Much has been said in attempts by various groups to score President Goodluck Jonathan’s performance in his one year in office. GEORGE AGBA, in this report, analyses the perception of critics and their divergent views to ascertain the veracity or otherwise of their claims.
President Goodluck Jonathan clocked one year in office today, amidst divergent views of his administration’s score card. On the dark side, opposition elements have tended to describe the year under review as a failure. While some choose the term ‘worsening’, others prefer the word ‘slow’. But to be fair, if? an assessment of Jonathan’s first year as elected president should be taken from an unbiased perspective, then it could best be described as a quintessence of an administration which has gotten enmeshed in the muddy and harsh terrain of insecurity created for it by malignant forces who pledged to make Nigeria ungovernable for it.
Overwhelmed by an election victory which many considered to be some sort of divine providence, with much recourse to the sympathy he attracted from the great mass of Nigerians, President Jonathan had on May 29 last year, promised to turn the fortunes of the country for the better. For a man who came into office with a lot of promises, having assumed office on the pedestal of progressivism, it is not surprising that the already furious debate over his performance is attracting negative reactions on what positive impact he has made on the lives of Nigerians. Some are even wondering whether the celebration of the 1st anniversary in Abuja should even take place.
But one truth that has been kept lurking in the dark is the unpleasant reality that, before Jonathan could re-echo his campaign promises to Nigerians, of his firm resolve to take them to the promise land at Eagle Square on this same day, a group of disgruntled youths from the opposition extraction had already threatened openly to make his stay in office unbearable and the country ungovernable. Since then, things have refused to be the way they used to be in the country. Before one government policy or the other at the federal or state government level would boast of reaching its implementation stage, one bomb attack by a terrorist group will rattle government out of its duty post and subject the entire country to a state of mourning.
That has been the piteous fate of the Jonathan administration since it hit the ground running last year. To make matters worse for it, every step taken by the administration to deliver on its campaign promises in the past one year has evoked several condemnation and criticisms, no thanks to the opposition whose prevalence of opinions keep pointing only to the direction that Jonathan’s emergence as president is the worst thing that has happened to the country. According to them, Nigeria is today more divided than when he became president a year ago.
The Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and some other interest groups in the country have unanimously declared that the first year of the Jonathan presidency has been an abysmal failure, replete with poverty, insecurity and an unprecedented level of public corruption.
But those sympathetic to the plight of the president have contended strongly that, on a more honest note, the question that should be yearning for answers on the lips of Nigerians is not whether the president has lived up to expectations, but whether he has been able to fair well in the face of the growing insecurity. The thinking is that no president has ever ruled Nigeria at a time when bombs and violent attacks persistently scuttle every effort the government tends to be making in moving the country forward.
Even some of the groups said to be rating the administration low in terms of performance have tended to demonstrate an element of appreciation in their assessment of the past one year of Jonathan’s government. The spokesman of the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), Mr. Anthony Sani? who? noted that not much has been done if the president’s performance? were to be measured in accordance with the promises he made, however, gave Jonathan a pass mark for what has been put on ground so far.
Sani said, “The president has awarded contracts for railways and the dredging of the River Niger. He has talked about plans to improve power supply. He has made efforts and I will give him pass mark for that. But deliverance of the plans is yet to be realised”.
In their own assessment of the Jonathan administration in the past one year, the business community represented by the Nigerian Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (NACCIMA) hinged the administration’s problem on the growing insecurity, which the group said poses serious problems for the foreign investment needed to return the ailing economy to its former state of equilibrium.
But true to NACCIMA’s position, just as Jonathan was gathering momentum to pilot the affairs of the country in the present dispensation, insecurity crept surreptitiously and found a comfortable place in the country’s political lexicon, leaving a precarious landscape for any leader at this time to even be working at par with his predecessors who had ruled under very favourable atmosphere than what he inherited. Granted that during and after his campaign, he promised Nigerians to leave a better country than what he met. But Jonathan did not envisage that he was going to rule concurrently alongside the reign of terror unleashed by some religious extremists. Now, with terrorist attacks becoming a recurrent decimal in the country’s day to day life, all efforts made by the president to deliver on his campaign promises tend to be like singing the lords song in a strange land, the way the children of Israel did by the rivers of Babylon.
Some pundits who have their eyes glued to the day to day activities of the government have contended that the worst in Jonathan’s administration is the best compared to some past administrations and that one year is still too small to assess him in terms of all he has put on ground. They argue that revamping the economy of a country which has been sapped completely of its economic value by the corruption and mismanagement practiced by politicians and public officials in the past 52 years cannot be a year’s job. In this regard, they hold strongly that the impression about the cry of economic hardship by Nigerians is like the cry of Israelites while they were being taken out of Egypt by Moses.
Most Nigerians who have commented on the president’s one year anniversary hinge their message basically on two areas that are of interest to them: the need for improved power supply and the tackling of insecurity.? While some of them expressed their displeasure on the performance of the Jonathan led administration, others who gave him a pass mark urged him to speed up his transformation agenda.
Those who expressed sympathy for the president said although the situation he found himself was not daisy, he must be encouraged to try his best with utmost sincerity. “There is no government that can fight security without information from the public and the next eye for security would have been total surveillance camera coverage of every flash, Mr. President. I think it can’t be possible to change ugly situations over night. It is a common saying that ‘it is easy to destroy but hard to build’. About security, Sir, Nigerians are not sincere with the issue of security. How can you fight security in a country where only 30% is ready to give you security information? Are the security agents ghosts that should know everything? I’m very sorry for you to be leading a country where 80% of people are creating wrong impressions about your administration with the security challenges”, a social network user told Jonathan via Facebook.
In the same vein, Special Adviser to the president, Dr. Reuben Abati has argued repeatedly that what Jonathan is doing to change the fortunes of the country is more than what meets the eye. Asked about Jonathan’s performance after one year in office, Abati said, “I think that the question you have asked draws attention to only one particular issue which is that, perhaps, those of us who are involved in the business of informing the public about what the administration is doing, maybe, are not doing enough and I think this kind of question should compel us to learn certain lessons. One of the lessons is that we cannot shy away from continually talking to the public, which is to tell us that we have a responsibility and a duty to continue to bring the achievements of the Jonathan’s administration to the attention of the public”.
The presidential spokesman noted that the plight of the president can be easily captured in the words of Jesus Christ in the Bible where he said a prophet is hardly respected in his own home town. Abati painted a pathetic picture of a Nigerian president who is accorded more regards outside the shores of the country, but always being degraded by opposition forces back home.
He said, “One of the gains for Nigeria has been that during his tenure as chairman of ECOWAS, President Jonathan discharged his responsibilities with distinction. He played a major role in resolving the crisis in Niger, in intervening in Guinea Bissau, in intervening in the famous Cote d’Ivoire crisis, in providing support for South Sudan and their independence process. Now, all of these brought a lot of respect to Nigeria. Under President Jonathan’s watch, Nigeria regained solid respectability in the international community. I have travelled with him to many countries and you will see that while some Nigerians at home play politics with whatever he does by criticising him, people wait on the streets, including foreigners, to receive him and these are not people who have been planted there.
“You cannot say an ‘Oyinbo’ man will go and rent a crowd to welcome an African president because he is a man that is admired and respected within the international arena. But I know also that many Nigerians will say why is he admired within the international arena? His business is here at home, but at the end of the day, this admiration he gets from an objective externally distance audience is a plus for Nigeria. It is instructive that President Jonathan is one of the 100 most influential people in the world selected by Times Magazine. Don’t forget that Times International is a serious publication. That particular selection was based on a poll by both Nigerians and other people and at the end of the day, it came out and, in fact, President Jonathan was the only African leader that was so selected. This means that when you look closely at some of these criticisms against him, they are really mythical and emotional and that deep in their hearts, President Jonathan enjoys the goodwill of many Nigerians”.
On the security situation which many have considered to be the administration’s albatross, he said, “I think that the major challenge we have at home is security: let us concede to it. In Nigeria, if you hear that a bomb went off there, you are rightly to get emotional and it is very clear that the people who are throwing those bombs are seeking to discredit the administration and the average Nigerian knows this. Most people complain about the challenge of security, but if that was not there many Nigerians will be more objective, the situation would have been worse.
“But I have also made it clear that President Jonathan and the various security agencies are doing a lot to address this challenge. Every nation has its own moments of crisis and this may well be a special moment in the history of our nation, but President Jonathan, while working hard, is also an optimist. He challenges every Nigerian to support his administration, to be optimistic and to give credit to what the administration is doing so that a lot more can be achieved and he also makes the point again and again that securing the Nigerian environment is ultimately a collective responsibility. Every Nigerian has a role to play. We would not overcome if we keep demonising the efforts of the administration. We would overcome if we all come together and place a greater emphasis on those things that bind us together and rise in unison against those who want to destabilise this country”.
Whether those scoring the administration low are right or wrong in their judgement, there is one universal truth that has always stood the test of time. That truth is the axiom that says “history vindicates the just”. Three years is still too long a period for President Jonathan to prove the authenticity or otherwise of how he has been assessed so far in the past one year.
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