Buhari’s May 29 Dividends -By Festus Adedayo

In the last few days, the Nigerian presidency, as well as many state governments, have been regaling us with claims of their infrastructural impacts in the lives of their people and society at large since being sworn into office. The Muhammadu Buhari administration, for instance, listed physical infrastructure it said it had executed which made its leg-men thump their chests as having trodden a path never trodden in the annals of governmental leadership in Nigeria.

While the list does not suffer in terms of its bogey claim, it does suffer immensely in terms of its human input. What do I mean? It would have been great if these presidential trumpeters could affix to those infrastructural claims a conservative measurement of the greatest happiness of the greatest number of Nigerians who government had pushed from the brinks of misery to the periphery of happiness in the last few years. While the mathematics of the amount of cash government claimed to have spent to provide infrastructure is quite monstrous, the actuals of the joy on the lips of Nigerians is indeed very lean. Thus, the most accessible indices would have been for government to tell us that in 2015 when Buhari took up the reins of governance, while a million people, for instance, could afford to eat two meals a day, with a million also having a roof over their heads and another million possessing jobs that gave them joy, today, it had pushed those indices to a higher Level X.

In the absence of a verifiable equation as painted above, it will be convenient to label government as merely glorifying dud figures. We are aware that those claims of infrastructure are at best not representative of the state of mind of the Nigerian people under the leadership of Buhari, as well as many of the state governments.

The miseries of Nigerians in the last five years under Buhari and many state governors far outweigh whatever joy that resides in those monstrous figures and decimals released by them. The miseries are locatable in Kaduna State where hundreds have been killed under the overall suzerainty of Muhammadu Buhari, with his godson, Nasir el-Rufai superintending; the hundreds killed in Sokoto by bandits; hundreds yet killed by avoidable diseases that a proper healthcare could have prevented and the millions who are pauperized on account of the self-serving policies of government. These are what we see as “dividends” of May 29.