By Darlington Enhondor
In case he doesn’t know it yet, Yemi Osinbajo should be tutored on this truism: government is the process of walking, not the art, or act, of talking. More of the one invariably means a considerable lessening of the other. Hence the manifestation of productive government is the sum total of the art of politics. Osinbajo seems to assume that we enjoy hearing what we have heard many times before. Such as “100 zillion Nigerians live below the poverty line,” and “we don’t have adequate supply of electricity because our refineries operate below capacity.” And blah blah blah! Yah yah yah!! Especially when talk is the redundant repetition of clichéd explanations of government’s incompetence, or recriminations about “who done it,” talk, even from a vice president, becomes boring and enormously annoying.
So when Osinbajo repeats what the likes of Namadi Sambo regularly regurgitated under the Goodluck Jonathan administration and spent half their tenure thinking we were stupid enough to believe their gobbledygook, he increases our collective annoyance by several gigabytes. Our eardrums are suffering from the excruciating punishment of recycled aspeech. Our stomachs, however, hunger for nourishing diets of economic abundance. Which is conspicuously scarce in government thinking.
Osinbajo’s familiar lamentations would have made sense if they were balanced up with enumerations of how the Mohammadu Buhari government plans to resolve the social dislocations he laments about. Jonathan squandered scant time promising to”eradicate” the cancers that had eroded “the power sector.” His best effort, however, was to transfer his government’s incompetence to conglomerations of private vultures with melodious acronyms, GENCOs and DISCOS. Still, today large majorities of citizens invest scarce resources in electricity generators for their own sustenance. Nothing is greater evidence of the political leadership’s defining irresponsibility.
The challenge before the new government is to produce verifiable evidence of its reformative abilities. Having campaigned on the catechism of “change,” Buhari’s prominent burden now is to demonstrate its curative difference from previous dispensations. The time to moan about social problems – which were created, and are being sustained, by the “leadership” class, by the way – should now recede into the dark alleys of history. With collective agreement, Nigerians’ resounding admonition to the Buhari government is, “show us how far and how well you can walk, not how much you can talk.” QED!
Darlington contributed this piece on social media
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