Re: 100 Days By Bala Muhammad

President Muhammadu Buhari

 By Bala Muhammad

 Last week’s piece on President Buhari’s 100 Days elicited several responses which are acknowledged and appreciated. One contribution, however, stuck out - 100 DAYS: HAVE NIGERIANS HELPED BUHARI? penned by Amina Waziri Ibrahim, a freelance journalist and this Columnist’s one-time colleague at the BBC. Amina asks: if we interrogate Buhari over his 100 Days, have we interrogated ourselves on what we as Nigerians have done in the 100 Days to help him? Here is Amina’s piece, enjoy:
Recently, we as a nation seemed to be all lost interrogating and querying what the Buhari Administration has done in the 100 Days of its existence. Unfortunately, we as citizens have failed in one fundamental - what have we, as a people, done in 100 Days to ensure smooth sail for the government? In what ways have we helped it, and in what ways have we been clogs in its wheels? In my opinion, the interrogation should start with us citizens - and the four fingers pointing at us should be more important than the one finger pointing at the government.
Last week, we saw on national television a fit and

active Chief of Army Staff leading his men in an exercise drill, and around the same time we saw another active and visibly compassionate Chief of Air Staff attending the funeral of three of his officers who had sadly perished in the Dornier air crash in Kaduna. I cannot remember the last time I saw this happen in this country; so my surprise and joy were uncontainable.
We have finally come into an era where we know we have a real government; a government that appoints the right people who share its ethos into the right positions, but most importantly a government that is focused on getting the job done. Every official whom President Buhari has so far appointed knows, without being told, that he must follow the big three ethics of hard work, zero tolerance to corruption and absolute discipline.
It is also pretty clear to all Nigerians by now that change has finally come, and everyone is now in a reasonable state of alertness. This, I believe, is the first step in the right direction in the short term, but my concern is whether we, as Nigerians, can eventually be attuned to this government’s style of honesty, integrity and fair play.
The challenge I perceive for this country is that perhaps the government may start having problems with us, the people, instead of we, the people, having problems with the government. I fear that corruption and indiscipline, the two social evils which are ingrained in our national psyche and with which we are latently comfortable, will now fester and manifest to make us a difficult people to govern.
Through no fault of ours, since the Babangida era (beginning in 1985), Nigerians have been products of corruption and dishonesty. We were raised since then by governments that nurtured us in an environment devoid of integrity. We were fed dishonesty, our first solids were double standards, our first education was how to steal and get away with it, and our role models were selfish and greedy government officials. Now that we have been adopted by new parents who are trying to change us for the better to be better citizens, the question to ask is: are we ready to follow a relatively honest leader?
The first step surely must be to stop sympathising with, and disassociate ourselves from, those of us who matured into hard-core “respectable and honourable” thieves. The articles in newspapers and the television debates must stop telling us about how a person who stole billions was “unfairly treated”, or “unfairly tried”. Justice is justice, and we have to start from somewhere. Indeed it is this very manner of validating dishonest people that in the first place brought us into this national mess.
Everyone knows for a fact that billions of dollars were stolen in the last three decades, but we continue undermining this government’s efforts to try the culprits by our writings and by our debates and by the so-called appeals to “justice and fairness”. This then only encourages even the worst offender to fight back, appealing to the self-same “fairness” we have offered him, the “fairness” he overlooked when stealing our monies.
If this government is going to achieve half its dreams, we are going to have to aid it by providing the enabling environment for it to do so. Let them jail whoever stole our money, let them retrieve property acquired with ill-gotten wealth, let them sack whomsoever they find wanting and appoint whom they deem fit, let them pay a living wage, and please let’s allow them do what they have to do. It would seem we are reluctant to leave our comfort zone where dishonesty thrives, where laws are meaningless, where corrupt practices are order of the day, where “business as usual”, indiscipline and law breaking are legion. We must abandon that comfort zone.
We have only recently been blessed with these two hardworking, God-fearing and inspirational leaders - Buhari and Osinbajo. The greatest assistance we can render the two gentlemen is to aspire to be the kind of people that they are, or to at least understand and wholeheartedly support what they do. We must aspire to be honest and forthright by supporting, encouraging and validating them at all levels and in all situations.
Let us be the kind of people we know they wish us to be, and not the kind of people they will regret suffering for for all these years. Indeed we are a wretched, ungrateful people if we fail to reciprocate their efforts at sanitising this nation. It is that negative attitude of ours as Nigerians that has facilitated the terrible governments we have had in the past years.
My thoughts, I am happy, are shared by many - and not even from the present time. Back in 2012, a communique issued by the Association of Peace Ambassadors after a meeting in Abuja encapsulated all of my thoughts on this issue: “The problem of Nigeria is not in structures and systems, but in Nigerians themselves. We are religious but not spiritual, we are manipulative and not hardworking, we are  smart but dishonest, we love to wield power but not to be accountable, we love wealth but reject morality, we promote nepotism and disdain merit, we are inveterate ego-trippers and contemptuous of humility, and we thrive on chaos and fearful of orderliness.”
What we need now as Nigerians is a reorientation of our core values and attitudes. We are badly in need of attitudinal rehabilitation and the government needs to reorient us so that we can relate to them better. The National Orientation Agency (NOA) needs to come up with immediate campaigns to instil and promote core values of honesty and discipline in the psyche of Nigerians. Understandably, agencies like NOA have been unable to fulfil their mandates, or indeed remain relevant, in the last few years due to the same hurricane of corruption which has made their existence virtually meaningless such that many have forgotten that they even exist.
In its handbook, NOA says its aims are to ensure “discipline, dignity of labour, social justice, religious tolerance, self-reliance, patriotism, integrity, accountability, loyalty, commitment and dedication to the nation-state.” The communique cited earlier, which was signed by a Dr. Cosmas  Ilechukwu, also detailed a blueprint on how to achieve this transformation, including how traditional and educational  institutions could be involved. The same views were also largely mirrored in The Vision 2010 Document created almost twenty years ago.
All these taken together are just about everything we need to set about the much-needed radical change needed in our mind-set. We now have leaders with a vision; leaders who are ready to galvanise us to create the country of our dreams. The rest is up to us. So we should ask ourselves what have done in 100 Days?

Ref:  http://www.dailytrust.com.ng/news/saturday-column/re-100-days/110444.html