Firsts Baba Isa|31 December 2017
I was gobsmacked a few days ago when a presidential aide asked Nigerians to tune to their TV sets to watch some documentary entitled "The Human Side of Buhari."
The callous irony of the title of the said documentary vis-a-vis the fact that the citizenry was (still is) grappling with an embarrassing and biting fuel crisis made the whole thing a painful joke.
Sadly the men and women saddled with the responsibility of managing the image of the president didn't see this comedy of errors. We are a country of humans, who elected one of us, a fellow human, to lead us as president in 2015 and 2 years later you ask us to put on our TV Sets to watch the "human side" of a fellow human being who is our president?
If that is not an indictment, then nothing is.
Scrambling to show a human side of the president is an open acceptance that what we have been seeing is an inhuman side. If you like gather the whole of your ancestors to argue this point in flowery oratory and mechanical sophistry, it won't change the perception of millions of Nigerians on the subject.
How can you spend state resources to produce a documentary to show us the human side of a human president? Who told you people are doubting his humanity? Even if they are some who are doubting, will such doubts be cleared by watching a documentary? If you think a president is being considered inhuman, then you should know that it is because he has failed to deliver his campaign promises or what we call in this clime "dividends of democracy". Thus, the best way to show his human side is to provide dividends of democracy.
What of those who don't have TV or electricity to watch the president's "human side". Nigerians want to feel the human side of our leaders not watch it. It's like the President's aides are beginning to think that they are Omoni Oboli. Their job is not to produce movies but to deliver social welfare, amenities and good governance.
The President's aides are the real (in)human side of the President.
Their incompetence, tardiness and plain cluelessness is plundering the political capital of President Buhari.
They are spending time acting and releasing documentaries; while they can't even find the time to go through the list of appointees to separate the living from the dead before releasing the list. Now, see it, the president who claims to have an extra human side, worthy of filming, has ended up appointing the dead to lead the living.
And the best excuse so far they have come up with is that the list was prepared since 2015 when the dead occupants of the list were still alive.
Oh, really?
So the list has been prepared since 2015? Then why didn't you release it? We had a list since 2015 and boards and parastatals were left comatose? To what end?
See, the excuse they are trying to use is even making the President look more incompetent and inhuman.
The President is old, that happens to all humans; even if we had a younger president, he won't be able to do everything or be everywhere at once, that too happens to all humans, that is a major component of the human side of every human president.
For a president, this human side, comes out negative or positive in direct proportion to the kind of aides he appoints. A president who has competent and thorough aides, who will peruse an appointment list before releasing same will project the President as human; but when clumsy aides allow lists containing the names of dead men to be released, all the people will see is the inhuman side of the president. No lengthy documentary or cinematographic presentation can change that.
Show us the President's human side by doing your jobs not producing documentaries.
I hope President Buhari will realize that, like President Harry Truman will always say, the buck stops at his table.
Firsts Baba Isa (FBI) is a Legal Practitioner and writes from Abuja.
07037162029.
