Buhari must hit the ground running

The presidential election has come and gone, except for some states where there were ballot boxes snatching. All is well that ends well, except for some isolated disturbances in some states like Lagos, Benue, Rivers and Bayelsa states. The election was largely peaceful across the country and President Muhammadu Buhari of the APC was declared the winner.
On its part, the Peoples Democratic Party , the main opposition party, has contested the declared result by the Independent National Electoral Commission . Atiku Abubakar, its presidential candidate, has resolved to contest the result in the court. We therefore commend his reaction to the declared election result because it is better to go to court to seek redress on the matter than to embark on senseless riots which will further throw the country’s fragile democracy and peace into conflagration. We also congratulate President Buhari for a victory well deserved.
But, as it is often said, we expect President Buhari, as the declared winner, to show a lot of magnanimity in victory while the losers should take the result with a lot of equanimity and congratulate the winner without any resort to rancour. As it happened in the 2015 election, President Goodluck Jonathan accepted his loss at the election and quickly congratulated Buhari for his victory. The president, too, must extend an olive branch to the losers in the election so that the country can move forward with unity without rancour.
Going forward, the president must throw away bureaucratic lethargy and hit the ground running to ensure that he succeeds in all sectors of the nation’s life, particularly the economy, and make positive impact. He must select a cabinet that can work with high tempo and ensure visible, credible, and sustainable quantum increase in productivity across all sectors of the economy.
Diversification of the economy to agriculture and manufacturing must be taken more serious. A situation where the country is said to be approaching self sufficiency in local rice production and the local rice cannot be found in the markets while only imported rice smuggled into the country abound in the markets amount to total deceit of the masses.
The projects in the pilot phase of the Special Economic Zones (SEZs), that is, the Enyimba Economic City in the South-east zone, Funtua Cotton Cluster in the North-West; and the Lekki Model Industrial Park, South-west must start immediately so that they can still contribute to the economic growth of te country this year. The Special Economic Zones will deliver Federal Government’s Made in Nigeria for Export (MINE) and harness the Federal Government’s spending on the SEZs. In particular, the SEZs, if well implemented, have the capacity to increase the nation’s revenue by as much as $30billion (about N9.15trillion) and also generate 1.5million jobs by 2025.
Also, the contentious oil subsidy which gulps N1.5 billion of the nation’s hard earned money must be stopped immediately. Government must note that the less privileged in the society don’t buy cars. Only the affluent in the society can buy cars and anybody who has capacity to purchase a car also has the capacity to keep it running. If the government wants to subsidise the cost of living of the less privileged in the nation, it is not through petrol subsidy but by subsidising the cost of inputs to agriculture, among others.
Also, more attention needs to be focussed on the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation to avoid wastage in the corporation. A situation where the corporation imports and distributes 60 million litres of petrol per day instead of a little less than 35 million litres per day amounts to a monstrous wastage of the country’s resources which could have been spent on other needy areas. This accounts for why about half of the petrol imported into Nigeria is smuggled to other neighbouring ECOWAS countries with impunity. This must stop.
We also call for a quick reorganisation of the Customs Service to enable it adjust to the realities of the time. A situation where corruption has eaten deep into the service and its men collude with smugglers to smuggle large quantities of petrol out of the country to neighbouring ECOWAS countries amounts to serious sabotage of the Customs Service mandate. Also, a situation where Customs men collude with smugglers to bring foreign rice into the Nigerian market is inimical to government’s self sufficiency in rice
production.
Above all, security of lives and property is paramount for peace to reign in the country and for investors to invest in the economy. Therefore, the government must, in collaboration with governments in the neighbouring ECOWAS countries, put a final end to the Boko Haram insurgency in the North east region. The insurgency has, for more than five years, driven millions of Nigerians in the region away from their homes, prevented them from carrying out any meaningful economic activity and from contributing their own quota to the development of the economy.