Suddenly President Jonathan shows compassion to Chibok, Buni Yadi and Immigration job victims!
You want to be president or campaign for one? Take your cue from President Goodluck Jonathan, and you would probably end up as a study on how not to be both!
For a third of his first-term tenure, the president left undone things he should have done. But in the final lap, with its inevitable electioneering, he now goes on an over-drive — perhaps with manic determination to cover what he had not covered; or undo the harm his lethargy had done!
True, it is never late to right wrongs; after all, perhaps the greatest anti-Christ of all times, Saul, became Paul, one of the greatest propagators of the gospel of Christ. Still, the way President Jonathan goes about his lethargy-to-overdrive change oozes blind panic and seasoned cynicism.
This has driven not a few to ponder: so if there were no looming elections, this president would not rouse himself? And if all the buzz is election-driven, would he not most likely revert to his culpable lethargy, the instant he is gifted a second term?
These theatrics, when applied to intense citizen tragedies, requiring instant state empathy but met none, are well and truly disgusting. Take the twin tragedy of Chibok and Buni Yadi.
At Chibok on 14 April 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls (57 escaped, leaving 219), to intense global outrage. These pupils of Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State, were writing their Senior Secondary School Certificate (SSSE) examination. Despite the mass revulsion at seizing the girls, neither President Jonathan nor any of his top officials visited the tragic town to empathise with the community, despite the president’s bounden duty to provide security for all citizens.
Earlier on 25 February 2014 at the Federal Government College, Buni-Yadi, Yobe State, Boko Haram terrorists also slew, in their sleep, 29 pupils. After reportedly putting to the knife the poor and tender souls, the deranged savages set the school ablaze, thus charring the pupils’ remains! Unlike Borno State-owned Chibok, Buni-Yadi is a Federal Government-owned school. Yet, again, neither the president nor any of his top officials visited to commiserate.
But all that has changed with the advent of electioneering — to the reported deep fury of the victim communities. At Chibok, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, finance minister and coordinating minister for the Economy, visited to lay the foundation of a new school building, complete with security watch towers, state-of-the-art laboratories and other facilities. She pledged studying there would be a delight; and the new facility’s security gadgets would avert any future Chibok kidnap tragedy.
But would that bring back the girls? That appeared the big question from the Chibok victims’ association of parents. Could they then possibly embrace the new school in lieu of their missing girls, when, had the Jonathan government acted swiftly, most of the girls would probably have been saved? And had the Presidency been alive to its duty, none of the Chibok 276 would have come to harm’s way?
Only unbridled cynicism, driven by baseless electoral optimism, could have lured any government to such an insensitive strategy.
At Buni-Yadi, the community pointedly told the visiting Federal Government delegation that their so-called commiseration came a year too late; more so when the attacked school was a Federal Government facility.
The visits condemn President Jonathan: both for lack of empathy (no timely emotional support for the victims) and serious dereliction of duty (for preventing the attack); and culpable cunning: election-induced sympathy, which audaciously pitches a second term, even if the visit itself was symbol of the government’s incompetence at security, its most basic task. So, how can proven incompetence attract a renewed mandate?
The Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) recruitment deaths scandal is another turf on which the Jonathan government engages in a sickening gallery play.
The NIS tragedy was a hideous racket, which produced a grotesque result: no less than 16 dead, in an abortive search for elusive jobs. No less than 700, 000 youths, paying, according to Wikipedia, an application fee of N1,000 each, applied for and attended the consultant-handled job interview, and NIS para-military drilling process. But alas, only 4,000 spaces were available! The deaths resulted from stampede and crushes, at different stadia nationwide “interview venues”, on 15 March 2014.
After this soulless extortionist scandal, President Jonathan announced a cancellation, promised the youths their N1,000 application fee refund, automatic jobs for the wounded and cash compensation to the family of the dead. Then, all went quiet — until electioneering, March 14: almost exactly a year after the tragedy, and less than two weeks to the postponed presidential election!
The leading opposition, All Progressives Congress (APC) has dismissed the announced N5 million compensation to relatives of the dead, and fulfilled job promises to the injured, as “taking advantage of the NIS deaths” for cheap electoral reasons. That would appear a valid accusation, even if the president must redeem his pledge, made under particularly tragic circumstances.
The galling point, however, is the survival of Abba Moro, Interior minister, under whose charge the tragedy took place. Despite the outrage, Mr. Moro, a protégé of Senate President, David Mark, survived. But the sad trade-off that guaranteed Mr. Moro’s job would become apparent with the Mark-pushed Senate ministerial endorsement of Musiliu Obanikoro, even with his scandalous involvement in the Ekiti audio rigging tapes. As Jonathan stood by Mark on Moro, it would appear, Mark also stands by Jonathan on Koro!
Devious manoeuvring, to willy-nilly retain a job, at which a first-term performance screams incompetent, appears to drive the president.
This tactic would explain the unilateral 30 per cent salary cut for the president and his federal executive (no crime; but it cannot be done without the input of the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission), the halving of electricity tariff (which should be the forte of the regulators, Nigeria Electricity Regulatory Commission, and not an executive-induced fiat) and the bunching together of the National Youth Service Corps three-year honours list (a desperate grab at approval and legitimacy, on the eve of a crucial election).
President Jonathan appears on the roll: a festival of cant, in the final push to the election. It is both cheap and un-presidential.
