Promises and Challenges

             “Promises are like babies: easy to make, hard to deliver”. Anon

         On the 30th of March this year, if President-elect Buhari said he would walk on water, it would have taken a foolish man to argue with him. He had just won an election that did not even look like it will hold. If it did, it was likely to bring the whole house down. Right until the very last minute, desperate attempts were being made to prevent the emergence of a Buhari presidency. His incumbent opponent had conceded defeat (a first in Nigerian presidential election history). The international community was beside itself with the satisfaction that its registered aversion to a weak and corrupt Jonathan administration had been ended.

      Nigerians spent days putting lives and limbs at risk in celebrations. It is quite probable that more young people died celebrating Buhari's victory than those who were felled by bullets and machettes in our notoriously-violent election process. Just having Buhari there meant anything was possible. The defeat of Jonathan and the PDP meant Buhari had a clean slate to reinvent Nigeria after his own image. Very few people understood his manifesto, or cared what it contained. But Nigerians understood honest leadership, peace without Boko Haram, and an end to the institutionalized pillage of our resources. Young people wanted good education and jobs.

            So when Buhari ordered his new military chiefs to end the Boko Haram insurgency before the end of this year, it would have been foolhardy to think he was giving them a tall order. After all, his predecessor, prompted by election pressures had rolled back the insurgency's territory considerably, with new weapons and a postponed election. His service chiefs saluted and said, done sir. A frenzy of activities followed: command and control was relocated to the frontline; alliances with neighbours were reinvented and reinforced; military morale was boosted through improved welfare; the global community lined up to help in every way except with boots on the ground. Boko Haram suffered major setbacks, but their videos said it was all a lie.

         Deadline down the road, the insurgency is far from finished. Sambisa forest is still there, in spite of massively-improved air assault and painstaking recapture of surrounding areas. The insurgency is still holding some territory, but even more worrisome, their bombing campaign is threatening to cancel out all the progress being made by the Nigerian state. As children routinely kill themselves and scores of other citizens in mosques and markets, the military and intelligence services are warning the public of the possibility of new campaigns in places such as Lagos and FCT. The Chibok girls are still in captivity, and the internally-displaced population is being counted in millions. In spite of many efforts to re-interprete the December deadline by people including Gowon and Obasanjo, neither Buhari nor the military top brass acknowledged that it was too optimistic.

        December still has some way to go, and there is some talk of reviewing strategies in view of the multi-facetted nature of the threat of the insurgency. Bottom line is that Nigerians will live with this threat for a long time after December 2015.His political opponents will gloat and remind President Buhari that he has missed his deadline. Missing deadlines regarding Boko Haram used to be a patent exclusively held by his predecessor, so it ought be of some concern that Buhari should be mentioned in the same breath with Jonathan. Others less-inclined to gloat over a national crisis will draw attention to some linkages between integrity, competence and missing your own set deadlines. Boko Haram itself, from the little corner it has been pushed, will attempt to make a mockrey of the December deadline. Its touted alliance with ISIS will be flashed before Nigerians to give it an international dimension, and the latters’ exploits and the renewed panic it is generating in Europe and U.S will give it a boost.

         The review of strategies in dealing with Boko Haram will have to be comprehensive and involve a long term perspective. Long after Sambisa forest is cleared and every inch of territory is liberated, the battle against de-radicalization, proliferation of small arms and bomb-making technology, the surfiet of sleeper cells, rebuilding communities and infrastructure and rehabilitating IDPs have to be vigorously taken up by a nation which will now be joined by many advanced industrialized countries now coming under greater impact of global terror. In political terms, President Buhari may also learn a lesson on setting deadlines on difficult challenges. The mobs that march routinely in cities in the East and South South demanding release of Nnamdi Kanu of IPOB are becoming a real headache. The game plan appears to be to pitch the federal government in a direct confrontation with a group that wants the impossible. There are clearly attempts to secure for the Igbo, political and economic advantages using threats and blackmail. How Buhari handles this threat will be a major indicator of his political acumen.

          His limping opposition, the PDP, will not need to look far to recognize missed targets and sundry failures. The road ahead is not by any stretch of imagination smooth, and Buhari's government has many tough choices to make in a nation which thinks it has been patient and supportive enough. Will Buhari remove fuel subsidy or not? If he does not, how does he make political capital by retaining a huge drain that still fails to eliminate the type of long fuel queues we live with these days? If he will, when will he do it, given that his political capital and goodwill is a lot less robust today than three months ago? Is he going ahead with the populist handouts that will eat deeply into resources at a time the nation's revenues are desperately stretched? Does he have a plan B, in case he cannot sustain them? How much thought has he given a strategy of reflating an economy by massive borrowing? Will the 2016 budget and the Medium Term Expenditure Framework contain the details of basic fiscal and monetary policy the international investor community has been anxiously waiting for? The mind-boggling revelations on the pillage of our resources are precisely the reasons why powerful interests worked hard to prevent the emergence of a Buhari Presidency. At current rate of discoveries, revelations and confessions, holding cells should be bulging with V.I.P suspects. Even as he retrieves billions of our resources, Buhari should ensure that EFCC and the police and the courts commence trials. Nigerians want to see the guilty in jail, not perpetually in courts being represented by expensive lawyers.

          President Buhari has used up most of his bonus period. His new cabinet made of a mix of hardened, bruised experience and touching innocence is eager to go, but needs to know how much rope it will have. A year is half its length in politics, and everyday brings up new challenges. Nigerians have made excuses for Buhari over many challenges he inherited. But they will not excuse his failure to solve them, because that was precisely why they elected him.