THE FIRST PROBLEM OF BUHARI’S GOVERNMENT ON THE MANAGEMENT OF COVID -19 IS INTELLECTUAL LAZINESS, SEGUN SHOWUNMI

Segun Showunmi is the spokesperson of the Presidential Candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party in the 2019 election, Atiku Abubakar. He analyses the socio-economic situation of Nigeria under the current administration, and also offers solutions to key problems facing the country. He spoke with AYO ESAN in Abeokuta. Excerpts:

What is your view on the state of the nation?

Well, thank God, one of the beauties of democracy is that people must choose and when they choose, they must live with the consequences of their decisions. That is why elections are usually very critical matters, if only the citizens would pay attention. We know that whatever expectations or capacity that was expected of Buhari, it has become deflated, giving that in the build up to whatever he had done between 2015 and 2019, the indicators were very gloomy. Buhari and his cabinet have not done as well as was expected on employment; they have not done as well as was expected on security; and they haven’t done well on the improvement of the economy.

The direction of their government in terms of the overall wellness of the country is also suspect. We also have a very big issue with the fact that when we are running the 1999 constitution, there are fundamental assumptions, which people don’t pay attention to. Those who granted us that constitution assumed that in a democracy, we didn’t have to bother about all-inclusiveness, and as such, they enshrined the federal character into the constitution as a principle. They assumed that anybody who becomes the president of the country would be running a country that would involve everybody. That was a country that was handed over to Buhari. And as at the time we got to 2016 to 2017, we had seen that the level of parochialism had become so high and that it was dangerous for the country.

What would your Principal have done differently?

What Alhaji Atiku Abubakar brought to the table was very clear. One of the major things he emphasised was unity, because we knew that unless we were able to pull the country from the brink, you would not have a comprehensive buy-in of Nigerians to push their country forward. And we also said very clearly that the Omnibus indicated that the economy was going into the dustbin. We didn’t know that anything like COVID-19 was going to happen. And we queried the competence of the people who were running the country. And at last, we ran that election. As far as we are concerned, we won, but the verdict has come from the courts. They said we didn’t win and there is nothing we can do about that one; we must live with the consequences. But the Nigerian people must also have to ask themselves: how much were they buying a bag of rice in 2015? The last time I checked, it was about N8, 000 or thereabout. How much are they buying it now?  Has there been a comprehensive increase in the cash that is available to Nigerians to be sure they can meet up with the rise to over N20,000 now? And when you put the effect of COVID-19 on top of it, what do you get?

One is also concerned about the way the Buhari government has gone about as though the only economic agenda it has is to borrow money. And when they borrow money and they say they are running a private sector template, you begin to suspect foul play because you expect that countries are supposed to provide guarantees, but are not to be the ones that are actually borrowing because nobody can take the country seriously when it comes to the discipline required to pay those debts back.

These are all the issues, but we are where we are now. If Nigerians are not smiling, we also have not kept quiet. His Excellency, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, has not kept quiet in offering ideas, some solutions. When there is the need for him to speak up, he speaks up. Remember very clearly when he said we were running a very serious problem with debts. He speaks on our health indicators, he speaks on what we should do with agriculture and what we are doing. He has spoken up on restructuring. Anybody who is very conversant with Nigeria’s political dialogue situation would know that most political leaders only speak when the elections are in season but that is not us. We have tailored all our conversations in a manner that can offer solutions, so that we are not sitting down with any group of people and trying to pull down the government. That is not who we are, that is not what we are ever going to be. Why? Because for us, it is always Nigeria first.

But there are some states being controlled by the PDP. If the APC–led Federal Government is not doing well, what of the PDP states? Why can’t the PDP governors show example of good governance?

It is a chicken and an egg approach question. If you have an inappropriate structure that does not allow the governors at the sub-national level to have bigger capacity to be able to solve problems by themselves, then you can’t blame the governors. I give you a view; if you become the governor of your state tomorrow and you have very serious security challenges there and you have creative ideas on how to stem them, you will realise that the constitution we are running in the country does not allow you to do that. You have to wait for an approval or a protocol that is run from Abuja. That means that you are going to be competing with all security personnel and resources that are available to the police and all the other federal security agencies are able to deploy. That already limits your ability. Leave that, if you desire that, okay, you want to do massive mining because you have the capability to mine and get some resources there, you will realise that no matter where your village is and no matter the realities of the mines or the resources you have on the ground in your village, you have to run to Abuja to get the approval and the procedure to do it. And that is the least of the problems.  The bigger problem is this: if you are a Federal Republic of Nigeria, it means that there is a principle that there are federating units. Federating units, wherever we find them, are not to be run as a unitary system. So you now have a situation where you have a Federal Ministry of Works building roads from one place to the other. What does that really mean? You have a Federal Ministry of Agriculture. Can a person that doesn’t have land and no farm have the right to control agriculture? These are the structural issues there. So Governors generally in the country are not doing as well, but I say they are not doing well with tongue in cheek because the framework has to be redesigned to encourage them to be able to engage their issues proactively without having the excuse of one Landlord that is preventing them.

But more importantly, the structure we run in the country does not even allow us to call them to order, because we have created a psychology of a unitary system. It means therefore that at the level of sub-national, governors can go to bed and steal themselves blind. And if anybody is to query them on that, then they are going to run into the hole of ‘oh he is my brother, oh he is my cousin or family member.’

If you have a good structure for the country, it will be impossible for the governors not to perform because people will demand more from them. That is how I see that. So some of them are trying, some of the governors are coming up with flashes, but the vast majority are not doing as well as we would have expected them to.

Some states are forming security outfits. Will a PDP Government at the Federal level support the security initiatives such as Amotekun?

Ask me about Atiku Abubakar Government not the PDP?

I can only speak for Atiku. Atiku Abubakar believes absolutely that the business of community policing, the federal policing and the state policing is ripe. He keeps saying they grew up in an environment when the local government had a lot of powers. Some of them were schooled by local government scholarship. Some of them have local police enforcing payment of taxes and so they have seen how it works. And Atiku will ask you, if you keep too much power at the Federal that you cannot actually use, you do not give the states the wherewithal to be able to move and solve some of the problems. In any case, his view on this security matter is that you cannot insist that the security architecture that is not delivering on stemming insecurity can be left unchanged or unmoderated. So he believes that security is too important for us to say that one level of government will have all the capability to do it.

Would Atiku have managed the issue of COVID-19 differently? It is an epidemic that caught everybody unawares?

The responsibility of a leader is vision. Sometimes, a leader will see the challenge earlier than anybody else and would have even sought solution. The greater responsibility he has is to bring everybody on board to curtail the challenge. The major problem that Nigeria has with the management of COVID-19 is that it may have been novel in America and China and all that. But by November 2019 that it started in those countries till about February ending when we had our index case in Nigeria, there was more room for creativity and capacity for any leader that knows what he is doing. And you would notice that Atiku Abubakar was the first person to say in this country that we should shut down our airports so that we could flatten the curve. They didn’t listen.  Then we were the first to say, now that the COVID is in the country and you want to lock down the country, put the BVN of the people on the table, and give them the palliatives directly to their accounts, so that you could touch them. At least you know the number of people you have on the BVN that don’t have money or are not rich. Your chances of reaching them is better. Atiku also was the first person to say I am going to put some money down and encourage the private sector to bring in money. You know he put the money down and he encouraged the private sector players to also put in money. That is leadership.

We are not absentee landlords, we don’t even have to wake up in middle of the night to come and listen to ideas, no. We are repositories of great ideas because of deep thinking.  Atiku does not just sit down, he thinks, that is who he is. And if we could manage Ebola why couldn’t we have done better.

The first problem of Buhari’s government on the management of COVID -19 is intellectual laziness. They were not prepared to interrogate themselves. Thank God, we got low mortality rate but we are still spiking. So we never can be too sure, and we have seen some countries going through the second wind of COVID-19, therefore I will say that, our approach would have been more thoughtful, our approach would have been speedy, and an Atiku’s approach would have put the money in the hands of the people via BVN.

Even now, the Federal Government is approaching the COVID-19 pandemic as if it is a media event. They come in everyday on Television and read out the numbers of cases. They never tell us how many people they have tested, they never tell us what they have done with rural level medical intervention to be able to assure the people. They don’t tell us how they are spending money in a transparent manners