no
need for foreign interference in Nigeria’s electoral process since the Buhari
administration has given room for a free and fair exercise”. He observed that “Buhari’s resolute nature has irritated
some members of the Nigerian elites who were plotting to use his popularity to
continue stealing and cheating the country”.
The article reads: “President Muhammadu Buhari has campaigned in
this election exactly as he has governed since 2015, true to the values in
which he has believed all his adult life: our security, a diversified economy
and an administration free from the scourge of corruption and the sleazy
mediocrity it fuels.
“Buhari has not changed, and with good reason. Without these
attributes, Nigeria will not know peace, prosperity or the rule of law: the
only real foundations on which free and fair elections and genuine democracy
can thrive. He is stubborn and resolute in defence of these values. This
irritates quite a number in the elite, and especially those who, four years
ago, thought that they could play the President and use his popularity to
continue to steal and cheat the people.
“These
players have failed. They are angry but they have not yet given up. They have
some unlikely allies. Our traditional friends in the US and Europe say they
want nothing from Nigeria except free and fair elections. But if you look at
what their representatives here actually do rather than what they say, the
unmistakeable signs of a quite different agenda are plain to see.
“It’s
easy to forget where we were, a country falling apart, unable even to protect
school girls and where corruption defined every aspect of so much of our public
life and private business. Today our media ignore the revelations in a Milan
court of how oil companies and fixers stuffed cash in suitcases and the
nine-figure bank accounts of former PDP justice ministers and spy chiefs and
Presidents. This failure goes beyond individuals or particular political
parties, although it is true that our decline accelerated under the PDP after
the end of military rule in 1999, a betrayal that Atiku Abubakar and many of
his allies hope forlornly to revive and celebrate.
“Our
young people see only the devastation that has been visited upon them, too
young to remember the vibrant rural economy that once gave us the wealth for
the schools and hospitals we are only now beginning to revive. They
cannot imagine the rubber plantations where for decades Dunlop and Michelin
made tyres for Nigeria and the world. The factories are long since closed. Our
palm oil was once a world leader but it is only now, under this government,
that we are reviving an industry on life support. We have timber, we have
hardworking people – and yet we came to be importing even simple school desks and
bedframes. We have so much of what we need for fertilisers, yet government
after government preferred to let the plants we had already built go to waste
for easy commissions on second-rate imports. Textiles used to employ thousands,
and will do again, when we allow our talent fairly to compete on the
international stage".
“A
major crude producer with four refineries that once delivered petroleum
products for home consumption and export, Nigeria was reduced to importing
petroleum products as if we were Burkina Faso or Bangladesh, not a leading
member of OPEC. Our golden goose was starved. The military and the PDP took all
the money, they didn’t pay oil partners what we owed and only now, after this
government’s efforts, speaking plainly and finding real solutions, can we begin
to grow exports that have stagnated for 30 years.
“When
our private banks collapsed (again) in 2009, the outstanding liabilities were
N5.7 trillion. It is hard to imagine a sum of money, so vast, owed by so few,
to so many. The list of decay is long. And yet this was the inherited culture
of government – ‘to those that have, give more’ – that we have challenged, a
culture where every declared reform was in fact a disguise to privatise profit
and leave the rest of us with all the risk.
“Nigeria
has almost as many problems as we have people. But it also has all the
resources to meet our needs, if they are properly managed and honestly
marshalled. Think where we would be today, but for all the time wasted, the
prosperity we would enjoy and the better partner we might have been to our
friends in the region and further afield! Buhari is not a populist but he is
popular because he is delivering on our most basic needs first.
Do
our foreign friends simply not understand what is at stake, or do they actually
want us to fail? We know we are not equal partners, and do not pretend to be
so. In our own time in government, the US, the UK and the EU let us know
subtly, and often not so subtly, what we should be doing on everything from
currency reform to fuel deregulation and the import of toothpicks.
“They
have their own subsidies to protect key strategic interests, their farmers and
steel plants, but condemn our own efforts to protect the poorest and most
vulnerable from an unregulated market for food, transport and housing, or to
create and protect space for new opportunities and innovation to flourish. This
is not so much a question of policy, but integrity: we, at least, mean what we
say. So many past governments in Nigeria did not.
“Our
transition has been difficult because Nigeria needs radical change, which we
have been delivering, despite ingenious and often disingenuous resistance from
vested interests and the business-as-usual brigade. Which begs the question: is
there a difference between what suits Nigeria’s real national interest and what
suits the interests of the Great Powers? The years of failure were
characterised by hypocrisy and betrayal by our leaders, who were in turn easy
targets for manipulation – much easier for foreign powers to manage than a
government genuinely looking to repair and revive today so that we can build
tomorrow. And tomorrow never dies.
“I
always knew that business-as-usual had a powerful self-interest in resisting
CHANGE. I had hoped their tentacles did not stretch so far or so easily beyond
our borders, that a good case, well made, would receive a fair hearing. In
three and a half years in government, I have learned that decent argument and
hard facts face stiff competition from vested interests that seem so easily to
sway people who should know better. A convenient lie is not better than an
uncomfortable truth.
“Nowhere
is this clearer than the contrived debate on the conduct of elections. Buhari’s
commitment to the democratic process is a matter of record, time and again. All
of the work to rebuild our public institutions, restore our values and
recalibrate our future prospects can succeed only in a democracy in which the
integrity of elections is sacrosanct.
“Instead
of judging Nigeria by our actions, it seems altogether too easy for foreign
partners to be swayed by the expensive words of lobbyists. Riva Levinson has
been hired by Bukola Saraki. She was trained by Paul Manafort and Roger Stone
(both caught up in the probe into interference by foreign powers in the US
elections in 2016) and guide earlier in her career to dictators like Siad
Barre, unprincipled warlords like Jonas Savimbi, or frauds like Iraqi exile
Ahmed Chalabi, the man who neo-conned the Bush White House.
“We
are meant to believe that Ms Levinson, like the others who are paid by one of
the contestants, wants only to promote a free and fair race. And that it is
only a coincidence that this language for hire is identical to what we hear
from accredited diplomats!”.
“By
omission or commission, it appears it may actually suit our friends, deep down,
below the pious words, to see Nigeria a basket case, begging bowl in hand, than
the partner we could, should and will prove to be. And we have been here
before. At the end of 1984, British diplomats predicted a coup against the then
Buhari government, with whom London was quarrelling over everything from
apartheid to economic policy (as we knew then, and as it turned out, Buhari was
right. Glowing profiles of Ibrahim Babangida were prepared and telegrams of
congratulation were drafted. Mrs Thatcher put the project on ice, at least for
a few months, but it was not long before foreign powers concluded that their
best interests would be served by people who told them everything they wanted
to hear on democratisation and reform, but, as they could and should have
known, meant precisely none of it. Nigeria lived through the consequences of
this systemic deception. We lost so much in the 30 years after 1985, but
nothing as precious as the loss of confidence in our values and what we as a
nation could be”.
“In
the 19th century, Lord Palmerston, Britain’s Prime Minister and one of the
country’s most celebrated diplomats, observed that “nations have no permanent
friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.” We have been delivering
on a programme to restore the rule of law, to build democracy and strengthen
security, to deal with corruption and to create opportunity in a new
meritocracy. It is a platform that helps tackle violent extremism, illegal
migration, trafficking and financial crime. These are the very issues that are
central to the interests of our foreign friends, and we are producing results”.
“Nigeria
will make its choice on Saturday. It has never before had a government that has
more clearly demonstrated through words and actions its commitment to
transparency and the rule of law, protecting good judges and decent public
office-holders from the corruption of their peers. Voters are free to move
forwards to a better future or back to the desperate past from which we are now
beginning to emerge. Our election commission is independent and has all
resources it needs to do its job. We should all be wise to the risks, including
partial and premature announcements of unofficial results from unverifiable
sources, especially when one party has already declared well in advance that it
cannot lose unless there is rigging. There should be no interference from any
quarter, including foreign powers who say one thing but do another – exactly
the formula that their friends here have employed for years to bring us so
close to despair.”
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