By Ochereome Nnanna
PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari is the second returnee president of Nigeria. The first man to experience this uncommon opportunity was former President Olusegun Obasanjo. He came in with two major mindsets, which helped in no small measure in rendering his second coming as a great waste.

Number one was that he was a wounded man on a revenge mission: a civil war “hero” and former head of state who was disgraced and sent to life jail for coup plotting by the late General Sani Abacha and his group of cohorts. But instead of him (Obasanjo) perishing in jail as his enemies had plotted, God killed Abacha, set him free and made him president a second time. Though Abacha was dead, his ghost must be pursued to the gates of hell. Those who worked with him must pay for it, and all his good policies must be scrapped.

Obasanjo tightened the noose around the necks of Abacha’s men on trial, pursued the Abacha loot (though we were never told how the money was subsequently spent) and swept politically exposed officers from the armed forces. He literally put one of Abacha’s prized allies – Muhammadu Buhari – in the doghouse and scrapped the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF), a laudable programme Abacha put in Buhari’s hands to help revive rotten infrastructure nationwide. In fact, it was the shoddy treatment that Buhari and some entrenched Northerners received at the hands of Obasanjo that made him to embrace politics, knowing that with the North behind him, he too could become president like Obasanjo.

Secondly, Obasanjo, believing himself to be some kind of “rock star” in the eyes of the West, pursued what he called “debt forgiveness”. He spent valuable time and resources tramping all over the capitals of Europe and America. For four years he got nothing but snide reactions for his efforts. It was not until he brought Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala from the World Bank to manage the economy that Nigeria was finally able to exit the quagmire of the Paris Club by paying $12 billion upfront. Space constrains me to catalogue the litany of adverse consequences Nigeria suffered as a result of Obasanjo’s weathered mindset.

We are hoping that Buhari will be bigger than that. If Buhari starts by settling scores such as discriminating against Nigerians based on their roles in the civil war, how they voted, how they funded his campaign, how they treated him after he was deposed in 1985, what they said about him during the electioneering activities, and such effete and ephemeral considerations, he will also waste our time and resources and ultimately fail in his second coming. He will be the proverbial new wine in old skin which made the skin to burst and waste the wine.

Buhari as vintage wine

Buhari should be old wine in new skin; vintage wine. He campaigned on the platform of “change”, and we expect a change for the better. He told us he would pay priority attention to three main areas: security, anti-corruption and diversification of the economy through the revival of agriculture to create jobs. It is a well-chosen, lean mission. At an interactive session with editors when the All Progressives Congress (APC) was unveiling Akinwunmi Ambode, its governorship candidate for Lagos late last year, former Governor Babatunde Fashola (whom we expect to play a prominent role in the Buhari administration) explained the three-point agenda thus: “once (Buhari) fixes the problems of security and corruption the economy will be jump-started”.

The job will be made easier for him given the fact that the economy has already been jump-started by the previous People’s Democratic Party (PDP) administrations. The direction of the economy has already been defined to reflect a greater role of the private sector in areas formerly run as federal government monopolies, such as telecoms, power, petroleum, infrastructure, tourism and others.

I do not believe that Buhari should attempt to reverse this direction. He can only fine-tune any area where corruption has tainted the process or clogged the wheel of progress to speed up results.

The areas where we need the Buhari “magic” to go work immediately involve security and war on corruption. If anybody takes what does not belong to him he should go to jail in addition to returning the stolen goods to the owner.

If any public officer takes what is not his official entitlement, he should be made to return it and go to jail. If any government appointee who made a false declaration is caught, he must lose his job, go to jail and forfeit his loot. Whistleblowers get ready. Arise O compatriots, Nigeria’s call obey. If any past government official is proved to have taken anything that was not his due, he should be made to return it and proceed to jail. And he should go there as quickly as possible. The legal profession should no longer be a practice that ensures that thieves keep their loots and continue to live large. It should now promote the course of justice and the rule of law.

It has even come to a point where thieves are the greatest noisemakers about the need to deal with other thieves. As Nigerian musician, Sound Soultan puts it, in today’s Nigeria, ole dey shout ole. Thieves are the ones shouting: “Thief! Thief!!”, and of course, pointing to others. This must stop. It should not matter how much the thief contributed to put Buhari in power. The war on corruption must be blind and even-handed. The APC broom must sweep evenly, not pick some and leave some. When we begin to see selective arrests, detentions, prosecutions and jailing, Nigeria will continue to be a laughing stock. People will stream over to the APC to escape the law. People will cling to Buhari’s kaftan to keep their loots.

That is not the change we want.

The needed change

The law enforcement agencies must be reformed and reconfigured to enforce the law. All policemen guarding Nigeria’s “big men” must be returned to their core duty posts to chase down felons and enforce the law. Our soldiers must never again act as “mai gadi” to civilians or carry the bags of their wives or concubines. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and other agencies that monitor graft in society must be fully recharged and deployed to take down any culprit, no matter how highly placed or connected. Two or three take-downs and the rest of our people will line up in compliance.

We must also do away with the plethora of ethnic militias that threaten the peace, unity and survival of our country. The various militant and ex-militant groups in all parts of the country must be made to understand that there is only one Nigerian army, navy, air force, civil defence and secret police (Directorate of State Services (DSS). Any group that has a complaint should lodge it in appropriate quarters, and they should immediately be addressed and not allowed to fester until people take up arms.

We want a situation whereby, within the next one year of Buhari’s arrival, we will hear no more of Boko Haram, “Fulani herdsmen” massacring villagers all over the Middle Belt, Odua People’s Congress guarding pipelines and threatening their enemies in the South West, militants disturbing our economic well-being in the Niger Delta, Biafra renaissance groups trying to take over government houses in the East, kidnappers, ritualists, “baby factory” merchants, cultists and other heinous criminals dehumanising our people.

With our security and corruption demons exorcised, Nigeria’s economy, as Fashola predicted, will simply explode. If that is the change that Buhari will bring, then welcome, Mr. President.