Nigerians in their omniscient best never bargained for the unfolding shenanigans coiling around their polity like poison ivy. Less than a year, Jonathan has morphed quite badly from that gentle, humble and honest Itueke journeyman to being the most pathologically and shambolically misfit president this nation ever had. His former boss – Umar Yar’ Adua – used to claim that laurel but now, surprise, surprise, Jonathan has dislodged Yar’ Adua with little or no hard bruises.
President Goodluck Jonathan is rowing backward badly in the rough waters of Nigeria politics. The Abuja interloper, oh no, cipher, can neither bonk Boko nor harass the Haram clawing savagely at his credibility as a competent commander- in- chief.
His old virtue has turned into vice. People now regard him as a crap – a man who is ill prepared for the art of the state. His political promises are disappearing into a plughole of amnesia. Our hope that Jonathan will remoralise a demoralised and broken society is but now a sinking, wishful thinking. Our impulse has now shifted from hope to despair, from an excess of trust to an excess of suspicion; we exalted his innocence but has shamed us by his failure. The huge sense of his own political impotence is hurting millions of trusting lives who gave their votes to him.
Our raving anxiety is shipping into a kind despairing wail at the loss of an irreplaceable opportunity. The seed of our collective peril is frighteningly imminent. We are entering the zone of a tragedy of which Jonathan alone must be the villain. Consider this. An apathetic public now watch the erosion of Jonathan’s ‘shiddur’ – that’s Jewish word for getting engaged. Mr President has unplugged from the immediate priorities besetting this nation to embrace fantasy. Jonathan’s pre-election popularity which rose to 85 per cent showed just how much we needed to believe in his transformational agenda to provide us with the goodies and protection that his election rhetoric commanded.
But alas, Nigerians are now being forced to consider that Jonathan cannot give insulation from the harm of Boko Haram. Well, there is a huge gain in this. Boko Haram’s armed rebellion has aid us, no, accelerated our quest for a more dimensionalised perspective of our relationship with one another. That is, the president is presented with a fresh opportunity to rethink the dimensionality of the fragile relationship between the north and south. We are faced with a stark choice. This nation has to stem the tide of its evolutionary leap backwards. Boko Haram has signposted our future by reworking the old model of our unity and peace. The onset of a primordialised Nigeria held captive by a retrograde strain of theomanic Boko Haram should offer us a broader discursive narrative of the fiction of our oneness.
Rather than uproot the thorns and briars of Boko Haram theocratic rebellion, the low lifer in Aso Rock found time to party hard and quaff expensive champagne over Xmas and the New Year. More absurdly, Patience ‘umblela’ Jonathan was said to have given her man an ergonomically designed facial sauna for a clearer fresh complexion that befits a shambolically misfit president. There had been no proactive pathway for addressing the proliferating brute-luck risks individuals’ face in today’s northern Nigeria. Jonathan’s embrace of the logic of the ghetto offers us a more tolerant social climate to tolerate the Inspector General of Police (Hafiz Ringim), Police Affairs (Navy Captain Caleb Olubolade), National Security Adviser (Andrew Owoeye Azazi) and the Service Chiefs, the very people, who, in true accountability should have been sacked for sleeping while the nation burns!
One of the intellectual catastrophes of a post-colonial but primitive Nigeria is that a tiny band of cabal from the north can continue to exert power, dominion and control over the destiny of Nigeria through violence-driven ideology of theocratic illiteracy. A band of satanically energised rag-tag cowards masquerading as Boko Haram claims bloody victory after bloody victory over the might of our police and military personnel.
Christians in the north are being shocked and awed while Jonathan embraces an over-cautious, timid, cumulative process of unacceptable placidity. Right under Jonathan’s watch, Christian worshippers face gruesome genocide in the Republic of Boko Haram.
As the embers of Boko Haram scorched earth pogrom rages, Jonathan twisted the knife deeper and sent Nigerians deeper into the turmoil of petroleum subsidy removal palaver. Jonathan is now a subject of both intense hostility and repulsion. His belated action of selling the bitter pill of subsidy removal to Nigerians makes Herod’s propaganda efforts on culling the first born look simple. More sinisterly, his action reminded me that those dictators from Adolf Hitler, Idi-Amin and Sanni Abacha owed a good deal of their tragic end to this genetic fault line: inability to listen to other contesting stakeholders in the struggle for the soul of their nations.
There have been verbal onslaught against IMF-inspired subsidy removal from the media, organised labour, NGOs, past leaders, students, commuters, workers, housewives and even the blind. Controversy trailed Jonathan’s informational treasury. It was agreed that consultations and rethinking were to last until April 2012 because of the pain and regression of subsidy removal, but Jonathan relapsed into the perfidy of a dictating, military chauvinist we all loath to remember.
There is a thorough absence of a more capacious sense of millions of struggling Nigerians, those unseen others who inhabit the other side of the political dividend divide. I mean those unseen others who are daily mired in poverty, helplessness, decay and pessimism – the very victims of petrol subsidy excision.
Jonathan’s politics of isolating the public through intransigent political elitism presents the greatest danger yet to our democratic renewal. The ongoing dialectics of double jeopardy – Boko Haram and petroleum subsidy removal – are enough failures to ignite social and political revolution. I therefore welcome Arab Spring to the most populous black nation on earth. Welcome Republic of Boko Haram! Welcome Republic Of Biafra! Welcome Republic of Oduduwa!
