The spokesman of the Northern Elders Forum, NEF, Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, has described the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari as a failure to the north.
Speaking in an interview with a national newspaper, Baba-Ahmed said Buhari failed the north and the electorate that voted for him.
He said, “In one word, expectant! Yes, expectant, because we expect that President Tinubu will do phenomenally better than Buhari. The immediate past President was a woeful disappointment.
“He failed the nation. He failed the North. He failed the electorates that trooped out to give him the kind of votes that no other President has ever had. He raised a lot of expectations but left the country a lot worse than he met it.
“So, we are hoping that if Tinubu continues to be the President after all these judicial processes have been concluded, he would have learnt from President Buhari’s weaknesses and failures to create a government that is radically different from that of President Buhari because this country has to move on.
“We don’t have another eight years to lose. There’s a very high expectation that we will have good governance, we will have a secure country, and that we will have a compassionate government.
Baba-Ahmed said the former president did not like the forum because of their positions on critical issues of the region.
“We made some profound recommendations; for instance, the amendment of the constitution, fixing the economy, security and tackling poverty at a time when his administration was precisely the reason why these problems were blowing; and fixing the country.
“I don’t think that up to the time Buhari left, he accepted that there was any problem with this country. So, when you tell somebody who is the problem about some solutions, he doesn’t want to hear it.
“That is the reason I stressed that whoever is going to lead between now and 2027 should be the type of President who will be open minded, who will recognise the fact that he needs ideas on how this country needs to be restructured and how the economy needs to be redesigned so that both can serve the purposes of growth, reduce poverty and that it bring the country together. These things are very important. We can’t continue to sustain the level of insecurity in this country.”
