Tag: shoes

No one can forget President Goodluck Jonathan’s shoe speech of seduction. We remember it not for its rhetorical distinction. Jonathan has not delivered any speech that stuns except for playing games with facts. But the shoe speech distinguished itself by its bare bones fact, its evocative familiarity. He said he did not have shoes as a little boy and walked barefoot to school.

It was a seduction speech because he tapped the experience of many who grew up in his days, whether in the Niger Delta, in the Southeast, in the Southwest or all parts of the North. In the 1970’s in Warri, we called it “tearing ten toes.”

Most people did not buy shoes. They could not afford it, and it did not seem then like a big deal if you did not have shoes because many did not. That was the point President Jonathan did not make. He was not alone without shoes. He grew up in a generation of shoeless school goers. He was not an isolated poor. We all had that foot deficiency with blisters, petrified soles and toes, limping over wounds coming and going.

He delivered the speech when he declared he wanted to run for president after he survived the plots and ululations of the so-called cabal or kitchen cabinet. Those were the men and woman who would not give him the right to which providence and the law entitled him, and he broke a law on his own called zoning in his party in order to declare his “I did not have a shoe” speech. It was perhaps the most resonant appeal in all speeches declaring a presidential ambition in Nigerian history. I might also say it was the most opportunistic.

But that is not the point today. It is because President Jonathan has spent one hundred days in office and he seemed to bask in false glory in an organised media chat in which he failed to elevate his thoughts. He was incapable of generating an enthusiasm among Nigerians about whether he had a direction. Editors found it hard to cast any good headline because in the two-hour exposure he did not make any meaningful exposition. Not on security, not on the federal question or power or infrastructure development or on the vexing bugbear of education did he utter any succinct line of policy. As a PHD, he did not sound coherent. As a former teacher he did not inspire one to take notes. As a past technocrat, he showed no sign of the policy wonk.

Yet, the nation is in dire pains. Poverty worsens by the hour, and all the challenges we face in the areas of Boko Haram eruptions, the failure of power, the exodus of businesses, the rising illiteracy levels, all show how poverty continues to grow like an ominous monster feeding fat in the sewer.

In all of these, I don’t think he knows the significance of his shoe speech. It was not just an emotive moment. It was a challenge, a potentially inspirational moment. It was a pact with all those who live at the level he lived in the shoeless era. He vowed – if he did not realise it on that incandescent stage that Abuja afternoon – to ensure that those who could not afford shoes in 2011 should be able to afford them by the time he is done in office.

It was a very simple pledge. It was an IOU. It is time to start paying up. But from how he has performed since he took over as a substantive president- though he has been president for over a year now- I see no signal of progress. No one is asking him to set up a shoe factory. That will not cut it. And no one is asking him to go on a charity spree, buy shoes in their millions and distribute them to the poor of subaltern Nigerian or even in the city.

That will be phony. In fact Nigerians have become so adept at second-hand shoes that even the very poor afford threadbare varieties of footwear. What Jonathan should focus on now is to create conditions that will make it easy for the poor to afford shoes. It sounds simplistic. But that is the power he needs to tap for a successful presidency.

Before a boy of school age whose parents cannot afford shoes can afford them, certain things have to happen. The parents have to be able to have enough money, and not just enough to feed, but also for shelter, for school fees, and other essentials. Shoes were seen as luxuries in those days. You had to afford the basics and later go to the level of footwear. Footwear was at the bottom of the list. Shoes are still a luxury today. For the parents to get money, they have to have jobs and jobs do not spring from lumbering economies.

What this means is that Jonathan should make it possible for the poor to rise out of their present state of misery. But for a presidency that has not narrowed its objectives and set a coherent strategy for implementation, the story of all those with shoeless lifestyles remain endangered.

In his first duty as president, which is security, he has proved out of sync. Jos has become a cauldron of weekly and sometimes daily tragedies. In the approach to the Boko Haram eruptions, he is engaging in counterterrorism without intelligence. Nobody wages a war without intelligence. If knowledge is power, how can you fight without knowledge? This is a typical Nigerian paradox.

How can businesses flourish, or education standards rise and infrastructure develop in the absence of security? That is what Nigeria is today.

This is not the time to allow himself to dither. This is not the time to be distracted by the issue of a six-year term. He made it clear it was not six years he was proposing but seven. He said Nigerians presumed he was going to benefit from it. He did not make any categorical statement about whether he was going to exploit it. Not that any such categorical word was going to mean anything. Zoning is an example.

Agriculture is still behind, and Nigerians live on less than a dollar a day. Yet the value of the Naira to the dollar has dropped about N15 in only three months. The banks do not show the real values. Go to the Bureaus de change to find out the truth. The Nigerian is devaluated like our currency and that does not presage good things for those without shoes.

The worse the situation, the more likely it will be for those with shoeless boys and girls to afford shoes. The president ought to take this seriously. How marvelous it would be though if the president does well and at the end of four years, we are able to pick those whose lots have so improved that they can afford shoes for their children to go to school.

If not, that rhetoric of seduction on that gleeful stage of intention would be a big waste, a grandiloquent lie. The president could protest his failure by taking off his shoes. But we cannot have that of our president because people will say our president has no shoes.

•This article, first published on September 19, 2011, was one of four articles with which Omatseye won the NMMA Columnist of the Year.