Customs Comptroller General Hameed Ali tears into
President Buhari. The president should listen to him.
Customs Comptroller General, Col Hameed Ali, is one of the few
persons President Muhammadu Buhari proudly calls ‘friend’. They really are that
close.
It is little wonder that when Buhari settled into the task of
putting together his kitchen cabinet after the rigours of a 2015 electioneering
campaign, he naturally handpicked Ali, a retired Army Colonel, to clean up a
corrupt Customs service.
Like
Buhari, Ali is austere, taciturn, disciplined, ascetic and possesses a disdain
for corruption. Legend has it that after leaving the army top brass, Ali had
only one beat up car to his name. Not for him the idiotic accumulation of
wealth for which his peers in the army are better known.
Ali only took up the Buhari Customs job because he couldn’t say no
to an old friend—someone who shares his values.
He
was with Buhari during the President’s CPC and ANPP days. As Buhari lost one
general election after another, he could always count on Ali’s shoulders as a
place of solace.
But
now, like everyone close to Buhari, Ali is disgusted that the president’s
government has been hijacked by people with less than noble interests.
“We have won one battle by taking over power. But what we make of
this power is essential to us and to humanity. We must agree that we cannot
finish our four years without delivering and leaving something to be remembered
for in this country for a long time to come”, Ali said at
the commissioning of the office complex of the Buhari Support Organisation in
Abuja last Friday.
I
crave your indulgence to reproduce a substantial part of what Ali said below:
“We have no problem with our president because he is on course.
But I must confess here that we have been infused by people who were not part
of this journey and these people are the ones that call the shots today. That
is why we are derailing. If we had the right people who had the vision and have
been there in and out, I believe that we will not be going the way we are going
today.
“It is my belief that those of us who have been in the trenches
all these years to get good governance will surely be sleeping with bellyache
every day, especially in the recent past. Every day, when you wake up, there is
a story that makes you shiver. We cannot, as a people who have fought and
committed everything we had to bring this government to being, sit back and
allow things to happen the way they are happening.
“These people that are calling the shots today were not there and
when the chips are down, they will disappear and melt within the system. We are
the ones that will be asked to account for what happened.
“Are we willing to face Nigerians and tell them that we have
failed? I think this is the time for us to come together, create a system that
is very robust enough to fight back and take back government in our hands and
ensure that we deliver.
But let me say here without fear of being contradicted that I
think halfway through the journey, we are losing our core values. We are losing
our vision and mission and I think that the idea of our being here today is to
look critically at what we need to do to get back on track.
“There is no doubt that we have derailed because we are not doing
what we say we want to do. Why is it so? We need to find an answer to that. If
we do find an answer, then what should we do to get us all back on track? We
owe this great nation and the 180 million Nigerians the duty to give good
governance. Good governance is what they voted for and good governance is what
they expect to get and they deserve that”.
This is a friend calling out another friend in public. This is Ali
telling Buhari that his administration is losing its way. This is someone who
cares, telling his friend that the APC led administration at the center is
failing Nigerians and that Buharists everywhere should be worried because the
government they helped enthrone is trampling on the core values they hold dear.
Yet,
Ali isn’t saying anything differently from what other persons who are close to
Buhari have been saying.
Buhari’s wife Aisha told the world that
her husband doesn’t know a chunk of the people he appointed to help him steer
Nigeria to pastures new. She has threatened not to campaign for him in 2019.
Kaduna
State Governor Nasir
El-Rufai is a Buharist through and through. He wrote a long
letter to the president detailing how the Buhari government has been hijacked
by a cabal.
Everywhere
Buhari turns, people who love him, people who are closest to him, are telling
him to retrace he and the APC’s steps or incur wrath of voters at the ballot in
2019. But the man appears to be past listening. He’s become tone deaf and hard
of hearing.
There is always the temptation to slip into an echo chamber when
you become a political leader in Nigeria; to only pick what sycophants say and
regard criticism as the vitriol of the opposition. Buhari, most of his aides
and team members, have reached that place.
However, if he intends to make a success of the next two
years--after flunking the last two--the president has got to begin listening to
what the Alis, the El-Rufais and the Aishas are saying about his administration.
Comments
Post a Comment