Conversation bordering on “100 days of the Buhari presidency”, must really irritate Abuja right now.
It all began when the Senior Special Assistant to the President, Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu, penned an OP-ED wherein he stated that a certain document flying around during the electioneering campaigns; promising achievements in 100 days of the Buhari presidency, did not emanate from candidate Buhari or his political platform, the APC.
That was all that was needed, really, to unleash the print and electronic media on the presidency.
And reactions have been pouring in torrents.
The document was tagged “One Hundred Things Buhari Will Do in 100 Days”. The other read: “My Covenant With Nigerians”.
My email account is full of these documents and I received tons of similar documents from my regular APC official channels all through the campaigns.
The APC has washed its hands off the authorship of the ‘100 Days’ document; as you would expect.
So, who wrote the darn documents and circulated same? Garba Shehu says he can explain.
“APC had a campaign in which there were so many centres of public communications and unfortunately there were some among those centres that were more or less on the loose.
“Yes, it was possible that things were being done without the knowledge or the usage of the proper channel of communications.
“My point is that as the Director, Media and Communications of that campaign, I was responsible for internal and external communications and these so-called documents that are being flown around did not have my signature.
“I did not fund them and I did not authorise them. From what Buhari himself had said at Chatham House, he had no iota or knowledge of those documents. So people cannot hold him to account on something to which he did not commit himself.”
Shehu said the presidency would prefer to talk about “milestones” rather than “achievements” in 100 days.
“We prefer to talk about milestones instead of achievements. Whether the milestones represent achievements or not, that is left for the people to decide. Milestones have been achieved which is important for the country,” he said.
Harking back to what the president said during his lecture at Chatham House in London before the elections, the presidential spokesman said: “The president never promised anything to anyone. It is on record in that lecture at Chatham House…they asked him a question relating to expectations and what he specifically would do in relation to certain documents that were flying around, committing him to this thing or that thing within 100 days.
“In that lecture – the video is already now viral on the web – he (Buhari) said ‘it contained falsehood and I am not going to be engaged in deceit. I will go in there, I will see what is there and get the intelligence – the knowledge of things that are going on – and I will fully commit myself to serving Nigeria’.”
To be fair, Buhari did say the following during that Chatham House appearance:
“The second one: high expectations and what to do with the first 100 days. Yes, I respect that question because quietly I was thinking about these high expectations.
“Those who are following the trail of our campaigns can see how people are turning out, some becoming emotional and crying.
“I am really getting scared that if I get there they will expect miracles within the next (few) week or months. That would be very dicey handling that one.
“I think we have to have a deliberate campaign to temper high expectations with some reasonableness on the part of those who are expecting miracles to happen.
“Just to go first to the ‘first 100 days’, some of it is fraudulent and I don’t want to participate in any fraud in any form. Nigerians know that we are in trouble as a people and as a country.
“When we get there we will quickly get correct intelligence of what is on the ground and inform Nigerians and just learn what I have just read.
“We will make sure that the misappropriation and misapplication of public resources will not be allowed. You would be surprised by how much savings we will realise. That saving will be ploughed back into development and this is what I can promise. But I would remove that ‘100 days’.”
Which leaves us asking: why did the presidency and the APC wait this long to disown or shed some more light on the document?
Will the real author of these documents, please stand up?!
*The writer is on Twitter as @egbas
The post Jude Egbas: Buhari insists he never promised to turn Nigeria into an el dorado in 100 days. So, who did? appeared first on Ekekeee.