A team of 94 academics, researchers and experts have partnered to produce an authoritative, comprehensive and definitive history of President Muhammadu Buhari’s eight- year administration in a five volume compendium cutting across governance and development sectors.
Udu Yakubu, the projector director and editor told BusinessDay that the book will be released in the fourth quarter of 2023, precisely in October, and that it is neither a commissioned nor a government-solicited work.
“It is “neither a commissioned, nor government-solicited, nor a government-censored work,” he said.
Yakubu reiterated that the volumes are pitched against and far above mere political talks coloured by populism, individual, party or sectarian interests, street sentiments and social media activism and propaganda.
He maintained that they deal with cold, hard empirical facts and figures in engaging the various policies, programmes and actions of the administration, and the impact that they had in Nigeria’s development over the last eight years.
“Contributors were expected to be clinical in their approach and to strive to achieve fairness, contextual awareness, and critical balance in their analyses.
“Through this book, we have engaged and articulated the administration’s history and relevance, and aligned these around its services, strategies, achievements, shortcomings, challenges, and on-going programmes and projects, mostly in contexts of ensuring political and economic system stability and advancement,” Yakubu said.
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The compendium titled; “Muhammadu Buhari: The Nigerian Legacy (2015-2023)”, has 125 chapters that carefully and systematically comb through the various fields of public experience in the country to succinctly capture the policies, programmes, projects, challenges, achievements and shortcomings of the erstwhile administration.
The volumes encapsulate a very broad range of the Buhari legacy in Nigerian history. They constitute the administration’s scorecard as documented by independent experts and scholars outside government.
Yakubu explained that the work, an initiative of May Publishing Limited, is the result of many months of independent research and critical engagements with the activities and achievements of the Buhari administration.
“The publication is so much about the making and workings of governance in the nation in the last eight years as it is about the comprehensive history of Nigeria’s socio-political and economic development within the period,” he noted.
In addition, he said that the historical compendium is a mine of information that presents with critical depth the true story of the administration’s performance in public service.
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Each volume of the compendium focuses on specific aspects of the administration’s activities and achievements in the last eight years. Volume One is on the president’s journey to power.
Volume Two explores the management and development of the economy, while Volume Three engages various aspects of national security and human development.
Volume Four examines the development of industry, trade and the various elements of public infrastructure.
Volume Five discusses anti-corruption, the business of government, politics and governance, constitutional political restructuring, public institutions in governance, and Nigeria’s advancement in the international arena.
The five volumes “tell the story of the Buhari administration in critically varied ways, and invite the reader to engage the ensuing narratives with an open and fair mind.
The narratives are historically foregrounded, enabling the reader to see the administration in the broader timeframes of what had been, and the changes that had come into being.
