Buhari Is Solving Nigeria’s Problems – Femi Adesina

The Special Adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina has said that he’s also suffering from the effects of the current economic crisis.

Adesina also assured Nigerians that their suffering will soon end if they can only endure.

The presidential aide made the comments via an article, titled “After Ye Have Suffered A While” which was published in The Sun.

Read the article below:
Here comes the preacher. What does he want to tell us? Doesn’t he know that we are hungry, and the din of hunger makes one deaf to reason? The rumble in our tummies, as the worms compete for the little food left there, will surely be louder than what anybody can say now. True? Not exactly. Come, let us reason together.

Father Ejike Mbaka, that fearless priest of the Catholic church, gave an illustration recently, which I believe was not revealed to him by flesh and blood. There is hunger in the land, with people severely famished. And there is ululation, loud enough to deafen the deaf all over again, and wake the dead from his eternal sleep.

The wailers are wailing so loud, as if Bob Marley had resurrected with his band, the Wailing Wailers. But hear Fr. Mbaka: somebody came, looted your kitchen, carried away all the food. He did not even leave you crumbs to console yourself with. And then comes another person, trying to replenish your pantry, trying to restock your kitchen.

And then you begin to shout; we are hungry o, we are hungry o, to the point of distracting and discouraging the new man. Who should you rather wail and rage against? The man that looted your kitchen, of course.

That is the exact similitude of the position of Nigeria. There is hunger, lack, and deprivation in the land. But is it a death knell? Not when the kitchen is being restocked, and we will soon feed till we want no more.

But what if we are dead before our kitchen gets replenished? What if we had been knackered by hunger, before the days of plenty come? That is the purpose of this piece. “But the God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, established, strengthen, settle you.” (1 Peter 5:10).

Christianity is the religion I am most familiar with. But every religion must surely preach the virtue of godly patience. “After ye have suffered a while…” Let’s look at it closely. You give a single thing, you get four in return. What a huge return on investment. You put in suffering (patience, if you like), and you get this cocktail of blessings : perfect, established, strengthened, settled. Buy one, get four free.

Hear who is preaching patience, from the cosy confines of the presidential villa.

He has moved up, and from obscene comfort, he can preach. That was the insinuation my own brother, Dele Momodu, made in his Saturday column in Thisday a couple of weeks ago. He did not mention my name, but I knew he was talking of me. And I laughed. Obscene comfort, in a Muhammadu Buhari administration? Funny.

Well, I do not know about those who can hustle, and gain advantage from holding public office. But I can speak for myself. The day God was distributing the ability to hustle, I probably was not at home, so I have not been given that ability. And the Good Book says no man does anything, except it is given to him from above. The sum total?

I am on a national assignment that has cut my legitimate annual income by one third, so when there is hunger in the land, I go hungry too. Well, almost. When people talk of lack of money, I penny-pinch, too. Well, almost. Let nobody think those in government are insulated from what is happening in the country. At least, those who have truly come to serve.

But those precious promises hold true any day. “In the days of famine, my people shall be satisfied.” “The young lion may lack, and suffer hunger, but those that trust in the Lord shall not suffer any good thing.” (Ride on, preacher!).

In Benin on Monday, President Buhari spoke at campaign rally of the All Progressives Congress (APC). He declared: “I assure you that we are going to get out of our economic problems. We are almost out of our security problem and we are going to make Nigeria great again. We are going to be very proud of our country once again.”

I believe it. Implicitly. If I don’t, I am then simply wasting time in government, when I could fare a lot better outside it. But the Daura man needs people to believe in him. Count me in the number. I had always been, and will always be a believer in integrity, probity and accountability. It is good for our country.

The economy has fallen into recession, and after recession comes depression. Really? Why are some people too eager to believe negative projections, while shunning the positive? Yes, when you have negative economic growth for two consecutive quarters, there is business contraction, and the economy falls into recession.

Depression is even worse. But recession is not Armageddon. It is not a death sentence. Leading countries of the world had fallen into economic recession at one time or the other, and they came out of it, to become strong and sturdy again.