#Pendulum: WHO MISLED OUR DEAR PRESIDENT? (A Must Read) – @DeleMomodu Fellow Nigerians, please note that the title of my column today is written in the past tense. I must confess that I did it deliberately for reasons I will explain shortly. You probably remember an earlier article titled WHO’S MISLEADING OUR PRESIDENT? I had written too many unsolicited epistles in the past advising our dear President free of charge. Those accusing me of hating the President don’t know me. I lack the capacity to hate anyone, not even my enemy. It is sinful to hate your fellow human being. My Christian faith teaches me to love my neighbours and forgive those who trespass against me. I intend to abide by those injunctions to the very end. What is there to hate in President Goodluck Jonathan? For me, he is a man richly blessed by God almighty. He has achieved what no man would in many lifetimes. His story is a stuff of fiction and fairytale. It is a classic case of grass to grace or from a valley to the mountain top. Every man should use Jonathan as HIS prayer point/contact with God and seek his type of uncommon favour. The depiction of his life’s trajectory had resonated with many Nigerians. We hoped and expected that he would know and appreciate the meaning of poverty. Nigeria badly needed a compassionate leader who would work for the general people and not for a few privileged fat cats. We prayed and anticipated a relatively young and educated gentleman to come in and fix our comatose education. Dr Goodluck Jonathan fitted that bill almost in surreal terms with his PhD. Who could have been better suitable for such an onerous task if not Jonathan? We believed that here finally was a man to connect perfectly with the university eggheads and put an end to the incessant closure of our institutions of higher learning. But we were dead wrong. Our universities went on indefinite strike and at the height of this mutual madness, university lecturers who refused to go back to work were pronounced sacked with automatic alacrity. Not even a military junta would have conjectured such ribaldry but a democratically elected government led by a former University Don not only envisioned it but made it reality. Beyond that, the substantive Minister of Education, a Professor in the person of Ruqayyah Ahmed Rufa’i was replaced by the Minister of State for Education, Nyesom Wike, a full-blown politician, whose understanding of his remit was undoubtedly suspect. It was a clear indication of how much disdain the Federal Government has for Education. The President who was projected as a man who grew up without the basic necessities of life soon became a high-flying, jet-setting impresario. In fact, his government became so elitist that many started wondering why a man from a pedigree of frugality would become more flamboyant than any leader before him. Our President travelled at the flimsiest excuse. His unwieldy entourage, comprising of a multitude of acolytes, became a subject of international opprobrium. Yet the same government insisted that Nigerians must forgo the nebulous subsidy they had always enjoyed in varied forms in the past. The subsidy itself was a grand scam with the bill skyrocketing and quadrupling within the twinkle of an eye. Yet the citizens were told to pay more for the only semblance of privilege they should be enjoying. The many mistakes of Jonathan are seemingly endless. The President behaved not like a national but a clannish Chieftain. It was as if he did not expect the year of reckoning to arrive sooner rather than later. I repeatedly warned against fighting on too many fronts which no reasonable General would indulge in. I’m yet to understand the logic behind alienating the rest of the nation as if their votes would never be needed. This is the most unfortunate attitude that led to what has become the President’s albatross today. Nothing has redefined this government than the seeming nonchalance of President Jonathan to the spate of Killings in Northern Nigeria. Thousands of our brothers and sisters have been massacred like locus [truncated by WhatsApp]
Posted on: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 10:42:04 +0000
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