BY LINUS CHIBUIKE
SERVING Overseer of the Citadel Global Community Church, Pastor Tunde Bakare, on Sunday, raised the alarm that, given the state of the nation, the legacy of President Muhammadu Buhari was in grave danger of being confined to an unsavoury side of history.
He said he was compelled to speak out because Nigeria was in a state of emergency.
Bakare, who was Buhari’s running mate in the 2011 presidential election, under the Congress for Progressive Change, said the state of the nation did not represent the Buhari he knew when they took the solemn journey towards rebuilding Nigeria.
He spoke in an address to commemorate the 2021 Easter celebrations.
Bakare said, “I am compelled to speak out because the state of the nation does not represent the Buhari I knew when we took that solemn journey towards rebuilding Nigeria.
“I am compelled to cry out because of the intent of the president as contained in his tribute dated October 14, 2019 in honour of my 65th birthday PMB wrote to me: “We have shared ideas on how to engender a better country and formed a tag team for political power. May the ideas germinate fully, proliferate and give us the country of our dreams.
“The purpose of this address is to present the facts of this diagnosis and point a way out of our current crisis even as we approach a critical juncture in the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari.”
While pointing out the current challenges of banditry, kidnapping, militancy, cultism and human trafficking, among others, Bakare, however, listed some early wins of the Buhari administration.
This was as he recalled that the administration’s goals were to tackle corruption, address insecurity and fix the nation’s economy.
He said, “Fellow Nigerians, you may recall that as PMB took the oath of office during his first term in office, he summed up his election campaign promises in three pivotal agendas, namely: Security, Anti-Corruption and Eco Diversification with a focus on job creation.
“However, the first term saw the Buhari administration grapple with the collapse in oil prices and Nigeria’s first recession in about 25 years. Despite the false starts, the administration succeeded in bringing Nigeria out of recession and made some gains in security, job creation and anti-corruption.
“On security, the administration of President Buhari continued the military assault on Boko Haram that had commenced at the end of the term of his predecessor.
“We recall the PMB’s first bold move when he ordered the relocation of the Command Control Centre from Abuja to Borno. By December 2015, the government declared Boko Haram ‘technically defeated’ and unable to mount conventional attacks against hard or soft targets.”
On anti-corruption, he said Buhari “took commendable steps in the fight against corruption at the beginning of his administration, including the attempt to plug the loopholes in the system through the Treasury Single Account (TSA) intervention.”
“In 2016, Nigeria received its highest scorecard so far in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index,” Bakare noted.
“On job creation, at the beginning of his administration, President Muhammadu Buhari embarked on large-scale skill development through the N-Power programme. Under this scheme, hundreds of thousands were empowered,” he added.
