One year of Buhari's election victory has Nigeria Change

It is one year since President Muhammadu
Buhari won the 2015 presidential poll. Buhari came to the
power raising public expectations on his declared
commitment to fighting corruption, ending the Boko Haram
insurgency and fixing the economy.
Jibrin Ibrahim, a Nigerian political scientist and activist,
examines what has changed since last year presidential
election.
The election as a narrative of heroes
It’s exactly one year today since the March 28 2015
presidential election. In my column of 30th March 2015,
I had described the election as a narrative of heroes. I
started my list of heroes with the communities attacked
by insurgents to stop them from participating in the
electoral process. Most of them came out and voted
risking their lives to operationalize Nigerian democracy.
Nigerians love democracy so much that not even
terrorists could deter them from exercising their
franchise.
The Nigerian voters in general are also heroes. They
came out in their droves to vote. The voters endured
severe difficulties during the elections as a result of
several operational and logistical lapses by the
Independent National Electoral Commission. Voting
commenced late in many parts of the country. In many
places voting continued late into the night and in some
cases through to the morning. In these instances,
voters remained calm, patient and orderly. They
demonstrated a great sense of civic consciousness,
which we should continue to salute.
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– Buhari’s panel reveals
Another hero revealed by the elections was INEC and its
leadership under Professor Attahiru Jega who planned
for and delivered elections that were relatively free and
fair. Their use of the card reader was a masterstroke.
The card reader, this simple machine that has the
capacity to recognize and count real human voters was
another real hero. It caused a real panic among circles
that are used to rigging elections. The panic was
justified; the card reader was really an anti-rigging
devise and has come to stay in future elections in spite
of some recent incomprehensible court judgements.
The value gained by these heroes
One year later, we can pose the question of the value
gained by these heroes of Nigerian democracy.
Following Buhari’s inauguration as president on 29th,
May the expectation was that he would hit the ground
running, immediately appoint his ministerial team and
heads of agencies and embark on immediate
implementation of his elaborate governance agenda,
which he had successfully sold to the electorate. That
did not happen. The president appeared reluctant to
engage in governance with his political allies and even
uttered some rather unkind words about them.
Nigerians were not initially worried about this approach
to governance with civil servants especially as during
the first quarter of the administration, there was a
remarkable improvement in electricity and fuel supply.
My own view was that it is problematic to rule with just
civil servants after all; one of the most important
signifier of the crisis of the Nigerian state was the
collapse of public administration. There was no basis to
assume that the civil service was still the competent
bureaucracy bequeathed at independence. The
president refused to be stampeded from his announced
path of properly studying the situation he inherited
before making political appointments and it took over
four months before the first list of ministers emerged.
The disadvantages of the approach chosen by President
Buhari
Some people were of the view that by allowed the
permanent secretaries he found in office to remain in
power for so long, they might have had the opportunity
to wipe out evidence of their previous misdeeds. Some
of that might have indeed happened. Today after ten
months in power, we are inundated on a daily basis by
numerous revelations about mega corruption and what
is clear is that corruption under the Jonathan
administration was carried out with such recklessness
and a naïve assumption that they could not possibly
lose elections that hiding the misdeeds was simply
impossible. It might have therefore have been good
tactic to fully study the situation before engaging in
governance.