In just a few days after becoming president again, President Donald Trump has signed several Executive Orders. Most of those orders have come at a time when the USA appears to be in a flux or glut. Take for instance the Executive Order which appeared to have exposed the underbelly of one of the US institutions, allegedly a Boko Haram funder. With that Executive Order, very many political, economic and social alignments and realignments are being made, to the extent that many other countries are considering cutting aid to African countries. Very recent videos that we have seen on the international media indicate that there are many Americans who are unhappy with some of the decisions that President Trump has been taking. These unhappy American have taken to burning Tesla cars and attacking Mr Elon Musk’s subsidiaries apparently because Musk heads the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE. But no matter the level of unhappiness or dissatisfaction of those committing arson in the name of their dissatisfaction, one thing is very clear, and that is: the decisions that Mr. Trump has been taking are decisions that appear to put the interests of America at the forefront of any other consideration there is. Like him or hate him, Mr. Trump appears ready to go the hog, and to pushes the limits for what he believes to be in the interest of his country.
But you know what? Whilst Mr Trump was busy from day one with signing executive order after executive order for the uplift of the American people, our own president from day one started us on a journey to the deepest part of the wilderness after Mr Buhari took us just to the periphery of that wilderness. First, he removed fuel subsidy, a subsidy removal he had strenuously and vehemently opposed as an opposition leader. With that unplanned removal, a chain reaction that brought about a galloping increase in the prices of food, transport, school fees, was ignited. As if that was not enough, Mr. President of Nigeria raised the cost of power, and has proposed to raise taxes mostly affecting the poor. At that point where Nigerians had had it up to here and took to the streets, we were all to be embarrassed to see children arrested for protesting hunger and hardship brought to the courts, that they were masterminds of revolts over oppressive costs of living initiated by the Tinubu administration.
At this point of no return for many Nigerians, many Nigerian President Trump’s critics were having a field day spinning positive yarns about the incredible suffering in Nigeria. First they said that this is a reform government. They also came with that famous fabu of theirs in urging Nigerians to be as patient as dogs because even though the dividends of the actions of Mr President are walking like a tortoise, they would soon start geeing and neighing like galloping horses in no time. They told us to live sacrificially, that monies to be saved from the removal of fuel subsidy would be put to the construction of bad roads, hospitals and provision of affordable power supply. But what were we to see? Whilst all of this rhetoric was in all the papers and television, Mr President was still going about his social engagements in extremely long convoys, and at a time of an astronomical increment in the costs of petrol. Not only that – the Trump critics said that monies from removal of subsidy will be used for repair of bad roads, only for the Senate and House of Reps members to get brand new SUVs to drive over those bad roads.
We have identified two presidents – the one US and the other Nigerian, and referred to how some Nigerians respond to their actions and inactions. There is one other African president with a different modus vivendi of governance completely at variance with the Nigerian and African, and which the apologists of the Nigerian love to hate as they hate Trump. He is the Burkinabe Ibrahim Traore. Even though he has snubbed aid from the West, is revolutionizing agriculture in his country, refuses to live as a king, and is taking his country on a quantum leap into the future as a shining example of governance for Africa, the Nigeria Trump critics and apologists of the Tinubu administration are on the neck of the Burkinabe president. They say that his actions are ‘undemocratic’ simply because the Burkinabe president wears a military uniform and carries a pistol wherever he goes.
What bewilders in all of this about the Nigerian critics of President Trump and of the Burkinabe is that life is not as rosy for them in Nigeria anyways. Where there are power outages, they suffer like every other Nigerian. They buy garri at very expensive costs in the same market as every other Nigerian, and groan under their breathe at the outrageous costs of diesel and fuel. The question now is: why are they comfortable criticizing people in other lands working hard for the uplift of their people but are uncomfortable with criticizing presidents in their own country and continent who live like kings and pauperize their own people? I think this is schizophrenic – disorganized thinking and behavioral lapses premised on clannish and primordial expectations. It has to stop forthwith.
