14082018 - POPULATION GROWTH : Danger looms for Nigeria

Personality of The Year: The burden of making nominations
IT happened again between
October and December last
year. With no no-go areas, you
would expect the arguments
and debates by members of
Vanguard Board of Editors to be
very straight forward. But, as in
everything about life, nothing
is ever straight forward.
In fact, the ghost of the events
of October 2016, which cast a
pall of indecisiveness on the
sessions to choose Vanguard’s
PROLOGUE
By Jide Ajani
SATURDAY Vanguard, APRIL 14, 2018 — 19
Personality of the Year for that
period, refused to be exorcised.
Worse, in the light of a
manifest drop in the value, content
and context of
leadership construct in Nigeria,
the ghost loomed large,
thereby, once again, bringing
forth the relevance of the premonition
of 1927 by Time editors,
“whether sufficiently prominent
people could be found in
subsequent years to warrant
the designation, MAN OF THE
YEAR”.
Therefore, the task to locate
that ‘sufficiently prominent individual’
who touched the lives
of Nigerians, whether for good
or for ill, in ways that were so
profound as to be voted PER-
SONALITY OF THE YEAR, confronted
the editors once again.
Interestingly, this had become
an annual ritual and, therefore,
would have been expected
to be more like a walk in the
park. Perish the thought, as
Dan
Agbese
of Newswatch had written.
The sessions of the debate to
choose the primus, the PER-
SONALITY OF THE YEAR, is
always enervating and comes
with tantalising nominations,
just as it also tolerates some
names of personalities that cannot,
by any stretch of the imagination,
be considered awe-inspiring.
The editors have always
been guided by a set of
values that signposts predictors
that engender success.
And talking about predictors
that correlate strongly with competence
at the top, Harvard
Business Review (November/
Continues on page 20
Aisha Buhari, President’s wife with
commitment to lift people out of poverty
By Ochereome Nnanna
Chairman, Editorial Board
LURKING in the shadow of
every Nigerian leader
(President or Head of State) has
been a wife who was officially
addressed as First Lady or Wife
of the President (or Head of
State). Before the coming of
Military President Ibrahim
Babangida, these ladies were
mostly in the background,
manning the “home front” and
occasionally accompanying
their husbands on official visits
to important events at home
and abroad.
It was during Babangida’s
regime (1985 to 1993) that our
First Ladies assumed more
visible, quasi-official roles. They
became more dominant within
the ruling circles. They started
wielding enormous influences,
not only through the
gravitational pull they exerted
on their husbands but also
through the “pet projects” they
initiated and prosecuted, mostly
with public funds which were
not accounted for.
With our return to democracy
in 1999, these women also
became integrated into their
husbands’ political structures
and unabashedly engaged in
the electioneering campaigns.
Hajiya Turai Yar’ Adua and
Dame Patience Jonathan, for
instance, wielded very strong
influences in their husbands’
governments. In fact, Turai
even was reported to have
coordinated the “cabal” of her
husband’s government when
President Umaru Yar’ Adua
became too sick to rule Nigeria,
to the point of allegedly
sidelining the then Vice
President, Dr. Goodluck
Jonathan, until her husband
died.
Hajiya Aisha Buhari, whose
husband prefers the title of
“Wife of the President” for her,
had initially preferred to hold
the home front while her
husband as the presidential
candidate of the APC worked
the campaign trail and the
soapbox with the rest of the
political gang. It was not until
January 13, 2015 that she
joined her husband’s campaign
during the Abeokuta rally after
Asiwaju Ahmed Tinubu, one of
the frontline leaders of the All
Progressives Congress (APC),
persuaded her to join the fray.
Since she made that decision to
come out, she has brought
something fresh, unique and
people-friendly to an office
whose former occupants were
contented with manipulating
the elite, government
machinery and political class for
personal aggrandisement.
Progressive
ideals
She has strongly established
herself as the number one
advocate for the people,
pricking the conscience of the
APC Federal Government and
fighting almost a lone battle to
ensure that the Party delivers its
campaign promises to the
people.
Shortly after assuming power,
some officials of the Party and
the Buhari government had
started distancing the President
from some of the APC’s
campaign promises. Indeed,
some APC senators in
November 2015, had disowned
the N5,000 the Party promised
to pay 25 million poor
Nigerians, but Aisha Buhari
would have none of that.
She directed her media office
to issue a public statement
calling on the APC not to
renege on its promises to the
people, especially the
payments to the most
vulnerable. Eventually, the
Federal Government put Mrs.
Maryam Uwais, one of Buhari’s
Special Advisers, in the charge
of the Social Intervention Fund
and voted N500 billion in the
2016 budget for the programme,
though the exact level of its
coverage and implementation
•Wife of the President, Aisha Buhari
remains something of a
mystery.
Aisha Buhari has stood firm
as a purist of the APC’s touted
progressive ideals. She is a
strong advocate of the anti-graft
war of the Buhari government.
It is no longer news that Aisha
has been locked in several
battles with the inner core of
the Buhari government, which
is made up of very close, highlyplaced
members of the Buhari
family, friends and old
associates. Widely referred to as
“the cabal”, elements of this
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