One Hundred Days After Buhari

By Garba Shehu

This week, President Muhammadu Buhari clocked 100 days away from office after completing two terms of four years each as President of Nigeria.

He chose to stay in Daura to be far away from Abuja in order not to distract the new APC administration and in the hope also that the distance will make it possible for him to have a good rest and to care for his farm which had not received as much attention as it needed while he was away.

He goes to the farm four days of the week and is upbeat about how well the crops and his animals are now doing. He gets a good measure of rest but the visits have not abated. To manage the numbers, he has a weekly program drawn for him as they did while he was in the Villa.

Visitors are scheduled on the program but there are so many people who just start their motor bikes and cars to head out to Daura to him in the belief that he has the time to receive all visitors.

Among his many “special guests” are party faithful, grassroots groups, farmers, artisans, artists, praise singers, nurses and doctors, religious leaders, community leaders and several other professionals. Not left out are those who benefited from the administration, one way or another.

The other day, he was musing the decision to remove fuel subsidy by the Tinubu administration, saying he had hoped that it would lessen the pressure on him by constraining the large number of people who pick up their transport and head to Daura to see him from all parts of the country, but that he had noted that instead of they coming one by one, his friends, including the poor and the marginalized now group themselves, share costs to hire buses to come to see and talk to him.

So while it is the case that some in the country were happy that he was no longer in office, there are some, even more that continue to cherish and admire him.

In the eight years he led the country, Muhammadu Buhari had taken many decisions and as is human, one or two may have been wrong. But no one, not even critics, can question his intentions when those decisions were taken.

There has not been a single area that has not been touched by the Buhari government, with massive, positive changes in the eight years he held fort.

In the normative functions of our governments, an administration takes four to five major decisions in four years and they rush to the public square to celebrate themselves. Looking at the records he left, the Buhari government has taken hundreds of major decisions in the eight years it was in office, and yet you hear nothing but criticism upon criticism.

The promise of tackling corruption and establishing a strong democracy was a prime factor in the rise to power by Muhammadu Buhari and the All Progressives Congress party in 2015.

On coming to office, the administration directed all Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) to close their accounts with deposit money banks to fully operationalize the Treasury Single Account. TSA was launched in 2012 but left on the drawing boards. More than 17,000 bank accounts were closed and an average of four billion Naira in monthly bank charges was saved. Government revenue, it was found out, was being banked in personal accounts and signatories were, in some instances, big men and women who had retired from service.

This was closely followed with the institution of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll System, IPPS to cover all MDAs in spite of great opposition by the armed forces and the universities. Ghost workers in excess of 50,000 were flushed out and savings in hundreds of billions made.

Garba Shehu was Senior Special Assistant (Media) to former President Muhammadu Buhari.