The Goodluck Jonathan administration is peopled by half-empty grandiloquent popinjays. That is Hardball’s well-considered opinion and you could quote that freely. Now let us proceed to uphold our proposition. First the leading lights of the regime are people who have sojourned abroad. They were shipped home with the high expectation that they were some kind of technocrats who had answers to at least some, if not all the developmental pains bedeviling a fledgling country like Nigeria. But as it has turned out, or as it has been revealed, they really don’t grasp it. In fact they are miles away from the reality of Nigeria’s situation.
Sometimes Hardball cannot help but have sympathy for them. They really cannot help themselves. They have their heads permanently screwed to an angle so that they are forever looking up towards the ceiling or the West if you prefer; (if only they are looking up to heaven). In other words, they are stiff-necked if you catch Hardball’s drift. They fancy themselves belonging to some rarefied Western clubs. They are jet-set – meaning that they are more airborne than on Nigeria’s humble roads. They love the luxury hotels of New York and Washington and London more than the seedy terra-firma of Abuja and Lagos. They cherish the company of some white-skin top-notch who humour them with some sexed-up ratings; some wangled ‘global’ awards and who convince them that they are the miracles out of Africa.
But they are only adept at the current global economic slangs and jargons. At every turn they speak their hocus-pocus with so much relish and bravura. When we muster enough courage to ask questions or point at blinding incongruities littering our landscape, they browbeat us with more economic arcana and will only stop short at calling us illiterate. Such is our predicament in the last decade or so that we have had a quake of a motion yet we remain in situ.
They know they have failed us woefully, they can see the house crumbling all around them yet they dig in stubbornly – as stubborn as that snout-mouthed creature often dead to its mucky forays. There is nothing doing but they live in abject denial of glaring facts, concocting fantabulous tales of ‘transformation’. But facts and reality keep haunting us all. For instance, no new jobs are being created; in fact the job space shrinks resulting in deathly scramble for a few dozen openings in our old colonial bureaucracy.
In a country of over 150 million people, not one million can boast of clean, potable water. Cholera still ravages many parts of the country; leprosy rages, diabetes, kidney failure and even polio. All the diseases that have been eradicated in other climes seem to have found solace here. And what does the Ministry of Health do for instance: serial summitry as well at venues far removed from our diseased environments. Public awareness is a major weapon against diseases but not so in Nigeria. Pupils still sit on bare floor to study. All basic things of life elude us.
Yet we would burn N4 billion in three days hosting ‘the world’ in a locked down ghost city. They gloat about pledges in million dollars as if we are a beggarly nation. It’s eerie isn’t it? In fact it’s so spooky Hardball wagers we must be in a ghost land.
