Cham Faliya Sharon
“….. He became a president and ran it with a cabal of antediluvian ideas…. On the economy, he stood guard over a government that had no way to generate money except by printing and borrowing from China, among others…..
“He left the finances in chaos and the nation’s morale was at the nadir. In one word, Buhari should have saved the economy from the Jonathan era where the nation was in dire straits. Rather, he worsened the situation, and created an economy that had to be saved from itself.
“Buhari, in the end, turned out to be a man who looked after one man: Muhammadu Buhari….. It has turned out that Buhari loved himself too much to love Nigeria enough. He loved his faith too much to open his heart out of his prejudices.
“He was loved by both cow and man. He did less for man than cow, but cows never had a way of gratitude known to man, except men like him, perhaps.
“He is a testament to the futility of the crowd as a picture of wisdom. That is why we should be wary of man who, without clear vision, capture the imagination of the throng……”
The words above are excerpts from an essay written by one Sam Omatseye, the chairman of the Editorial Board of THE NATION newspaper (Tinubu’s newspaper), who writes a back page column for the newspaper every Monday. These excerpts are from his column of Monday, July 14, 2025, titled ‘Anticlimax’, which appears to have been written just a few hours after the death of former President Muhammadu Buhari or he may have even written and kept it well before the death of the man, especially seeing how it was published even before millions of Nigerians got to learn of the demise of the former President, and even before the body was brought into the country for its burial.
The point is, Sam Omatseye is one of Tinubu’s right hand men, and the fact that he couldn’t even wait for Buhari’s dead body to become cold or to be even buried before adding his sardonic voice to the pitch of President Tinubu’s cold, concerted effort of blaming and ridiculing former President Muhammadu Buhari for the gargantuan failures and hardships he (Tinubu) has unleashed on Nigerians since the very first day he was sworn in as President on the 29th of May 2023, speaks volumes about the hypocrisy Tinubu displayed in his purported honour and last respects to the body of the late former President in Daura and Abuja.
Of course, lots of people in this country know how Tinubu recruited imps and pseudo-intellectuals like Shehu Sani, Reno Omokri, and all the other shadowy characters in his regime to be insulting and blaming Buhari for the brainlessness and sheer wickedness with which he (Tinubu) ruined the robust economy and solid democratic structures that he inherited on the 29th of May 2023, and the recruits are not limited to those fickle-minded clowns; the recruitment extends to some feckless characters in the National Assembly as well as in some pay-as-you-go filth tanks masquerading as think tanks, which, therefore, bears no surprise that Sam Omatseye, who is a mere staff on his payroll, will be playing his own part in this sordid dance of lies and shamelessness.
While they openly exploited Buhari’s quiet nature and lied against him without response from him when he was alive, Sam Omatseye became more tempted, perhaps in collusion with his own employer, to continue their hobby of lies and ridicule, except that this time, they overdid themselves by not even waiting for the man whom they shocked to death with their blatant treachery and betrayal to be buried before they continued with their macabre dance of fools, which is evidently meant to distract the people from their self-inflicted failure in governance. What is even more galling, and which equally depicts their sense of depravity, ill conscience, ill-will, moral bankruptcy, and compulsive inclination towards dishonesty, was how Omatseye could look his readers in the eye and lie that Buhari did more for cows than man! Such insolence!
Unless if Omatseye is schizophrenic and he thinks that the railways; the seaports; the remodelled airports; the historically unmatched number of roads; the bridges; the new universities; the new polytechnics; the new hospitals; the hydroelectric dams; the agricultural dams; the irrigation projects; the unprecedented number of TETFund projects in our universities, polytechnics and colleges of education; the unprecedented number of Federal Housing Projects in all the states and the FCT; the rural electrification projects; the NLNG Train 7 project; the historic and economically transformative Ajaokuta – Kaduna – Kano (AKK) gas pipeline project; the 65 private refineries licences, which includes the Dangote Refinery in Lagos and the BUA Refinery now being built in Akwa Ibom State; the Modular Refineris in Edo, Delta and Imo states; the history-making construction of the NDDC Secretariat in Port Harcourt after more than 30 years; the equally historic construction of the 17-storey headquarters of the Nigeria Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) in Bayelsa State, which has been adjudged as the tallest building in the South/South and Southeast regions of the country; the Siemens Energy AG deal, which has supplied – and is still supplying – new Mega Transformers and other large-scale electrical equipment that are being installed in power stations across the country, were done by President Muhammadu Buhari for cows in Nigeria instead of human beings in Nigeria. Then how could anyone assess Sam Omatseye’s state of mind other than by accurately describing him as schizophrenic when he claimed that cows were better served than man during the Buhari administration in the light of these achievements?
But then, if in his state of schizophrenia he thinks that all those achievements – and many more – were done by the late President for cows, shouldn’t that schizophrenic mind of his make him see himself as a cow and then rejoice heartily that cows like him have been respectfully considered worthy of great amenities that are capable of positively transforming the socioeconomic status of cows instead of wasting precious time bellyaching that human beings, instead of cows, have been neglected to live like pigs in pigsties? If rational beings do regard cows as dull and dumb, and cannot afford the faculties to express gratitude, shouldn’t Sam Omatseye at least try to break that jinx and express even very little gratitude since he appears to be a rare cow that can read and write, or is there simply no distinction between dull and dumb cows and the cows that can read and write essays on newspapers?
In trying to conflate Tinubu with Buhari, Sam Omatseye shamelessly lied that “Buhari turned out to be a man who looked only after himself, and that he loved himself too much to love Nigeria enough”, and you can’t help wondering how it is that Omatseye saw Buhari instead of Tinubu buying very luxurious presidential jets, yachts and armoured escalades in 2024, right in the midst of hunger-protests across the country, occasioned by the unconscionable and needless removal of subsidy on petroleum products and the floatation of the Naira by Tinubu, which caused the prices of everything to jump up by up to 1000% in many cases, or how he thought it was Buhari that he saw instead of Tinubu awarding a dubious contract of 15 trillion Naira for a mere 700km road to his family without appropriation by the National Assembly and without any scintilla of due process!
Besides, if Buhari loved himself too much to love Nigeria enough, as mischievously claimed by Omatseye, then how was it that the places from where he started his key infrastructural projects were all from southern Nigeria instead of the North from where he hailed from? Think of the Second Niger Bridge, the Lagos – Ibadan railway project, the Lagos – Ibadan Expressway, the Enugu – Port Harcourt Expressway, the 326km Itakpe – Ajaokuta – Warri Railway project, the Bonny – Bodo Road and bridges, and many other landmark projects. And if he were a selfish man or a regional bigot like the crackpots and pseudo-intellectuals that dominate the Lagos/Ibadan media establishments often portrayed him, would he have bothered to deploy his administration into the Public Private Partnership (PPP) deal that built the Lekki Deep Seaport or would he have ordered the Central Bank under the leadership of Mr. Godwin Emefiele to finance the Lagos Blue Rail Line project and revamp the National Theatre in Lagos into a world-class entertainment and tourist facility?
And in saying “Buhari left the [country’s] finances in chaos”, you definitely get another confirmation that Sam Omatseye is schizophrenic, otherwise, how could he confuse Buhari who held the Naira at a stable rate of N430 to one dollar for 7 straight years with Bola Ahmed Tinubu who took the Naira from that N430 rate to a dollar straight to nearly N2,000 in less than one year! Perhaps, Sam Omatseye isn’t aware of the truthful joke circulating on social media lately, that it took Nigeria 50 years for the Naira to climb to N430 to one dollar, but it took Tinubu just one year to make one dollar to exchange for N1,700. That’s an unbeatable record for Tinubu and Sam Omatseye, isn’t it? So, under who then is Nigeria’s finances in chaos when Tinubu has broken all records of financial volatility and economic uncertainty, without even mentioning the brazen corruption going on under his watch?
And for the lie that Buhari “stood guard over a government that had no way to generate money except by printing and borrowing from China, among others”, I wouldn’t blame Sam Omatseye if his brain has become short-circuited by the pathogens of schizophrenia worrying him, such that he has quickly and easily forgotten that it was his boss, Bola Ahmed Tinubu that advised President Muhammadu Buhari on the 29th of March 2020 to suspend the collection of Value Added Tax (VAT) and print more Naira notes, and then fill the pockets of Nigerians with them as a remedy to the country’s economic challenges. Imagine such ridiculous economic advice coming from those who often brag about being more educated than others, which always forms the basis for their usually noisy, hypocritical and uninformed criticisms of the country’s leaders that don’t hail from their part of the world!
Of course, Buhari didn’t follow that illogical and economically catastrophic advice. But since Tinubu is now the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and since he has managed to ruin the country’s economy in a very short time and in much worse ways than anyone has ever done in our history, who knows, it is possible that his regime is actually practising what he advised Buhari to do five years ago, to print more money without commensurate economic activities to earn it. And because Omatseye now has symptoms of a hollow brain, caused probably by the catastrophic failure of his boss, Tinubu, to deliver on any single promise, in addition to the pathogens of schizophrenia that are biting him, he forgot that in just two years, Tinubu has borrowed twice as much money as Buhari has borrowed in all of his eights years as President, and to Buhari’s credit, there’s a general consensus that his loans were tied to infrastructural projects, which Nigerians could see everywhere. But what of Tinubu’s borrowings that exceed those of his predecessors? Where are the projects for his borrowings, and more importantly, where are the savings made from the removal of subsidy on petroleum products, which was done on the premise that the country wouldn’t borrow any funds again? Where are the revenues from our oil sales, at least, the portions belonging to the federal government? Where are our non-oil revenues generated by the Federal Inland Revenue Service, the Customs Service, and the rest?
When the intensity of schizophrenia in Omatseye’s brain got turned up, he bawled that “Buhari should have saved the economy from the Jonathan era where the nation was in dire straits. Rather, he worsened the situation, and created an economy that had to be saved from itself.” But, of course, Buhari did save the economy from the dire straits of the Jonathan era, or, if not for the damaging effects of schizophrenia, how did Omatseye forget that one of the first things President Muhammadu Buhari did on assumption of office at the end of May 2015 was the financial bailouts he gave to all the states to pay their workers of which about 27 of the states were owing workers’ wages ranging from 7 to 14 months? Curiously, the wage-debts were accumulated when the country was selling oil at an average price of $100 per barrel, yet at the time Buhari bailed them out, oil was around $20 per barrel.
And that was not all. In order to further reflate the economy, President Muhammadu Buhari embarked on payment of the entitlements of the disengaged workers of defunct public corporations like NITEL, M-TEL, NEPA, the Nigeria Airways and others. Those were federal government companies that collapsed decades ago, and their workers were left high and dry without any compensation packages, but Buhari took care of it after decades of hopelessness and despair in the lives of the disengaged workers. Even our military veterans who were turned into pitiable humans on the streets of Abuja, begging and sleeping under the city’s bridges because of nonpayment of their entitlements were not left out from Buhari’s sweeping reforms in the country’s pensions system. The biggest of all was the payment of Biafran soldiers who fought against the unity of this country! Remind me again what they use to call or how they use to describe Muhammadu Buhari in certain parts of Nigeria!
After that, President Muhammadu Buhari proceeded to lay a very solid economic foundation for this country by creating and sustaining policies that will stimulate and engender local production of food items and industrial goods, especially those which Nigeria has the comparative advantage of producing in order to check capital flight, expand local opportunities for access to cash and to also boost our Foreign Reserves. The policies were a huge success because, in no time, the 8 rice mills that Buhari met on ground in the whole country grew to 91 when he was leaving office on the 29th of May 2023, and the 4 fertilizer blending plants which he also met on ground in May 2015 grew to more than 70 when he was leaving office.
Those were just a snapshot of the growth of several productive businesses and entrepreneurships that flourished under the leadership of President Muhammadu Buhari due to his economic policies that focused on local production of what we can conveniently produce instead of importation of everything, and which gave a sense of economic freedom and pride to our farmers, and for the first time in a long while in this country’s history, our farmers began smiling to the bank, and which also meant that our agro-allied industries were creating new jobs and business opportunities for our citizens.
And as a mark of the success of the economic policies of the Buhari administration, Nigeria became Africa’s top producer and exporter of rice and regained her place as the biggest economy on the continent. It surprised probably only a few people when in March 2018, the government of Thailand was reported to have complained that President Muhammadu Buhari has weakened their country’s rice industry because, instead of being a net importer of rice, of which Thailand was one of the main beneficiaries of our importation bazaar, Nigeria became a leading producer and exporter as well. So, on which planet is Sam Omatseye living in that he didn’t even know the strides Buhari has made in weaning the country from the Jonathan era dire straits that he was complaining about?
The other examples I laid out earlier, especially in the areas of infrastructure and energy, were also part of the successful economic reconfiguration Buhari did for the country. He did all of that with minimal loans even while subsidizing petroleum products and electricity for Nigerians, which renders an excellent testament to his brilliance, managerial prowess, and sense of prudence in both economic and political management. With such a solid foundation, any rational leader will have just simply sustained it, and the results would have been speaking lower costs for Nigerians by now. But what do we have? Instead of sustaining and continuing with those policies that have proven to be working successfully, the Tinubu mob came and threw wrenches into the whole thing, all because of their overrated and overhyped sense of managerial acumen, which we now know to be zero. And when their zero marks on their report card began showing up, they began exhibiting their customary character of treachery and dishonesty by blaming their failures and buffonery on Buhari even to the point of his death!
Finally, if we are to be a little charitable to say Sam Omatseye is not a cow, at least nothing should dissuade us from describing him as either a nitwit or a dimwit or a moron or even all of that. Nothing establishes this fact more than his very overt attempt to ridicule Buhari’s teeming supporters as a crowd without wisdom when he said that Buhari “is a testament to the futility of the crowd as a picture of wisdom. That is why we should be wary of man who, without clear vision, captures the imagination of the throng……” In fact, let us even be uncharitable and describe Sam Omatseye as a cow, because nothing can do justice to his utter disdain for wisdom, passion, integrity and patriotism than by properly addressing him as a cow who has no sense of sobriety and propriety, and neither does he even have any sense of admiration for facts, zeal, passion, and group wisdom from those who don’t look like him or think like him.
Of course, how else could you address a man who has contempt for the crowd that gave Nigeria its best President who gave the country all the achievements highlighted in this piece, with many more such achievements even unmentioned in the same piece due to time and space? If not for the Buhari crowd, everything mentioned here would have remained nonexistent, and Sam Omatseye may have had to continue watching what trains look like in foreign movies. To break it in simple terms, there wouldn’t have been the Second Niger Bridge and Nigeria’s Navy would have also remained without a single warship as it was prior to May 29, 2015. And to me personally, I would have continued to spend three and half hours from Gombe to my hometown instead of the one hour we now spend.
And while it is true that there are crowds without wisdom, the fact that crowds without wisdom do exist is an eloquent evidence itself that crowds with wisdom do also exist. It is so easy to trash out this argument by simply acknowledging the existence of the anti-Buhari crowd, which if they have had their way in 2015 and 2019, the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) would have continued to remain as a multibillion Naira drainpipe without something as basic as a corporate headquarters. Who knows, perhaps we would have also continued to have to be scanned for explosive devices before entering our places of worship or offices or markets or schools. And I also sincerely wonder what Sam Omatseye will be writing now in his Mondays column if he weren’t a staff of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, especially in the light of Tinubu’s gargantuan failures as a leader who has failed to live beyond the primitive impulses of clannishness and his alarming zeal and zest to catapult Nigeria back to the antediluvian era, which Omatseye is frantically trying to attribute to our blessed Muhammadu Buhari!
May the soul of President Muhammadu Buhari continue to rest in peace. Amen.