By Ikechukwu Amaechi
There is no doubt that President Goodluck Jonathan’s much touted transformation agenda has gone out of kilter. Recent happenings in the country prove that things are off beam.
Last week must be, so far, the busiest and most distressing for the President in his eight-month-old presidency. In one week, he had cause to address the nation twice. Watching him speak to Nigerians on Saturday in a spirited bid to take in hand the fallout of the unilateral decision of his government to remove the contentious subsidy on petrol, I saw a clearly distraught man.
Penultimate Saturday, the President also addressed the nation when he, invoking Section 305(1) of the 1999 Constitution (as amended), declared a state of emergency in 15 local government areas of Borno, Plateau, Niger and Yobe states, and ordered a temporary closure of the country’s borders with Chad, Niger and Cameroun. It was his answer to the escalation of violence by the extremist Islamic group, Boko Haram, which shocked Nigerians and, indeed, the international community by the string of bomb attacks that claimed dozens of lives on Christmas Day.
Penultimate Wednesday, the President summoned an emergency Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting with two issues on the agenda – deregulation and the state of emergency.
I had nothing but pity for him on Saturday as he addressed a populace that had become cynical and distrustful. I saw a man whose presidency was unraveling right before him. That is one of the most difficult positions any leader can face. And this is not an elite gang-up. It is coming from the same masses, who only a few months ago saw him as one of their own, the man from the rustic Ijaw village of Otuoke who wore no shoes while growing up because his parents could not afford to buy one.
The presidential election was held on April 16, 2011, and I have no doubt that Jonathan, despite the noticeable infractions, won. Credulous and superstitious Nigerians, who not only saw him as a breath of fresh air but also wished that their beloved country could share in his fabled run of good luck, voted for him. Something has, therefore, gone fundamentally wrong for the same masses that earnestly yearned for Jonathan only eight months ago to call for his impeachment.
But it is easy to explain what is happening. Nigerians elected Jonathan President on sentiment – a Christian from one of the minority ethnic groups in the South. Some went a step further to say that considering his meteoric rise in the power circuit; he must have been God-ordained. In doing all these, Nigerians ignored the most important criterion in any leadership recruitment exercise – Capacity.
They failed to ask whether the man in whose hands they were going to place the fate of over 150 million Nigerians had the capacity. They failed to ask the man they were about to hire as their President what he would bring to the table. They neither took him to task on his would-be policies nor interrogated the manifesto of his political party. They neither tasked him on his vision for the future nor mission in government. At the end, Jonathan broke world record as the first man to clinch the highest elective office in his country promising nothing. “I will promise nothing, but do more,” he told Nigerians. Nobody figured out that if he promised nothing, then he can only do more of nothing.
Unfortunately, countries are not run on the wheels of good luck. Governance is not a feel good project. It is too serious a business to be reduced to a trial and error paradigm. There must be well thought out policies and programmes. When Jonathan was sworn in on May 29, 2011, he had no agenda. Such a scenario is a recipe for crisis. And that is exactly what we have on our hands.
Nigerians have every reason to be angry over the precipitate and impetuous action taken by Jonathan on the issue of fuel subsidy. While pretending to be consulting, Nigerians woke up on New Year day to discover that the Federal Government had unilaterally increased the pump price of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), otherwise called petrol, by over 115 percent from N65 to N141 per litre. It was the height of deceit for a government that lays claim to being democratic to begin a patently bogus debate after concluding plans to ambush an unwary citizenry with a fait accompli, an economic diktat.
On Saturday, the President addressed the nation in a desperate attempt to avert a possible shutdown of the country by the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Trade Union Congress (TUC) and other civil society organizations. But if there is any reason why the strike which started on Monday should continue, it is the President’s speech. Why? If it took the threat of mass action for the President to agree to a cut, no matter how cosmetic, in the cost of governance, then Labour is treading the right path. It will take the mass action proper to compel him to walk his talk.
Aside the surreptitious removal of the subsidy on a most inauspicious day, government had taken two faulty steps since Labour declared its intention to challenge the policy in the court of public opinion. First, youths believed to have its backing, on Friday, invaded the Secretariat of the NLC in Abuja with heavily armed policemen, who cordoned off part of the NTA Link Road where labour House is located, looking the other way. The same day, the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Muhammed Bello Adoke, sought and got an injunction from the National Industrial Court (NIC), restraining NLC and TUC from embarking on the industrial action. Since then, the government has been rattling the sabre, all in an attempt to intimidate Nigerians off the street.
Whether the unpopular policy of the government will prevail over the will of an aggrieved citizenry to resist it will depend on how angry and determined the people are. The Arab Spring has proved most conclusively that when a people are sufficiently angry and determined to take their destiny in their own hands, no government, no matter how powerful and entrenched, can stop them.
On Saturday, the President agreed that to “save Nigeria, we must all be prepared to make sacrifices.” Before now, we have had the unsavoury situation where the long-suffering masses were cajoled to tighten their belts while the fat cows that superintend over the affairs of state loosen theirs. The President claimed that he had “directed that overseas travels by all political office holders, including the President be reduced to the barest minimum. The size of delegations on foreign trips will also be drastically reduced; only trips that are absolutely necessary will be approved.”
He also claimed that, “For the year 2012, the basic salaries of all political office holders in the Executive arm of government will be reduced by 25 percent … All Ministries, Departments and Agencies must reduce their overhead expenses.”
These are beside a raft of other promises including “the mobilization of contractors for the full rehabilitation of the Port Harcourt-Maiduguri railway line and the completion of the Lagos-Kano railway line,” and the immediate employment of 370,000 youths through a public works programme.
I doubt if any of these promises will ever be fulfilled if Jonathan gets away with his fuel subsidy gambit. But even if he decides to prove skeptics wrong and keep to his promise, it will still be instructive that it took mass revolt for a government that claims to be on a mission of transformation to realize that the first agenda on the table ought to be a drastic cut in the cost of governance.
In the N4.7 trillion 2012 Appropriation Bill which the President presented to the National Assembly last month, N3.3 trillion, representing 72 percent, was for recurrent expenditure. That, definitely, is not a budget with the intent of transforming Nigeria.
Therefore, these concessions are not voluntary; they are forced. If it took the threat of strike to force the hand of government into addressing the core issues of governance, then the strike must go on because that is the only way to ensure that this time around, Jonathan does not renege, as he is wont to do, on the promises he made on Saturday.
