How Buhari slow pace of governance put Nigeria in trouble–Financial Times

The influential Financial Times has published a scathing article criticizing Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari. The article was written by Columnist David Pilling.

According to the article, Buhari, “a septuagenarian president,” has been out of action, receiving medical treatment in London for an undisclosed illness.

His absence has triggered frequent erroneous reports that the president is dead.

“The tragedy for Nigeria is that policymaking has been so ponderous during the 20 months since Mr Buhari took office that, dead or alive, it is not always easy to tell the difference.” it said.

“Under Mr Buhari’s slow-blinking leadership, Africa’s largest economy has drifted into crisis. Brought low by the weak oil price, on which government revenues are woefully dependent, the system has been starved of dollars. That has driven businesses into the ground, people on to the margins and the economy into its worst recession in 25 years. What had been a growing middle class is being daily eviscerated. High inflation, especially for food, is damaging the poor in whose name Mr Buhari ran for office,” it added.

“There is an irony that Mr Buhari, a retired major general, is missing in action,” the report said stating that Buhari ruled Nigeria as a military ruler in the mid-1980s after seizing power in a coup.

“In civilian guise, his leadership style has verged on the invisible. After winning power in 2015 on the fourth attempt at the ballot box, he set out at a pace that has marked his presidency: it took him six months to name a cabinet.

“Hopes that he had surrounded himself with a lean team of capable technocrats empowered to get policy cranking have come to naught. Policymaking — such that it is — has been crafted instead by a tiny cabal of loyal, less qualified, stalwarts. Mr Buhari has failed to articulate anything approaching a vision”.