A team of 94 academics, researchers and experts have combined to produce an authoritative, comprehensive and definitive history of the Buhari administration in a 5-volume compendium cutting across various sectors of governance and development in Nigeria in the last eight years.
Titled Muhammadu Buhari: The Nigerian Legacy (2015-2023), the compendium 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.
The work is the result of many months of independent research and critical engagements with the activities and achievements of the Buhari administration. It is an initiative of May Publishing Limited, and, according to the Project Director/Editor, Dr. Udu Yakubu, it is “neither a commissioned, nor a government-solicited, nor a government-censored work”.
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.
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”, Yakubu said, adding. “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”.
The historical compendium is a mine of information that presents with critical depth the true story of the administration’s performance in public service.
“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 added.
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. 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.”
“Without any shred of immodesty, this work presents the definitive history of the eight years of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration. We make bold to state that there is nothing else like this compendium in the present.
“The publication is unprecedented in the history of any administration in Nigeria, especially in terms of its scope, editorial independence, depth of critical engagement, elaborate authorial authority, and scholarship,” Dr Yakubu had stated. It is a fact that can only be altered by some future works.
The book will be released in the fourth quarter of this year. Its website is already open and can be accessed at www.thebuharilegacy.com for more insights into the compendium.
