president. I don't even agree that he is a strong leader. He is not
very intelligent, he is not very articulate and I don't even agree
that he is a strong leader."
Controversial Vanguard columnist and fellowship coordinator of Healing
Wings, a pentecostal Christian fellowship in Lagos, Femi Aribisala
says President-elect Muhammadu Buhari still needs to ask for
forgiveness for killing people through extra-judicial means and for
jailing people for telling the truth, among other things. Apart from
the sins he says Buhari needs to seek forgiveness for, Aribisala also
thinks he cannot move the economy of Nigeria forward.
"In my view, I am pessimistic. I don't think Buhari can move the
economy forward because he has no understanding of economics. I tell
people that I am waiting for our currency to be equal to the dollar
which is one of the things he promised," Aribisala told Vanguard in an
interview.
"One has to see who his advisers are. Again, one has to deal with his
antecedents. If there was a change in Buhari, we should have known it
in the last three months. It should have come out from his
pronouncements during the campaign, but there was nothing there. He
said he is going to give N5,000 to 20 million poor people in Nigeria
and that is N120 billion which he is going to give away in a situation
where the country is cash strapped. I am going to see how this is
going to happen. Buhari does not understand how to tame corruption. He
did not succeed the last time.
"There are certain tendencies in the man that tells me he does not
understand how to tame corruption because we are talking of a change
campaign. But who are the people around him? They are not changed
people. It is paradoxical that now, the party chairman is saying they
don't want defectors anymore. But how did they come to where they are?
I don't see these changes coming with Buhari. This was a rhetoric that
was convenient for the purpose of winning an election. It has
succeeded, but don't let us ascribe more to it. It is going to have
some grand gestures but, in the final analysis, will be meaningless,"
Aribisala said.
Speaking further, he maintained that Buhari is not the type of leader
he could be proud of. "Buhari is not the type of person that I would
like to call my president. I don't even agree that he is a strong
leader. He is not very intelligent, he is not very articulate and I
don't even agree that he is a strong leader. Most of the positions he
held, his deputies were in charge. People run circles around him. Part
of the problem with democracy is that we don't necessarily have the
best choices. You have to choose between bad choices or some bad
choices. I don't see anything that will, ordinarily, make me to want
Buhari as my president. I don't see how he is an improvement on
Jonathan for whatever it is that you think of Jonathan," he said.
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