By Chuks Iloegbunam<\/p>\n
Punch columnist Sabella Abidde\u2019s Jonathan\u2019s diminishing presidency (Wednesday July 4, 2012), is typical of the massive anti-Jonathan hysteria currently trending in both the orthodox and the social media.\u00a0 A Pattern has developed over the past year of heaping blames upon the President for any and every perception of things not being exactly as they should be.\u00a0 Strikingly, the critics often get it horribly wrong on the question of exactly how things are.\u00a0 How does one\u2019s ridicule of the state of play of any situation hold water when that one\u2019s notion of either the state or the play is altogether unfounded?<\/p>\n
Let us begin from Sabella Abide.\u00a0 This US-based Nigerian is not a run-of-the-mill columnist.\u00a0 He is a university teacher.\u00a0 He is at home with the norms of socio-political commentary.\u00a0 He has the nuances of the application of lexis and semantics at his fingertips.\u00a0 Based on what I have read from him, there is no question that he has little difficulty siding with the truth.\u00a0 His Unraveling The Ojukwu Mystique, published in The Punch of Wednesday November 30, 2011 was so poignant that I contacted Mr. Abidde and obtained permission to add the article to the list of contributions in General of the People\u2019s Army, my book of tribute to Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu.<\/p>\n
Now, when someone of Mr. Abidde\u2019s pedigree gets his assessment of his country\u2019s First Citizen so fundamentally wrong, it leads to a critical question.\u00a0 What is responsible for his aberrant assessment of President Jonathan:\u00a0 The answer is simple.\u00a0 Jonathan is the victim of partisan press and political blackmail.\u00a0 He comes from a geographical part of the country not meant to govern.\u00a0 Not only that, he counts among his implacable political opponents, controllers of critical segments of the nation\u2019s media.\u00a0 The bile from these \u201cnattering nabobs of negativism\u201d, as a former American Vice President Spiro T. Agnew would have called them, has had a severe knock-on effect on the ranking of the Presidency by the public.<\/p>\n
There is an important point to make.\u00a0 Democracy guarantees the freedom of speech.\u00a0 This allows partisan politicians the leverage to score zero to their opponents who, if assessed judiciously, should be accorded heroic status.\u00a0 There is no mortal danger in this because the jostle for media supremacy \u2013 a central ploy for vote garnering \u2013 is an essential aspect of the democratic spirit, it being assumed that a political leader savagely criticized should have the wherewithal to counter the flaks trained in their direction.\u00a0 The problem starts when outright falsehood, severe exaggerations and outlandish speculations are forced down the gullet of the entity and subsequently ventilated as the truth by knowledgeable people such as Sabella Abidde.<\/p>\n
In ten paragraphs and about a thousand words, Abidde could not muster words and could not muster sentences to support his thesis of a diminished Jonathan presidency.\u00a0 Surely, neither dialectism nor empiricism has been extirpated from discourse.\u00a0 If someone wishing to be taken seriously pronounces something to be black, the imperative of argument demands of him a demonstration of the blackness.\u00a0 Facts cannot be allowed to be thrown around like the confetti of opinion.\u00a0 Besides, there is something known as comparative analysis.\u00a0 That wasn\u2019t exactly what Abidde was up to when he uncharacteristically mounted the partisan hobbyhorse to throw up names like Harry S. Truman, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Barack Obama.\u00a0 Nor did his submission lift itself out of the miserable by his mention of such former Nigerian leaders as Yakubu Gowon, Ibrahim Babangida, Sani Abacha and Olusegun Obasanjo.<\/p>\n
American political circumstances are unrelated to the Nigerian experience.\u00a0 Not only that, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was in office for 12 years.\u00a0 President Harry S. Truman was in office for 8 years, while Obama has been in office for four years.\u00a0 But President Jonathan has been in office for only a year.\u00a0 Gowon ran a dictatorship for nine years.\u00a0 Babangida ran an eight-year dictatorship.\u00a0 Abacha\u2019s \u201ccold and iron age\u201d was through five years.\u00a0 Obasanjo 1 was a dictatorship; Obasanjo 2, an imperial presidency.\u00a0 Why should these dictators be called up in assessment of a stickler for democratic tenets who has been in office for only a year?\u00a0 And \u2013 key point \u2013 Jonathan is facing the problem of homegrown terrorism, something that never confronted a previous American or Nigerian leader.Like the United States, Israel and many European countries face the danger of terrorism.\u00a0 Yet, serious as the danger certainly is, these countries face a brand of\u00a0 terrorism brewed essentially from outside their borders.\u00a0 On the contrary, Nigerian terrorism is brewed and perpetrated from within its borders by those who promised on his inauguration that they will make Jonathan\u2019s tenure ungovernable.<\/p>\n
Acknowledging that this blight of terrorism was previously unknown, and aware that the security architecture for fighting\u00a0 it is only being developed, it is logical to expect that Jonathan\u2019s traducers should acknowledge the deleterious impact which terrorism is having on governance. Sadly, that is not the case.<\/p>\n
Terrorists are killing fellow Nigerians by the hundreds. Businesses and business opportunities are being systematically crippled. A good chunk of the national budget, money that should otherwise go into areas of concrete development, are being channeled into making Nigeria safe and stable for the citizens as well as welcoming to investors. It is to President Jonathan\u2019s credit that he is battling the scotched-earth policy and practices of the terrorists with calm and measured response. His successes in this area will be guaranteed by the willingness and readiness of all sections of the country and all classes of the citizens to assist his government.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, a lot of those who should lend to the salvation of Nigeria are busy shielding themselves behind tinted windows, while tossing canisters of unwarranted criticism in all directions. In engaging in this dangerous pastime, they assume that their lot in an unraveled Nigeria would be a grand ringside view of a chaos consuming others. That\u2019s delusion par excellence. This delusion is also apparent in the media where commentators prelude precision and empiricism from their criticism. The proper way to criticize is by pinpointing errors of governance and positing options for salvage operations, not be following Abidde, whose grounds for diminishing Jonathan\u2019s presidency boils down to an undemonstrated perception of the current administration not being better than those of past military juntas.<\/p>\n
If gold rusts, what will iron do? What is to be expected of teenage bloggers and Facebook and Twitter champions when our educated commentators revel in displaying astonishing misapprehension of the trajectory of Nigerian political development? The negative agenda setting of partisan press obviously explains the din in uncritical quarters about the actual quality of the government in Abuja today.<\/p>\n
Otherwise, it should command adulation that President Jonathan has improved on the quality of our elections. This does not support Abidde\u2019s suggestion that the President is self-immolating. For decades the Lagos ports and the roads around them were clogged up. It took Jonathan\u2019s direct intervention and directives for the roads around the ports to be cleared of traffic logjams and for the period of clearing goods at the ports to be reduced from 39 days to 48 hours. This does not support Abidde\u2019s claim that the President\u2019s actions reek of doubt and\u00a0 mediocrity. For decades the matter of fertilizer for Nigerian farmers ran on the wheels of scandalous corruption. In one fell swoop, Jonathan cleared the Augean stable by extricating government out of fertilizer supplies. This negates Abidde\u2019s position that Jonathan\u2019s actions are framed by second-guessing and controversy. Why does Abidde\u2019s believe that it is positive to announce that \u201cthe economy is in a shambles\u201d without any evidence to support his charge? In agreeing that the \u201cPresident did not cause many of the problems we now face\u201d, Abidde did not point out the ones Jonathan created, nor did he explain how he expected the President to solve in 12 months problems that have existed and exacerbated since the amalgamation.<\/p>\n
Jonathan is probably the most underrated leader Nigeria ever had. This is partly due to his underrated personality \u2013 which is not a negative attribute in politics, and partly down to the blackmail and negative agenda setting of partisan press. Yet, I have a sense that, in the ultimate, \u201cThe mouth used to call a woman barren, will also be employed to put the vital question: Woman, how are your kids?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Chuks Iloegbunam Punch columnist Sabella Abidde\u2019s Jonathan\u2019s diminishing presidency (Wednesday July 4, 2012), is typical of the massive anti-Jonathan hysteria currently trending in both the orthodox and the social…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1904,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles-opinions"],"yoast_head":"\n