When it comes to Nigeria, no other individual or group seems to have a more demarketing effect than her own President, Muhammad Buhari.
Buhari seems to hate Nigerians more than he does cattle ranchers, and when he is not busy impoverishing them or rendering millions of them jobless, he is pre-occupied with badmouthing them in front of the international community.
In 2016, President Buhari told British journalists in London that Nigerians are corrupt. Only yesterday in same London at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, here is what Nigeria’s president had to say, “About the economy, we have a very young population, our population is estimated conservatively to be 180 million. This is a very conservative one. More than 60 per cent of the population is below 30, a lot of them haven’t been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria is an oil-producing country, therefore, they should sit and do nothing, and get housing, healthcare, education free.”
So today, President Muhammad Buhari has led the international community to believe that over 108 million Nigerians are illiterate and have an entitlement mentality.
In actuality, this is not the case. In America, statistics show that one of the most educated, if not most educated groups are Nigerian Americans.
If not for former military dictators who are now disguising as heroes of democracy, in Nigeria, the literacy rates would be much higher.
Only this month, over 300,000 students in Benue schools have had to drop out, because Mr President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces cannot protect them from a combo of Boko Haram, rampaging herdsmen, and as he likes to call it “late General Gaddafi’s troops spillover”.
Ironically, President Buhari is the one who has no evidence on record that he ever attended school. When he was asked to produce his certificate in court, he instead produced 60 Senior Advocates of Nigeria to bamboozle the legal system.
When it comes to entitlement, nobody can beat Buhari. He is the only honest Nigerian, the only one who is not corrupt and deserving of soft favours in za oza room. And yet, he, his family and his/their aides have received over $10 million in healthcare, housing, education and even food from the Nigerian people and their oil-wealth. That is not even counting his pensions since he was unceremoniously kicked out of power in 1984 which came with a bulletproof jeep he had no scruples riding around in.
President Buhari, like many leaders of his ilk, believes he is special and that only special Nigerians like himself, his family, his cronies, are entitled to Nigeria’s oil wealth. Buhari himself cannot name one project he has commissioned in education, especially because the senior minister for health has been out of the country most of the past 3 years, receiving medical treatment abroad. Perhaps the only public servant that has done so more than his principal.
Buhari is a joke, and it is easy for anyone to make fun of Nigeria and her youth because we allow clowns like him into power.
I wonder if he will campaign on bringing the dollar rate to N200 for his 2019 campaign, but the dolt will probably goof off on that too. The only thing President Buhari seems to do successfully is travel out of the country to receive health treatment and talk rubbish.
Joe Ezeriaku writes from Warri.