The Financial Times has weighed in on the uncertainty surrounding the absence of President Buhari for the past two weeks with a hard hitting article condemning his governance style in the last 20 months.
In a rather acerbic article written by its African Editor David Pilling, titled “Nigeria’s president is missing in action”, the writer said the “tragedy for Nigeria is that policy making has been so ponderous during the 20 months since Mr Buhari took office that, dead or alive, it is not always easy to tell the difference”.
“Under Mr Buhari’s slow-blinking leadership,” Pilling wrote, “Africa’s largest economy has drifted into crisis.”
The article said the president’s style has “verged on the invisible”, highlighting the fact that it took Buhari six months to name a cabinet after he was sworn into office.
“Policy making — such that it is — has been crafted instead by a tiny cabal of loyal, less qualified, stalwarts. Mr Buhari has failed to articulate anything approaching a vision,” FT wrote.
High inflation is damaging the poor “in whose name Mr Buhari ran for office”, noting that there “are signs that Nigerians — among the most resilient and adaptive people on the continent — are losing patience”.
In the anti-graft war, the newspaper said it a can be “boiled down to a few symbolic gestures” and a few high-profile cases against members of the previous administration.
“Yet, systemically, little has changed. The confused exchange rate policy — in which the central bank doles out scarce dollars at an advantageous rate — is a recipe for opacity. The dollar shortage is killing off industry rather than nurturing it,” it said.
However, the UK newspaper admitted that Buhari inherited “a dire situation” from former president Goodluck Jonathan.
Ebun Francis with additional report from Thecable