28th May, 2012
President Jonathan rode to office on the back of two heart-winning campaign slogans: ‘a breath of fresh air’ and ‘a transformation agenda’. Although he didn’t outline specific agenda, he told Nigerians that his government, an offshoot of the Umaru Yar’Adua presidency, would not be ‘same of the same’, or one that will conduct ‘business as usual’. His niche was that he was going to make a change. Not a simple change, he said, but a superlative change. He promised a transformation, which the dictionaries describe as a ‘marked or radical change’, usually for the better. And he said he would, like Usain Bolt, hit the ground running, once he got into office.
Therefore, assessing Jonathan, a year after, presents a simple task to us, the assessors. The questions to ask are: How far has he fulfilled his promise to effect change in our country? How far has he enlivened it with fresh air? How far has his transformation agenda gone?
Unless they live in Afghanistan, even Jonathan’s ardent supporters will agree with his legion of critics that nothing much has changed in our country in the last 365 days.
Electricity supply has not improved; sometimes it sinks to the pre-1999 level, despite the huge billion dollar investments. The roads are still terrible in many parts of the country. The cost of living gets more expensive daily. The indicator that should get the Jonathan presidency really worried was the statistics of the deteriorating poverty in our country, amidst rising oil income, released by the National Bureau of Statistics. Under Jonathan presidency, the bureau reported, 70 per cent of Nigerians now earn less than a dollar a day, with the greatest pauperisation recorded up north.
In fact, there is a palpable impression that our country has sunk deeper into the morass, in the last year. Many Nigerians are horrified that the candidate, who promised a transformation agenda, has failed to scale the first test of transformation. As the driver of transformation, the President ought to lead by actions and words that will rouse and inspire his people for change.
This has been lacking, no matter all the mutterings of the word around the corridors of power. It is not surprising that in all the media, especially the social media, where Nigerians make open commentaries about their country and the political leaders, their view of the President in the past year has not been complimentary. Impatient and hungry for change, Nigerians want their president to take them to Eldorado post-haste, but the President has perplexed them with his wobbly style, sometimes projecting the image that he is not in control or has lost control.
Of all the defining issues of the Jonathan presidency, the Boko Haram insurgency clearly stands out. The unrelenting bombings, the killings, the maiming in the northern part of Nigeria were unprecedented since the Civil War. The bombings initially elicited public sympathy for the government, the people believing the propaganda that disaffected politicians were at work. But the support soon turned into resentment as one bomb after another exploded with many casualties. Public anger was further exacerbated with the almost repetitive vacuous statements from Aso Rock, urging variously for calm, announcing repeatedly like a broken record, ‘we are on top of the situation’, ‘we are on the trail of the bombers’. To the people, Aso Rock and the President became ‘predictably irritating’.
The untamed corruption in our country, the unimaginable and unthinkable levels of treasury looting and government’s seeming reluctance to apply the law also eroded public confidence in the Jonathan administration. Worse, impunity that is the constitutional preserve of the state governors and the President has become a pan-Nigeria right: all looters and even murderers now dare the state and its institutions. And the rule of law, the fundamental law of sane societies, has gone to the dogs. Its erosion is best illustrated by the sudden removal of the Appeal Court President, in whose court the President had a case pending and the foot-dragging of the President to reinstate the judge, even after getting a valid recommendation to do so.
On the economic front, the removal of the so-called subsidy on petrol price appeared to be the final act that dislocated the love bond between Jonathan and the people. It earned the President in a week of protests, the unbridled abuse and scorn of compatriots and has led to what perceptive critics feared would happen, a further worsening of the cost of living in our country.
The hatred lingers such that were a referendum called today, Jonathan would be so overwhelmingly rejected that he would have no other option than to pack and return to Otueke, to mull over ‘where he got it wrong’.
In the last one year, the President got it wrong in several areas: starting his presidency with a move to change the constitution to allow for a single tenure of six years. The suggestion raised suspicions about Jonathan’s agenda. It was a bad one, a confidence breach between the new president and the people, a turning point, wherefrom, he, steadily, began to lose public trust.
It was not all bad news in the last year. Despite the pervading gloom, the Jonathan government earned public plaudits over its position on the shabby treatment meted out to Nigerian travelers to South Africa by the government of South Africa. The Nigerian government responded in kind, expelling some South Africans coming to Nigeria and threatening to take over some investments in our country.
The Jonathan government is also working hard to retune the economy away from oil, into agriculture. His religious campaign that we all forget our good old wheat bread for ‘gari bread’ is getting converts, right from Aso Rock, where gari bread is now a staple. So many figures are being bandied about what our country stands to reap from agriculture, from savings from imports, the export of surplus and the jobs that will be created. But because we have heard such rhetoric before, even from the number one farmer, Olusegun Obasanjo, who ran our nation before Jonathan, because our nation has remained a big importer of food, we cannot underscore the efforts yet. We need to wait for their enduring fruits, as the agriculture campaign is still work in progress.
—Bayo Onanuga