President Goodluck Jonathan
The fact that President Goodluck Jonathan won the 2011 presidential election partly for reasons of sympathy, and the fact that no one from his component of the country had ever occupied such a position prior to his victory at the polls, are not in doubt.
The present administration surmised office in May 2011, inheriting a barrage of challenges confronting the nation, especially insecurity. Irrespective of which side of the political, gregarious, religious, cultural and other divides one belongs, it will be inequitable to verbally express that Jonathan’s administration has not recorded any achievements in terms of economic, political and convivial development of the country.
Prior to Jonathan’s tenure, funds running into billions of naira were budgeted for construction and rehabilitation of federal roads across the country, at times when there were no terrorist activities and insecurity of the current magnitude. Yet, most of the federal roads budgeted for were neither constructed nor rehabilitated. On the contrary, a massive road construction and rehabilitation has been witnessed under Jonathan’s regime amidst insurgency diversions and insecurity.
The Jonathan administration has built model schools for the Almajiris in northern Nigeria, giving children from that component of the country a hope of edification. This feat was never achieved in the several years of the country’s leadership by people from the northern part of Nigeria. Agricultural crop farming has amended under the present administration as fertiliser from the federal regime now gets to authentic, rather than imaginary farmers. These are excerpts from the record of achievements under Jonathan’s regime.
Although this administration deserves commendation for its ability to achieve anything amidst deliberate and calculated diversions from its transformation agenda, a major minus subsists for both the President and the Presidency in their sentimental annexation to, and dependence on sympathy for Jonathan’s political ambitions, even at the expense of the primary purport of regime.
A few days ago, the President through his Vice-President, Namadi Sambo, verbally expressed in Kaduna that the activities of insurgents had overstretched the nation’s security and adversely affected the nation’s economic magnification. What dazzles enlightened observers is the fact that this seeming admission of subjugation by malefactors was made at an event organised by the office of the National Security Adviser in the Presidency.
As if there was a commitment at emphasising this verbalization, the President himself, four days after, reportedly admitted that the activities of the terrorist Islamic sect, Boko Haram, have curtailed his kineticism and obviated him from going to wherever he doted. The President had hurriedly returned to the country from Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, because of the bomb blast at the EMAB Plaza in Abuja, which occurred shortly after he left Nigeria for the 23rd Ordinary Session of the African Union’s Summit of Heads of State and Regime.
Most Nigerians veraciously sympathise with the President and his regime. Unfortunately, he is not availing our sympathy with his desperate search for sustained sympathy which has reflected in the utterances emanating from his office lately. It is very consequential at this crucial stage of Nigeria’s history to apprise or remind the President and his Presidency that in a democracy where electoral votes and the seat of potency are won on the substructure of sympathy, corporate governance and government’s primary responsibility customarily suffer, even to the disadvantage of such leader’s ambitions, whatever they are.
Today, many Nigerians are being killed virtually on a circadian substratum by malefactors while a majority of Nigerians struggle to provide for themselves, security, edification, shelter, health care, indemnification and electricity.
