Last week, the Presidency celebrated the 800-metre walk by President Muhammadu Buhari from the Eid prayers in Daura, Katsina State. It was a show of popularity for a man who has been missing on the scene for two weeks hitherto.
The Presidency celebrated the trekking exercise as a certain indication of the president’s fitness for the 2019 race. Not many Nigerians appear to agree with that postulation from the presidency. Some even carried the argument to the ludicrous level by indicating that if walking would be a yardstick for measuring readiness for presidential office, then madmen would easily win the crown: they trek thousands of kilometers daily without anyone offering them a medal.
Some even said that the man who shook our constituted authority in Ibadan to his bones last week, Yinka Ayefele, cannot trek, yet he moved mountains.
The logic from the presidency, however, is this: a seventy something year old who is deemed sick has just come out of the doctors’ consulting room and straightaway made 800m. It’s a trekking feat. It served a good purpose to diffuse the story of unfitness massing around the president and his handlers simply thought they could capitalise on that.
Let me report to our brothers in the Villa that a lot of Nigerians were not excited about the presidential walk because they daily see examples of 90 year olds who still perform their chores. They see persons like Pa Ayo Adebanjo, Chief Olu Falae and Alhaji Babarabe Musa retain their ebullience and energetically engage on national discourse almost on a daily basis. They see lots of women octogenarians redefine youthfulness in the villages. Lots of them still farm and either trek kilometers or ride bicycles to get there. In the psyche of many today’s Nigerians is in-built belief that the old and elderly are physically stronger than the youths of today because they were bred with herbs.
But physical fitness is more of a personal issue. If you engage in exercises, how does that help clear the files on the table? How does your trekking of kilometers aide the infrastructural development and service delivery of the country? Therein lie the fallacies in the Daura trek.
There is no doubt that President Buhari inherited lots of challenges in 2015. Many of those challenges have been with us since independence; many were inflicted on the nation in recent years.
Despite the fact that he reduced his campaign slogan to what was recently called SEC (security, economy and corruption), the myriads of promises he made on other sectors were not also lost on Nigerians.
How does his ability to trek 800 meters help the cause of soldiers fighting the recalcitrant Boko Haram warriors in the North-East, the ubiquitous kidnappers in the North-East, North-Central and the South, the pipeline vandals in the South-South and the armed robbers in the West?
Does the walk also help the cause of corruption fight or the economy? Some may say that if the president is fit, it means he can attend to the files and handle affairs, but you can’t deny that the presidential office needs more than physical strength. It demands mental fitness, firmness and stability and it demands intellectual capacity.
If we query our leadership lack of performance, it is because we are not assured those ingredients have been injected into governance in good and adequate measure.
That is where we distinguish between walking and working. When you walk, you sweat it out. It’s of concern to you and your body. When you work, you sweat on behalf of the people, you crack brains for the good of the society, even the child yet unborn. The people will see the results and price you as a transformational leader. History will also record you on the positive side. That is what we desire for the country and that is why a number of citizens agonise as the ills of this society heaps. They want the president to work and not necessarily walk.
One of the ingredients of walking the talk in a democratic setting is engaging the different sectors of power to deliver the goods to a majority of the people. That is one area that is seriously lacking in our democracy thus far. The annual budgets have become more of rituals than legal documents. No one is sure when a budget if submitted, will be passed into law.
Last week, one of the ministers of the Federal Government told a media house that the executive would submit the 2019 budget to the National Assembly in September.
Let me sound a note of warning that the budget could run into bad weather again if the processes are ignored. Whether submitted in August or July the prescribed process by the Fiscal Responsibility Act needs to be followed. The incumbent government has obeyed that law in the breach since 2015. That law expects the executive to pass the Medium Term Expenditure Framework and the Fiscal Strategy Paper (MTEF/FSP) to the National Assembly for passage before the budget is computed. The democratic norms also envisage lots of consultations between the different arms of government before policies are finalised.
When we fail to work the talk in strategic aspects, no amount of walk will deliver the goods, none.
and then