I guess the president wanted to say he and his aides would be prosecuted; not persecuted
Speaking before God and man at a thanksgiving and farewell service organised in his honour at the Cathedral Church of the Advent, Life Camp, Gwarinpa, Abuja, last Sunday, President Goodluck Jonathan stirred the hornet’s nest when he said that he and his ministers and other aides would face a lot of persecution after leaving office on May 29. “If you take certain decisions, it might be good for the generality of the people but it might affect people differently. So for ministers and aides who served with me, I sympathise with them, they will be persecuted. And they must be ready for that persecution.
“Quoting Tai Solarin, may your ways be rough. To my ministers, I wish you what I wish myself. They will have hard times; we will all have hard times. Our ways will be rough,” the president said at the service.
Many Nigerians have since then been wondering when the president became a prophet. But those who remember the tale of the professor and his driver would know that when leaves have stayed too long in soap, the leaves too become soap. President Jonathan, by now, we must realise has stayed too close to many prophets; so, he might have tapped the anointing for prophecy from some of his prophet-friends. But that is not where I am going today.
My point is that even if the president is now gifted with the power of prophecy, what he saw concerning himself and his aides could not have been ‘persecution’, but prosecution, after he might have stepped down from office. The last time I checked the meaning of ‘persecution’ in the dictionary, it defines it as ‘hostility and ill-treatment, especially because of race or political or religious beliefs; oppression”. For me, the operational words are “hostility”, “ill-treatment” and “oppression”. Do Nigerians have any cause to be hostile to President Jonathan and his team after handing over on May 29? The answer is ‘yes’. Do they have the right to ill-treat the president and his aides? Again, the answer is ‘yes’. Do they have to oppress the president and his team? I am afraid, again, the answer is ‘yes’.
If President Jonathan had said that he and his team would be prosecuted after leaving office, not many people would have expressed consternation, because that is what many of them deserve after messing up the lives of millions of Nigerians. So, the onus, as things stand, is on President Jonathan to explain why they should not be prosecuted. If not for the fact that we are in a democracy, we should have done what one of our Number Two citizens said in the military era when talking about some people involved in fraud. He said they (the government) would jail them (fraudsters). “We would jail them”, he said. When one of his aides reminded him that that was not due process and that people are first prosecuted and jailed, only if found guilty, the Number Two retorted, “yes, we would prosecute and jail them!” If the president wants to be told the truth, the fact is that in the court of public opinion, they are already guilty as (yet to be) charged. The average Nigerian would not mind if most of his officials are first persecuted before being prosecuted.
When President Jonathan won his first election ever and became president in 2011, the exchange rate was less than N170. Today, it goes for over N200 to a US dollar. Indeed, just how profligate his government can be is shown in his disbursal of funds in the Excess Crude Account (ECA). In February 2010, Dr Jonathan, then Acting President, gave the federal, states and local governments $2bn to share from an earlier balance of $6.2 billion, leaving about $4.1 billion. Again, in March 2010, he approved the disbursal of a further $1 billion from the account, leaving about $3.1. The move brought to $3 billion the total amount of Nigerian oil savings that Jonathan approved for disbursal to the country’s 36 states and government agencies in one month! When the government was accused of trying to pacify the states with the reckless disbursements, the government denied. But it would seem the states had seen the fiscal indiscipline at the federal level and therefore asked for their own share of the pie. None of these disbursements would have been painful if the government had spent the money judiciously, say on regenerative projects. Sadly, we lost a substantial amount of these earnings, aside the regular earnings that went into the Federation Account, to the government’s incompetence and massive corruption, which, rather than tackle headlong, the president regarded as ‘mere’ stealing.
Which sector of the economy is the government leaving healthier than it met it? The government keeps celebrating the fraudulent increase in the megawatts of electricity that are not producing light for Nigerians. The oil and gas sector is corruption-ridden, and that is why we cannot make refineries work here and resorted to importation of fuel, with the shameful record of the only crude oil producing nation that does that. Yet, our leaders are not ashamed. They were even at a time celebrating non-interruption in fuel supply for years.
The whole thing becomes the more nauseating when some of the people in the government begin to talk of the government’s achievements as if these are invisible as Abdul’s fabled shoes. For instance, it was in the midst of this demoralising milieu that Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the minister of finance and coordinating minister for the economy, went on a trip of self-glorification by telling Nigerians that the Jonathan administration would be leaving behind ‘solid economic legacies’. One wonders what the ‘solid economic legacies’ are and where they are. Do these ‘solid economic legacies’ include the 400,000 barrels of crude oil lost daily all through the Jonathan years, and before? Even at the rock bottom $50 per barrel price of crude oil in the international market, that translates to a lot daily. We can only imagine what we lost daily when oil was selling for well above $100 per barrel before the fall in prices late last year. Was there nothing the government could have done about this? Or, was it simply a case of the government looking the other way when the stealing was going on because its cronies were involved?
I guess the drastic fall in the price of crude oil when it did, and the worsening exchange rate are God’s own way of showing disapproval of the prodigality of the Jonathan government and the massive looting of the treasury that it permitted. So, God completed the mission by ensuring that the government was defeated in the presidential election because it would have been suicidal for the country to continue along the line of perdition that the government set it on. That was one of the reasons why the entire world was interested in seeing the back of the Jonathan government because we would simply overrun our neighbours should Nigeria implode; which was almost certain if the president had been reelected. The truth is, Dr Jonathan hasn’t the faintest idea of how to run a modern state, not to talk of wean a great country off its perpetually potential greatness to that actual greatness that it was destined to be.
And, instead of the people in the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) burying their heads in shame for the rudderless and corrupt manner their party steered the affairs of the country thus far, they are busy fishing for excuses on how and why they lost the election, an election they should not have had any chance of doing well in in the first place, but for the new lows that they sank the country.
The point is that President Jonathan’s government is worse than that of a former military governor in the country who said he met the state treasury empty, and left it empty. Dr Jonathan cannot say that. He met the treasury with some cash and left it not only empty but also with a lot of debt for his successor. It is just that politicians are incurable optimists. I do not envy the president-elect, General Muhammadu Buhari at all, knowing the gargantuan mess he is inheriting. Although President Jonathan had prayed for himself and his team, saying their roads be rough, I do not want to say ‘Amen’ to that. But our president who feels fulfilled after leaving us worse than he met us should understand that Nigerians may neither pray for him nor curse him and his team, but their mouths would not be idle either.
