For two weeks, Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s septuagenarian president, has been out of action, receiving medical treatment in London for an undisclosed illness.
His absence has sent the rumour mill of Africa’s most populous nation spinning, with frequent erroneous reports that the president is dead.
The tragedy for Nigeria is that policy-making has been so ponderous during the 20 months since President Muhammadu Buhari took office that, dead or alive, there is no difference.
Under President Buhari’s slow-blinking leadership, Africa’s largest economy has drifted into crisis, that has driven businesses into the ground, people on to the margins and the economy into its worst recession in 25 years.
What had been a growing middle class is being daily eviscerated.
High inflation, especially for food, is damaging the poor in whose name Muhammadu Buhari ran for office.
There are signs that Nigerians — among the most resilient and adaptive people on the continent — are losing patience.
Mr Buhari surrounded himself with a lean team of capable technocrats empowered to get policy cranking have come to naught.
Policymaking , 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.
Seventy per cent of Nigeria’s 170m people were not born when Mr Buhari was last running the show, so they might not notice that his policies are stuck in the same 1980s groove.
Read the originally report at Financial Times.
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