swipe at the US and Europe over their role in Nigeria’s upcoming
elections.
In an article published by THISDAY, Kyari said while the world powers
claim they want free and fair elections, their representatives in Nigeria
have a different agenda.
Kyari accused the western nations of opposing Buhari because of his reform
agenda which will free the country from import dependency and policies
that hurt the Nigerian economy.
He also took a shot at Atiku Abubakar, former vice-president and Buhari’s
main challenger in Saturday’s election — linking the PDP candidate to the
failures Nigeria has experienced as a developing nation.
“This failure goes beyond individuals or particular political parties,
although it is true that our decline accelerated under the PDP after the
end of military rule in 1999, a betrayal that Atiku Abubakar and many of
his allies hope forlornly to revive and celebrate,” he wrote.
THE FULL TEXT
President Muhammadu Buhari has campaigned in this election exactly as he
has governed since 2015, true to the values in which he has believed all
his adult life: our security, a diversified economy and an administration
free from the scourge of corruption and the sleazy mediocrity it fuels.
Buhari has not changed, and with good reason. Without these attributes,
Nigeria will not know peace, prosperity or the rule of law: the only real
foundations on which free and fair elections and genuine democracy can
thrive. He is stubborn and resolute in defence of these values. This
irritates quite a number in the elite, and especially those who, four
years ago, thought that they could play the President and use his
popularity to continue to steal and cheat the people.
These players have failed. They are angry but they have not yet given up.
They have some unlikely allies. Our traditional friends in the US and
Europe say they want nothing from Nigeria except free and fair elections.
But if you look at what their representatives here actually do rather than
what they say, the unmistakeable signs of a quite different agenda are
plain to see.
It’s easy to forget where we were, a country falling apart, unable even to
protect school girls and where corruption defined every aspect of so much
of our public life and private business. Today our media ignore the
revelations in a Milan court of how oil companies and fixers stuffed cash
in suitcases and the nine-figure bank accounts of former PDP justice
ministers and spy chiefs and Presidents. This failure goes beyond
individuals or particular political parties, although it is true that our
decline accelerated under the PDP after the end of military rule in 1999,
a betrayal that Atiku Abubakar and many of his allies hope forlornly to
revive and celebrate.
Our young people see only the devastation that has been visited upon them,
too young to remember the vibrant rural economy that once gave us the
wealth for the schools and hospitals we are only now beginning to revive.
They cannot imagine the rubber plantations where for decades Dunlop and
Michelin made tyres for Nigeria and the world. The factories are long
since closed. Our palm oil was once a world leader but it is only now,
under this government, that we are reviving an industry on life support.
We have timber, we have hardworking people – and yet we came to be
importing even simple school desks and bedframes. We have so much of what
we need for fertilisers, yet government after government preferred to let
the plants we had already built go to waste for easy commissions on
second-rate imports. Textiles used to employ thousands, and will do again,
when we allow our talent fairly to compete on the international stage.
A major crude producer with four refineries that once delivered petroleum
products for home consumption and export, Nigeria was reduced to importing
petroleum products as if we were Burkina Faso or Bangladesh, not a leading
member of OPEC. Our golden goose was starved. The military and the PDP
took all the money, they didn’t pay oil partners what we owed and only
now, after this government’s efforts, speaking plainly and finding real
solutions, can we begin to grow exports that have stagnated for 30 years.
When our private banks collapsed (again) in 2009, the outstanding
liabilities were N5.7 trillion. It is hard to imagine a sum of money, so
vast, owed by so few, to so many. The list of decay is long. And yet this
was the inherited culture of government – ‘to those that have, give more’
– that we have challenged, a culture where every declared reform was in
fact a disguise to privatise profit and leave the rest of us with all the
risk.
Nigeria has almost as many problems as we have people. But it also has all
the resources to meet our needs, if they are properly managed and honestly
marshalled. Think where we would be today, but for all the time wasted,
the prosperity we would enjoy and the better partner we might have been to
our friends in the region and further afield! Buhari is not a populist but
he is popular because he is delivering on our most basic needs first.
Do our foreign friends simply not understand what is at stake, or do they
actually want us to fail? We know we are not equal partners, and do not
pretend to be so. In our own time in government, the US, the UK and the EU
let us know subtly, and often not so subtly, what we should be doing on
everything from currency reform to fuel deregulation and the import of
toothpicks.
They have their own subsidies to protect key strategic interests, their
farmers and steel plants, but condemn our own efforts to protect the
poorest and most vulnerable from an unregulated market for food, transport
and housing, or to create and protect space for new opportunities and
innovation to flourish. This is not so much a question of policy, but
integrity: we, at least, mean what we say. So many past governments in
Nigeria did not.
Our transition has been difficult because Nigeria needs radical change,
which we have been delivering, despite ingenious and often disingenuous
resistance from vested interests and the business-as-usual brigade. Which
begs the question: is there a difference between what suits Nigeria’s real
national interest and what suits the interests of the Great Powers? The
years of failure were characterised by hypocrisy and betrayal by our
leaders, who were in turn easy targets for manipulation – much easier for
foreign powers to manage than a government genuinely looking to repair and
revive today so that we can build tomorrow. And tomorrow never dies.
I always knew that business-as-usual had a powerful self-interest in
resisting CHANGE. I had hoped their tentacles did not stretch so far or so
easily beyond our borders, that a good case, well made, would receive a
fair hearing. In three and a half years in government, I have learned that
decent argument and hard facts face stiff competition from vested
interests that seem so easily to sway people who should know better. A
convenient lie is not better than an uncomfortable truth.
Nowhere is this clearer than the contrived debate on the conduct of
elections. Buhari’s commitment to the democratic process is a matter of
record, time and again. All of the work to rebuild our public
institutions, restore our values and recalibrate our future prospects can
succeed only in a democracy in which the integrity of elections is
sacrosanct.
Instead of judging Nigeria by our actions, it seems altogether too easy
for foreign partners to be swayed by the expensive words of lobbyists.
Riva Levinson has been hired by Bukola Saraki. She was trained by Paul
Manafort and Roger Stone (both caught up in the probe into interference by
foreign powers in the US elections in 2016) and guide earlier in her
career to dictators like Siad Barre, unprincipled warlords like Jonas
Savimbi, or frauds like Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, the man who neo-conned
the Bush White House.
We are meant to believe that Ms Levinson, like the others who are paid by
one of the contestants, wants only to promote a free and fair race. And
that it is only a coincidence that this language for hire is identical to
what we hear from accredited diplomats!
By omission or commission, it appears it may actually suit our friends,
deep down, below the pious words, to see Nigeria a basket case, begging
bowl in hand, than the partner we could, should and will prove to be. And
we have been here before. At the end of 1984, British diplomats predicted
a coup against the then Buhari government, with whom London was
quarrelling over everything from apartheid to economic policy (as we knew
then, and as it turned out, Buhari was right). Glowing profiles of Ibrahim
Babangida were prepared and telegrams of congratulation were drafted. Mrs
Thatcher put the project on ice, at least for a few months, but it was not
long before foreign powers concluded that their best interests would be
served by people who told them everything they wanted to hear on
democratisation and reform, but, as they could and should have known,
meant precisely none of it. Nigeria lived through the consequences of this
systemic deception. We lost so much in the 30 years after 1985, but
nothing as precious as the loss of confidence in our values and what we as
a nation could be.
In the 19th century, Lord Palmerston, Britain’s Prime Minister and one of
the country’s most celebrated diplomats, observed that “nations have no
permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.” We have
been delivering on a programme to restore the rule of law, to build
democracy and strengthen security, to deal with corruption and to create
opportunity in a new meritocracy. It is a platform that helps tackle
violent extremism, illegal migration, trafficking and financial crime.
These are the very issues that are central to the interests of our foreign
friends, and we are producing results.
Nigeria will make its choice on Saturday. It has never before had a
government that has more clearly demonstrated through words and actions
its commitment to transparency and the rule of law, protecting good judges
and decent public office-holders from the corruption of their peers.
Voters are free to move forwards to a better future or back to the
desperate past from which we are now beginning to emerge. Our election
commission is independent and has all resources it needs to do its job. We
should all be wise to the risks, including partial and premature
announcements of unofficial results from unverifiable sources, especially
when one party has already declared well in advance that it cannot lose
unless there is rigging. There should be no interference from any quarter,
including foreign powers who say one thing but do another – exactly the
formula that their friends here have employed for years to bring us so
close to despair.