The Buhari Infrastructural Legacy that Tinubu Will Leverage on by Joseph Y. Chibok
Editor's note: A public affairs' analyst, Joseph Chibok, in this piece, argues that it will amount to political self-destruction if the presidential candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu distances himself from the outgoing Muhammadu Buhari administration while campaigning.
Upon his emergence as the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) party, Bola Ahmed Tinubu immediately declared that his presidency will build on the foundation that President Muhammadu Buhari has ably built. Rather than being hailed for his acknowledgement of the objective truth on the ground, his good sense in seeking to give credit to whom it is due and his political wisdom in seeking to buy the support of your predecessor and his ardent supporters that is crucial to your own election in a Third World setting such as ours, the know-it-all or the wiser-than- all commentators said he should not have said what he said. Rather, Tinubu should have sought to distance himself very far from Buhari because they say Buhari or the APC government he is heading has no legacy worthy of building on!
Source: Facebook
Even in a super-developed democracy such as the USA, it is a silly political mistake for a candidate to seek to distance himself from a predecessor he is seeking to succeed. Al Gore who was the incumbent vice-president to President Bill Clinton for eight years, was nominated as the Democratic Party candidate for the 2000 presidential election. Because of the Monica Lewinsky scandal that Clinton was embroiled in, Al Gore and his campaign staffers sought to distance him and his campaign from Clinton. Clinton was not invited to participate in Al Gore’s campaign. Pundits and commentators said this was one of the key reasons Al Gore failed in his bid for the presidency.
More amazingly, those who are pillorying Tinubu for that declaration forget that they are saying this to a man who secured more than 70 per cent of the votes of his party men and women during the primaries that threw him up as the party’s candidate! How can Tinubu be expected to seek to distance himself from his party that demonstrated its love and solidity behind him or the Buhari government which he is undoubtedly a solid part of even if the allegation that Buhari is a failure is true? But is that allegation even true? It is not, as the administration’s scorecard will soon start to unveil.
As the Buhari administration is racing feverishly to a close, Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) will be giving accounts of their stewardship in the past eight years. Such accounting will unveil verifiable proofs of what the Buhari administration has achieved in its lifespan. And, as quite often happens, some of those who feel nothing has been achieved will swallow their claims as they behold new truths of what has happened.
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Kick starting this ‘’unveiling’’, the honourable minister, federal ministry of works and housing (FMWH), Mr. Babatunde Fashola, made a presentation at first session of PMB administration scorecard (2015-2023), organised by the minister of information and culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, which cast a great light on the achievements of the Buhari government in the area of roads infrastructure.
The minister commenced his presentation by disclosing that from records available to him as at December 2015 when this administration came in newly, the last time the federal government of Nigeria budgeted over N200 billion a year on roads was in 2002. In subsequent years after that year, things started growing progressively worse such that in that year 2015, the federal government managed to budget N18.132 billion for roads but eventually got only N13 billion for all roads and highways in the country. And that was in spite of the fact that it had contracts for 206 roads, covering over 600km with a contract price of over N2trillion!
As a result of this poor budgetary show, job losses in four construction companies alone amounted to about 5, 000 senior and junior workers consisting of both expatriate and local workers. Fashola further disclosed that towards the end of 2015 when the federal government budget on roads had been exhausted, one company alone had 4,000 of its staff retrenched. The happy thing about this sad development, however, is that the minister and his team did not sit down and folded their hands in impotent lamentation. Necessity is the mother of invention. They did something. They came up with two broad policy ideas in order to overcome the challenges confronting them.
The first was what they called FMWH Budgetary Expansion and the second was ‘’Alternative Sources of Funding’’ which included:
a. Presidential Infrastructure Development Fund
b. SUKUK Fund
c. Road Infrastructure Tax Credit Scheme (RITCS)
d. Multilateral loans/ grants
e. Collaboration with other government agencies e,g The North East Development Commission
Through these policy initiatives, the FMWH was able to raise various sums of money in billions of naira to rehabilitate, construct and expand new roads, bridges and culvert spread across the six geo-political zones of the country. Star among these roads are: the Lagos-Shagamu-Ibadan dual carriageway sections 1 (Lagos-Shagamu) and 2 (Shagamu-Ibadan) (southwest); constructed and rehabilitated Lokoja-Obajana-Kabba-Ilorin road section 11 in Kogi/ Kwara states (north-central); reconstructed 117 km Gombe-Biu road in Gombe/Borno states (northeast); reconstructed 221.50 km Zaria-Funtua-Gusau-Sokoto-Birnin Kebbi road (northwest); Dualised 28 km Oku-Iboku power plant section of the Odukpani-Itu-Ikot Ekpene road in CRS/Akwa Ibom states(south-south) and constructed 40.27 km of Nnenwe-Uduma-Uburu road, section 1(26.27 km) and section2 Spur to Ishiagu-Mile 2 road (14km) in Enugu/Ebonyi States (southeast).
The good thing about claimed physical achievements, such as some of what we have narrated above, is that they are visible and on ground and so easily verifiable by any doubters or pessimists. You can not only ‘’ear-mark’’ them, such as is stated on this platform, but you can also go a step further to ‘’eye-mark’’ them by visiting them to see them for yourself.
Those who therefore say Tinubu did himself great harm to want to anchor his administration on Buhari can now see that from only one sector alone (roads, bridges and culverts) Buhari has tangible things for Tinubu to build on. The only debate now is about whether what has been done with the means or resources available to the Government meets our expectations or dreams about what should be.
Even here, we must bear in mind that Nigeria is a vast country - nearly 1 million square miles - so socio-economic infrastructures costing trillions of naira can be provided across the land and it would look as IF nothing has ever be done anywhere. Which is why meticulous accounting, such as the one under reference by the FMWH, must be given to cause Nigerians to become aware of the sheer quantum of work that has been done with the scarce means available.
If 400 kilometres of roads with bridges and culverts are executed in one or two states in one of the six geo-political zones, it will not become known to many people outside those one or two states of the geo-political zone. The reality of our situation is a particular government’s best efforts will hardly be noticeable unless such efforts are backed up with massive publicity.
One of the true measures of the socio-economic impact of road infrastructure is the reduction in travel time from when the facility was not yet in place and now that it is in place. There are many cases whereby a 29-kilometre road traversing certain important economic communities that used to take four hours because of its terrible state of disrepair and when it is properly repaired, cuts the travel time from that four hours to only thirty minutes. Only the road users and the national economy can properly appreciate the impact of the rehabilitation on socio-economic intercourse.
To properly assess the impact of what Buhari and Fashola have done in the case of roads infrastructure, we must appreciate the cost in reduction of travel time they have achieved in the kilometres of roads they have constructed, mended or expanded across the country.
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