The performance of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration has been below expectations, an economist and political analyst Jide Ojo has said.
Mr Ojo made his position known during an appearance on Politics Today on Monday. He was reacting to Bishop Mathew Kukah’s Christmas message.
The Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto had accused the Buhari administration of leaving Nigeria worse off, despite vowing to better the country when the administration came to power.
Bishop Kukah’s message has generated reactions and trended for most of Christmas Day and Monday.
Mr Ojo, however, believes that the bishop’s criticism was justified based on key development indicators.
He said, “The popular saying is that facts do not lie. If you look at all the human development indicators, where is Nigeria in all of it?
“Whether you talk of human development or you talk of security, or you talk about health or you talk about education or you talk about infrastructural development, you will see that Nigeria has been underwhelming in terms of performance.”
President Buhari has repeatedly asserted that he is doing his best for the nation and that his government is the target of unfair criticism.
In an interview which was part of a documentary to mark his 80th Birthday and screened on Friday, the President restated his belief that there were people trying to undermine his administration.
He said, “I believe I’m trying my best, but still my best is not good enough because there are people around that think that they can intimidate me to get what they want instead of going through certain systems to earn whatever they want to earn. And there are some people who want to be clever by half.”
Mr Ojo feels the President’s pain and believes there are people within his administration who perhaps could have done a better job promoting his achievements. But he doesn’t feel the President is interpreting the reality accurately.
“Each time I look at where Nigeria is, even on the corruption perception index, on the human development index, on the most terrorised countries — Nigeria is ranked sixth most terrorised country in the world… You cannot have all these indicators and say that people are unduly gaslighting your administration,” he said.
For Mr Ojo, even if the administration is judged by statistics generated in the country by government agencies, the outcome will still be the same.
He said, “Even when you take the National Bureau of Statistics figures… According to NBS, 133 million Nigerians out of an estimated 206 million are below the poverty line, from the multidimensional survey that was released very recently.
“So, if you have that, (and) you have Nigeria being the sixth most terrorised country, you have us not doing well on human development index, you don’t have us doing well on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, then you will know why Nigerians are aggrieved, why Nigerians feel that the President has betrayed the trust we had in him.
“Because he campaigned in 2015 on three-pronged pillars. He said he was going to fight insecurity, he was going to fight corruption and then he would improve our economy. And when you benchmark these three and where the global indicators have put Nigeria today, the performance of the administration has been underwhelming.”
The public affairs analyst believes the administration has faced some setbacks due to things that were not envisaged such as COVID-19, and the spread of insecurity, among others.
Even if all of that is taken into consideration, he believes “we are still not where we ought to have been in the realm of development”.