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Mr Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Party (NDC), was a guest of Seun Okinbaloye on Channels TV last week. He spoke on a wide range of topics as the race for Aso Rock in 2027 gathers energy and momentum. The aspect that jumped at me was the power crisis. While vowing to address the problem if elected president, Obi said uninterrupted power supply is not possible in four years. This hit me in two ways. The first was his seeming admission that there are no quick fixes to Nigeria’s problems, even though that is not what voters want to hear. The second is the intractability in fixing the power sector since we started experiencing blackouts in the mid-1970s.
I am generally an optimist — a “Naija-optimist”, if you will — but I am also intelligent enough to understand that the country is troubled on every side and we are not going to get out of the woods in a jiffy. We left too many reforms and adjustments too late. For too long, we lacked focus. We kept taking one step forward and two steps backward for decades, particularly since this democratic order berthed in 1999. Nigeria is not irredeemable but even with the best of presidents and the best of intentions, we need to manage our expectations of a magical turnaround. It will take more than one president and one term to turn Nigeria around. Unpopular opinion but that is the naked reality.
