Buhari is not worthy of forgiveness ---Abimbola Adelakun

The president, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (ret. ), urged Nigerians to go ahead and take any money distributed by vote-buying politicians but still cast their ballots in accordance with their moral convictions during the governorship and state house of assembly elections in March. It ought to be alarming that a president of a nation would openly support an electoral violation, especially if that president has campaigned against corruption before taking office. But he has disappointed us so frequently that it would be a waste of everyone's valuable time to bring out this mistake.

The more irritating aspect of that careless remark was how it contradicted his earlier boasting about the naira redesign policy to safeguard electoral integrity. When he met King Charles in November in the UK, he stressed that the policy was here to stay since it would shield Nigerians from those who would try to rig the election by using their abundant resources. Only a few months after reiterating his commitment to provide fair competition, this conviction would change. If maintaining election integrity was not a deeply held conviction, then why put people through such suffering and hardship?

This man and the "Sai Baba" men saw as the impacts of the badly planned and shoddily carried out naira redesign diminished Nigerians, who were already terribly impoverished by this man's lackluster rule since 2015. Small-scale farmers who labor in the agricultural produce industry and participate in the informal economic system were particularly hard hit by the reduced loss of livelihood. We will never be able to fully understand the magnitude of the crippling impact of that policy because we are not a civilization that knows how to tally and account for lives and resources. It is still a given that some of the wrecked enterprises will never recover and that people perished as a result of the stress. For what purpose?

As a military dictator, Buhari presided over a fiasco with his naira redesign strategy. He resumed the policy 40 years later despite having witnessed its horrific results. It turns out that the agenda was not driven by a bigger vision for our democratic procedures or for our elections. It was just another one of the sadistic ideas that Buhari grinds out of his psychopathic mind whenever he believes that Nigerians have not suffered enough. There was no benefit for the democratic institutions to which they were pledged. 

If there was no profound objective to be derived from the whole redesign policy, and he himself could advocate people taking money from their corrupt politicians, why did he not just leave people to collect their N5000? Why break things in the guise of trying to fix them?