Executive Order Number 6: In whose interest?

I hope the handlers of President Muhammadu Buhari are following events in the United States of America as regards investigations into possible collusion of the Donald Trump campaign team with Russia during the 2016 US presidential election. The Buhari team at Aso Rock should take a critical understudy of the workings of the US democratic system that Nigeria’s own structure is modelled after, instead of spending so much energy on why Atiku Abubakar has not been to the US recently. We should also remind the Buhari team that if the US has not declared someone persona non grata, then that person is not.

ALSO READ: $40m given to me was for special assignment, Jonathan’s cousin tells court

By and by, I would rather have a president who is barred from the now-isolationist USA than one who jets off to London at the slightest inkling of ill-health to spend so much pound sterling in London hospitals likely staffed by Nigerian expatriates.

Now to the matter of Executive Order Number 6. The timing of the Abuja High Court ruling on the Executive Order Number 6, just after the concluded PDP presidential primaries and the route that a couple of unknown “activists” took in creating an enabling environment for the High Court judge to issue a ruling that President Buhari so desired, even when there were widespread protests against the spirit of this order by the federal legislature and the populace, is suspicious. In whose interest is this order? Is it for the deepening of our democratic values or the perpetuation of the old political order? Corruption is everywhere. It has become endemic. What is the sitting president doing to ensure that transparency is enshrined and protected. Issuing Executive Order Number 6 is tantamount to an intention to interfere with the outcome of the 2019 general election.

While former President Olusegun Obasanjo talks good economics in faraway Bali, Indonesia, President Muhammadu Buhari, at home, is promulgating a decree-like order to stifle prospects of prime economic movers in initiating moves to grow the economy.

Sunday Jonah, Minna