In his speech in London last week, President Muhammadu Buhari, ever his frank and honest self, captured the challenges a state like Nigeria faces, with a huge population fixated on the entitlement syndrome which feels that the state must do everything for the citizens. Said the President at a Commonwealth Business Forum on Making Business Easier Between Commonwealth Countries in London; “We have a very young population. Our population is estimated conservatively to be 180million. More than 60 per cent of the population is below the age of 30. A lot of them have not been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria has been an oil-producing country, therefore they should sit and do nothing and get housing, healthcare and education free.”

There is nothing you can fault from Buhari’s perfect reading of the Nigerian reality, especially where a ravenous newly-minted opposition feels it is its right to hold power, raid the treasury and ride roughshod over all Nigerians, as it did in 16 woeful years. Where the displaced PDP and its cohorts think they have a thick poach of lazy, idle and uneducated ‘youths’ from its bizarre years in power who lie in wait for the proceeds of stolen resources, there is absolutely nothing new or wrong in the President’s unputdownable reading of the country’s predicaments. President Buhari merely brought to the fore the needs of a nation that had its best years eaten away by locusts, its youths badly short-changed and duped and its future made so uncertain by the prebendal profligacy of the past. So why do the Gentiles rage and the people utter folly?

But his honest and faultless statement was latched on by an opposition that wants to desperately hoodwink, cheat and con its ways back to power. Pronto, we had another version of Buhari’s sincere statement of the facts of the Nigerian problem. We heard from the distraught opposition that President Buhari said that Nigerian youths are lazy and there began a round of devious maelstrom that the same opposition hopes will drive it back to power to continue the bizarre sleaze it did in 16 years before the Buhari tsunami swept them off power. That was all the coyotes who have been bleeding badly since they lost power needed to raise a way cry. Oh, yea, he called us lazy and we will teach him a lesson in 2019! Can you believe such bacchanal deceit? Can you imagine such lascivious fraud? Can you believe such bestial intrigue? Can you believe such naked scam?

It can rightly be asked if the President’s comment above was the only match stick that kindled the mischievous anger of the dehydrated and frustrated Nigerian opposition. Is this simple statement of truth the only catalyst that set off the bottled rage of the opposition, hurting badly after being defeated and sent off power and bleeding more after the capping of the notorious free-loading enterprise with which they demolished Nigeria in 16 years? Is this statement enough to let off so huge a gall bag the distressed opposition and their cohorts have been exuding since then?  Ordinarily, the President’s comment shouldn’t let off the huge fireball those that want to come back to power by fire, by force have raised. But we are at a point where the consuming desperation of the opposition to return to power is firing the pin of a dangerous social, political and economic mayhem the country has never seen before. We have in our hands today an amoral and corrupt opposition that desperately wants to lie, slander, perjure, forge, bite and claw its way back to power. We have a deadly gang up of bitter but hugely corrupt forces that won’t mind setting the country on fire to achieve their consuming desire to get back power for the purpose of self-aggrandizement and free loading. For such deadly, spitting force, forging, lying and seducing the unaware and the simple minded with such frauds as they now untruths to the President, are all game.

In its desperation to nail Buhari, even by false means the bizarre opposition the country has been saddled for the past three years ran into its ever busy laboratory of forgery and fabricated a false version of the president’s comment and came out with the mantra that President Buhari called all Nigerian youths lazy. They didn’t go further. They have gotten all they wanted and they set sail, furiously marketing this lie to their confederates in desperate bid for power. They were not interested in proof of Buhari’s culpability because, like every other dubious marauder, they don’t have proof. They now moved in to seduce the ill-informed youths, their supporters and their fellow collegiate in the queer battle to get back to power and continue their brigands to mount a war cry of how Buhari abused the youths as lazy. They fawned, foamed ceaselessly in the mouth and threatened with corrupt indignation that they will vote out Buhari n 2019 for calling Nigerian youths lazy. Believing Nigerians are unthinking and irrational mobsters they can twiddle in any manner they want so as to get back to power, they lurked at the back, smiled in a glee of mischief and uttered, like Mark Anthony in Shakespearean Julius Caesar; ‘mischief thou art afoot’. They hope to garner the rewards like any other yahoo yahoo fraudster but they will be disappointed because even as they have consistently taken Nigerians for fools, Nigerians will disappoint them at the fullness of time.

So far, no one has shown where such devilish quote of ‘All Nigerian youths are lazy’ came in President Buhari’s spotless reason for which he drew attention to a stark reality bedeviling Nigeria where its future generation latches onto a strange sense of entitlement to deny themselves the creative opportunities and urge to do well for themselves. No one has so far excerpted the forged quote from Buhari’s effort to offer a conceptual clarity to a problem which surely will hunt all of us one day. No one has offered any rebuttal to the truism of Buhari’s statement. No one has cared to offer any alternative fact to the one he offered. But to the multitude of lazy, jobbing coyotes that graduated from the PDP school of mischief, Buhari is guilty, even when he never made the quote they are running stark nude in the market square with. To them, Buhari is guilty of every sin in the world because he denied to pander to their sense of entitlement by sharing the national cake amongst a sybaritic cult of idle, lazy and pleasure-loving political hustlers. Most importantly. Buhari by defeating the PDP was directly responsible for their woes. He denied them the favourite feeding bottle through which they have lived their padded lives so he must bear the responsibility for even what he never said or inferred. Can you believe such tragedy?

What was contained In President Buhari’s speech that had not been said by various people, even in more acrid forms before? Let us revisit a few;

In July 1974, precisely at the Ondo Town Hall, the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo delivered a speech at the presentation of legendary Chief Gani Fawehinmi’s book, ‘People’s Rights To Free Education At All Levels’ where he said, “The trouble with many Nigerian youths is that they sleep too much, play too much in idle chatter and gossip”. Buhari, in his London speech, didn’t come near this fatal indictment but there was no banner raised against Chief Awolowo because he was speaking the truth. Then, there was no desperate caste of looters and their politically-charged lazy youth wing trying every prank to return to power.

Reuben Abati, the Spokesman for the immediate past president Goodluck Jonathan, wrote about Nigerian youths in September 2012, ‘Nigerian youths are idle and idling twittering collective children of anger, the distracted crowd of Facebook addicts, the BBM-pinging soap gossips of Nigeria who seem to be in competition among themselves to pull down President Goodluck Jonathan”. This is the official spokesman of the erstwhile President Jonathan. So why did the political ‘youths’ mouthing asinine war rallies today on their forged quote not protest this huge assault which grandly dwarfs the presumed slight of President Buhari? Will it surprise you that the same ‘youths’ that are now devouring their tongues in anger were sing-praising and urging Abati to fire on because this was from the house? Is it because, as at the time Abati made this scathing remarks, the same ‘youths’ now beating war drums over what Buhari did not say were sitting lazily in the village square, singing, drumming and clapping for Jonathan and drawing handsomely from that but are now weeping out their eye sockets because the illicit source of vain livelihood they were surviving from had been plugged by Buhari? We must be clear on this before we are inadvertently recruited for an obnoxious political battle for the benefit of those that despoiled and laid the country bare just the other day.

Truth is that no sane, educated, informed Nigerian youth will feel perturbed with President Buhari’s frankness. No good Nigerian youth will feel indicted by the President’s assertion of the truth that many Nigerian youths are idle because they feel the state will wipe their behind for them because it is an oil-producing nation.. No sane Nigerian youth will submit to the devious project to falsify President Buhari’s true reflection of Nigeria with a view to stealing the roaches back to power.  No sane Nigerian would gladly wish the President play the ostrich, pad and hide the truth from the outside world and risk a factual presentation of his country’s problem and open doors for meaningful intervention in a bid not to fluster the nest of lazy, political youths and their corrupt paymasters. The truth is that no sane Nigerian youth will consume the sick and awful forgery of the lazy, corrupt, uneducated political youths who deviously embark on deliberate smear campaigns to achieve the deadly goals of their corrupt paymasters and their consuming desire to come back to power. No informed youth will fall prey to such cheap traps as the one made from forging President Buhari’s frank and honest take on any national issue.

But then, what else did the latest hoax about President Buhari allegedly calling all Nigerian youths lazy show but that, more than even the President can capture, Nigeria is firmly trapped with  lazy, uneducated and ill-informed youths who cannot read but wait on the state to feed them, often through stolen resources? It is incredible that some people will go such a long way mischievously manipulating President Buhari’s comment, get raucous applause from those that consume such forgeries and still protest being called lazy, illiterate and unproductive. It is instructive that the strategy these predictable political manipulators want to mischievously employ for selfish political gains have turned out to expose them so badly that, by their actions, they are proving President Buhari’s factual comment much more than the perversion they turn of it. Everything points still to the danger where an erstwhile corrupt political culture made a mess of our youths by destroying everything that will lead them to productive growth while feeding them with poor rations from stolen funds. From whichever angle you look at it, the problem is critical and demands such urgent attention far beyond what the country can muster, as Buhari pointed out in London.

Claver lives in Ikeja, Lagos.

E-mail: peterclaver2000@yahoo.com

The country is gearing up for the General Elections in February next year and with President Muhammadu Buhari announcing that he will bid for the governing Party, APC’s ticket to run fo a second term, all hell has been let loose by the chaotic, ill-prepared opposition camp.
A joke on WhatsApp last week was about the abuse and insults heaped on Muhammadu Buhari, attacking him for everything wrong with the country but failing to answer an important question: who do you have that is better?
In democracies around the globe, second terms by incumbents are usually harder to get simply because, somehow, there is always some kind of anti-incumbency leading to a loss of faith among those supporters.
For President Buhari, who won with massive votes in 2015, his major challenge is to do as well as he did, or even better. He came to power with a lot of expectations and Nigerians had, justifiably placed very high hopes on him. As we said sometimes back, he as a consequence, has became a victim of the tyranny of expectations. The weight of unrealistic expectations has evidently blinded many of the people from seeing the revolutionary changes happening across the nation.
Nigerians expected him to undo the damage in several decades of misgovernance and naturally, many are already feeling frustrated that he hadn’t done that in three years.
The problem with our opposition is that beyond fault-finding, they are unable to give or innovate a vision of their own on how they can make the nation better.
A so-called Third Force has failed to get political traction since it birth. This is understandable, given that they have promised to give the country everything that is new but have so far produced no new faces, no new ways of doing things. Certainly, there is no face that can be called the President of Nigeria.
For the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP parading itself on the glory of being the largest opposition, the party has not less than 10 leaders acutely ambitious to rule Nigeria. It will take them minimally two to three terms of presidential tenure, that is eight to twelve years to reinvent the party.
Looking at the entire opposition landscape, it can be said that they cannot be united by ideology, the type that made the pre-2015 opposition fuse into a formidable challenger that pushed an incumbent out of office. There is in no way therefore, they can choose leaders with unanimity.
What then they have taken to, is scaremongering by fanning ethnic and religious divisions among the minorities especially in the Middle Belt where hundreds of innocent citizens are confronted with violent death.
Before they take the words out of my mouth, let me state that the spate of those killings are tragic and unacceptable. They ought not happen and I’am aware of how sad the Presidency is about these unfortunate goings-on. And there is so much that is being done to end the killings.
More, however, could still have been achieved if there is cooperation extended to the security agencies by everyone, and by everyone, I mean especially the political opposition. A political warlord recently ordered the provocative stoning of a Nigerian Air Force personnel as their chopper landed in a Northeastern state.
Today, government has irrefutable evidence that much as most of these killings are arising from herdsmen-farmers attacks, some of it is driven by politicians. The recent arrests by the army in Taraba State point to a clear political sponsorship, and the kingpins, some of whom have been arrested have been handed over to the DSS for further investigation. Others who are being sought have either gone into hiding or they are pulling strings of blackmail to force the hands of government to abandon the search for them.
It is clear by now that the Middle Belt killings even if they are not caused by the opposition are no doubt seen as a political opportunity to set the tone for the 2019 elections.
Another matter of great disappointment is the ongoing attempt to victimize a group of religious leaders, the Arewa Pastors Initiative for Peace, representing 45,000 members, simply because they paid a visit to President Buhari. We see this development as an unnecessary distraction at a time the country should be united against its common problems and challenges.
We are both mystified and disturbed by the growing lack of tolerance and accommodation by some groups who see it as their birth right to visit and address the President on their issues but lack the modicum of respect for others to do the same. It is regrettable that an innocuous visit is becoming a subject of needless and unprintable attacks on the President and his visitors for doing nothing wrong.
For the avoidance of doubt, the President would not want to set a dangerous precedent for the country by discriminating against any group exercising their democratic rights of freedom of speech and association.
The Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo told the tale of the toad at the Asiwaju Bola Tinubu Colloquium recently in Lagos.
“Let’s discuss tails,” the toad was told. It, not having a tail, the toad said, “no, let’s talk about other things.”
Rather than coming to the table to discuss what has been achieved or not in key areas of policy, the conversation is today limited to one, the morbid tale of the relationship between farmers and herders.
Sad as these incidents involving farmers and herdsmen are, I wonder what the result will be if half the newsprint and airtime devoted to this is used to draw attention to malaria which kills 300,000 Nigerians every year; the 88,000 malnourished children and the 230,000 malnourished, pregnant women in the northeast, a quarter of whom the UNICEF said would most likely not make it.
An important motivation for President Buhari’s bid for second term is that the gains made from 2015 should not be frittered. Buhari is not involved in corruption and is not desperate for the office. He is among the few leaders we have who are not obsessed with money, cars and homes but working passionately for the country’s economy, peace and safety. If a corrupt politician wins, we will go back to where we were in 2015.
Many by now have forgotten where we are coming from. The daily bomb blasts in our cities between 2012 and 2015 including the deadly attack on the United Nations office in Abuja have been forgotten by many. The Juma’at Mosque bomb attack on Kano that left 300 dead and the theft of 270 girls in Chibok as they assembled to write their final exams, with 113 yet to return have for many, faded into history.
We lived in perpetual fear. I remember the story of the roadside Mosque in one settlement in which a black plastic bag was noticed by the congregation as the Imam led in prayer. The entire congregation fizzled out, the Imam realizing that he was left alone only from the eerie air of silence after everyone had quietly left.
Today, religious gatherings and crowded markets have resumed. Witnesses reported that Abuja and Kaduna witnessed the largest simultaneous assembly of people when the Tijjaniyya Islamic movement celebrated their Maulud a week ago without the fear of bomb blasts.
Cabinet meetings are now about how trillions of Naira are to be used to provide long delayed infrastructure such as roads, bridges, railway, power, drugs and equipment for hospitals. Grand corruption, by which ministers sat around the table to share money drawn from the treasury has been ended.
A majority of our people are farmers who depend on good rains, access to land and fertilizer to grow the food they eat and sell the surplus to make money for school fees for their children and where possible, add a wife or two and make the Hajj or other plans. This administration has broken the jinx of fertilizer shortage and its high cost and has put land clearing for agriculture on a priority. Loans at low or no interest rates are being given by the Central Bank of Nigeria, the Bank of Agriculture, the Bank of Industry and the Development Bank. It will take years to raise our rising population from poverty. Even in China, with the world’s fastest growing economy, this, still, is a work in progress.
The administration is doing so much for women, children and our enterprising youths. This is the first time anyone has given our country a social welfare scheme.
By it, 7.5 million children are served free meals in schools. This has improved school attendance. Two Hundred thousand graduates are now enrolled in N-Power, and 300,000 have just passed screening in the biggest, most audacious employment scheme on the continent. Our youths have a lot of ideas and many who need support, mentoring and guidance under the various schemes under the Social Investment Programme of the government are getting help.
Three years on, the economy has seen a paradigm shift with agriculture getting a pride of place. We are importing 90 percent less rice than we did three years back. The World Bank has certified Nigeria as being one of the top ten most improved economies in the world. Power ministry has done commendably well, raising generation from an average of 2,600 megawatts to 7,500 mw.
Today, each state has a minimum of between one to five federal roads under construction or reconstruction. Some have as many as eight or nine. The legendary second Niger Bridge is by now 44 percent complete, putting to shame the many years of platitude and lies by several past administrations.
With the advent of the Buhari administration, foreign policy has become robust. Nigerian enjoys a good reputation in West Africa, Africa and the world.
What this government is doing is different and the results are showing, for example:
Ø Reversing the decline which began in 2014 and stabilizing the economy for Nigerians.
Ø Recovery of stolen national assets.
Ø Economic restructuring for the growth of private sector as the best solution to unemployment.
Ø Demonstrable infrastructure improvement: roads, power and energy
Ø Re-establishment of collaborative working relationship between the President and the Vice President as model of how Northern/Southern, Muslim/Christian, Older/Younger Nigerians can and should work together.
The thing about Second Term in all political climes is that voters must have a practical reason to vote for someone. President Buhari has not given anyone an excuse not to choose him on this count. His is an administration that has something for everyone.
Supporters who talk about a noticeable loss of faith by some must note that there is nothing permanent in politics. Many of the allies will, in pursuit of power, come back to the APC, being the party with superior power.
The party did extremely well in the North to come to power and every indication is that in 2019, it will do in the South, what it did in the North in 2015.
By the way, did anyone notice the poll on who to choose in 2019 by a young man, Mark Essien @markessien on Twitter? Buhari supporters need to read that to cheer up!

Garba Shehu, is the Senior Special Assistant to the President  (Media and Publicity)