Do you know that the Femi Adesina gaffe on vandals was actually terrible while the Kachikwu statement was only politically incorrect but can be spinned into a positive for the government?
Let me explain.
Adesina told Nigerians complaining about the worst power situation we have experienced in Nigeria since independence to go and fight vandals and protect facilities and forget about govt intervention.
Ask any primary school student with even half a brain why government exists and he/she will tell you “to protect lives and properties”.
That is 100% correct.
If the president, through his spokesman abdicates that duty of protecting lives and properties it is an admission of governmental failure. When a government fails the head resigns or is impeached in a democracy.
In no distant a past, failure to protect lives and properties would have been enough for General Buhari and his fellow soldiers to strike at midnight and remove the president while playing jazz like martial music.
Adesina unwittingly provided evidence that the current federal government can no longer perform its constitutional duty of protection of lives and properties and hence has failed. To add insult to the injury he also recommended anarchy or self help. People might take a cue from his statement and lynch anyone they see around electricity installations and perfectly claim they are vandals without due process.
If I were the president I will sack Adesina and save myself from being associated with his unfortunate gaffe. That will be enough to remove him from culpability for the statement made on his behalf by his official “mouth”.
With regards to Ibe Kachikwu, he spoke in frustration as someone who is a technocrat working in a political environment. He did not need to say “I am not a magician” but he can perfectly insist that the govt is working on the fuel situation but that it will take about 3 months to sort things out.
Technocrats are permitted to speak straight without consideration for political correctness. In fact that is why people prefer listening to them rather than listening to professional politicians who are conditioned to say everything and mean nothing.
Without saying “I am not a magician” Ibe would have keyed into an APC excuse line that they have used to downplay expectations they unnecessarily raised to win election at all cost.
Who remembers that Femi Adesina said recently that “Buhari/APC promised change not magic”? Is that not similar to what Kachikwu said.
Google “Buhari never promised magic with Boko haram” and see exactly which APC chieftains made that line of argument since July 2015. All of them used the word “magic” or “magician” and the names that will pop up will shock you. Even the current Bauchi State Governor who is a member of APC told us not to expect magic from APC on the 14th of this same month that Kachikwu made his own statement.
“It is unfair for the APC government to be judged. People have forgotten that the PDP held sway for 16 years. Therefore, people should not expect magic from the APC”-Governor Abubakar Muhammed of APC.
Is there any difference between that and what Kachikwu said? Why then did Tinubu and the APC media establishment pick on Kachikwu who is a junior minister but approved all the other “not a magician” comments from the party’s elected and appointed officials?
The answer is simple: Tinubu is targeting Buhari, not his boy Kachikwu. It was Tinubu that nominated Kachikwu and was also instrumental to his earlier career progress.
I strongly doubt that Tinubu wants his boy fired.
But surely Tinubu wants to pick a fight with the president for many reasons. Of course Tinubu dare not attack Buhari directly. If he does, jail time awaits him.
Buhari may have accepted money and support from dodgy characters to win the presidency but the essential Buhari will use long spoons while dinning with them. I can tell you that if not for his desperation to become president and execute an agenda close to his heart Buhari won’t ordinarily want to have anything to do with most former ACN and new PDP members like Tinubu, Saraki and Amaechi.
They are just not the type he will like to call friends or associates.
Tinubu’s political latitude is not exactly growing under Buhari and he knows that it is either he forces the president to negotiate with him out of panic or he will have to distance himself from the president early enough and plot a path that will not end at making El Rufai president in 2019.
Tinubu and his media lackeys will surely continue to take side swipes at the president directly or indirectly until they either succeed in blackmailing the president or weaken him sufficiently to stop him or his man Friday from emerging in 2019.
If anything, attacks will continue with more ferocity now that the president refused or failed to allow Tinubu and Amaechi to use his name and authority to win Bayelsa and Rivers oil grab elections.
Of course there are options available to the president and his men if they really want to quieten Tinubu and his men who have now received the signal to attack the president. If they ask me nicely I will tell them. But if they choose to treat this as merely an attack on Kachikwu they are well advised to go back to the play book given to them by Axelrod on how to destroy Jonathan’s presidency by discrediting his key ministers.
Of course those after Kachikwu also know he is not the minister of petroleum. President Buhari is the minister and totally responsible for the lingering scarcity of products as well as the disorderly management of the subsidy removal policy. With the admission by Kachikwu that even working at 100% our refineries cannot deliver more than 50% of our daily consumption it is only a matter of time before we either regulate prices and pay subsidy or totally deregulate and risk N300/liter for some months before it starts dropping. I strongly doubt that in a fully deregulated environment the drop in prices will be steep enough to make it to N30/liter required to give pass mark to APC led federal government.
The only good news is that the APC government created at least 50,000 jobs this Easter. Jerry can sellers of petroleum products were gainfully employed and will likely continue to enjoy till May. With margins as high as 100% in some states we may have given jobs to common folks instead of CBN and NNPC jobs for APC leaders children.
That was same way we created jobs for currency traffickers and BDC operators by refusing to devalue the Naira yet selling Forex to “connected individuals” who buy at official rates and sell to parallel market operators. Most of my friends from the north are rushing to open BDCs and can’t seem to understand my reluctance to join the lucrative business made more lucrative by “change”.
Those who gambled on “a sickly, weak and aging Buhari” they will dictate to are finding out that it was a political error of judgement on their part. Buhari is a Fulani man who understands the politics of using and dumping those who planned to use and dump him. Baba Tinubu will soon realize that petty political side swipes will not be enough to have his way.
Dirty Kachikwu politics will open the eyes of the northern Hawks around Buhari sooner than later and all I and others can do is siddon look.
Please who can direct me to where I will get fuel for my generator at N150/liter?
By JOK.
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