Jonathan’s Half-Time: The Verdict By Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai

The mid-term review of the
Goodluck Jonathan administration
was celebrated with much pomp and
pageantry. To an onlooker or a
visitor to the country, the review of
the administration’s performance
was right on course and almost
believable. The paradox is that the
same people who set the
examinations, sat for them and
graded themselves. Sadly, contrary
to the current administration’s
celebration of success, the grand
‘economic’ figures that were reeled
out mean nothing to the ordinary
person. The President, proudly with
the midterm review document in
hand, has asked that we score him.
That is what exactly will be covered
by this concluding piece of mid-
term assessment; not from the
perspective of the government but
from the angle of the perceived
‘beneficiaries’ of the various
schemes and policies that have
been enacted since 2011.
Considering the macro-economic
issues which have been celebrated
by the current government, the fact
is several notable aspects of the
economy which the government
claims to have improved, only
impacted a few beneficiaries. The
government claims credit in a GDP
growth of about 7%. It also beats its
chest on the renovation of airports
and the resumption of a weekly train
service between Lagos and Kano,
having been off the lines for nearly
twenty years. The government also
touts its award of several contracts
for infrastructure, especially roads.
Finally, the Jonathan government is
very smugly proud of its so-called
power sector reform and the
corollary privatization of several
distribution and generation
companies.
In the area of providing safety and
security for citizens, the government
has just recently declared a state of
emergency in Adamawa, Borno and
Yobe States, while at the same time
ratcheting up the military onslaught
at the Boko Haram insurgency,
particularly in those three states.
Prior to these actions, the
government had all but capitulated
to all manners of security challenges
in all parts of the country, from the
kidnappings, to piracy, communal
and inter-ethnic clashes, the
potentially explosive grazers/
farmers relationship all over the
country, armed robbery, to all other
strains of dissidence. And, of
course, the government’s own
pretense at, and overlooking serial
human rights violations and
repeated extra judicial killings of
innocent citizens by the security
forces.
In the two years since the election
of President Goodluck Jonathan,
poverty has reportedly declined by
2% (48% to 46%) according to the
World Bank’s vice president for
Africa. Worthy of note is the fact
that it was also mentioned by the
World Bank chief that a GDP growth
rate of 8% is insufficient to reduce
poverty in the country. In practical
terms, while there appears to be a
minute improvement in the numbers,
how significant is a 2% reduction in
poverty when about 60% of the
population is poor? What does this
reduction in poverty mean to the
rural dweller who cannot afford the
minimum of a dollar (about 160
naira) to cater to his daily needs of
feeding, transportation and other
human engagements?
Beyond all the trumpets being blown
by the current administration for its
performance, poverty still abounds
greatly in the country which by all
standards and measures should not
be, given Nigeria’s vast natural and
human resource endowments.
According to the Revenue Watch
Institute, Nigeria is recognized and
ranked 40th among 58 natural
resources-rich nations. But because
these revenues are not properly
accounted for and managed terribly,
they benefit only a few who have
access to the funds at the detriment
of the citizenry.
Inequality is on the rise as attested
to by Rev. Jesse Jackson who was
invited for the democracy day
celebrations. His analysis of the
Nigerian situation, however grim, is
so true. He mentioned that there
would be continuous agitations and
unrests in Nigeria until the country’s
system was able to guarantee
economic justice and equality to the
people, stressing that poverty in the
midst of plenty was unacceptable.
Sadly, Nigeria, as at the end of 2012
ranked as the 35th most corrupt
country in the world. Ridiculously,
the government attributes the
marginal improvement of moving
four places from its ranking of 2011
to the Federal Government’s resolve
to fight corruption head-on. The
government also responded to the
ranking by saying, “it shows clearly
that Nigeria is gradually but steadily
coming out of the cycle of most
corrupt countries”. At this pace, the
only thing obvious is the fact that
the nation is nowhere close to being
taken off the corruption list.
The debt stock of the nation keeps
soaring and has currently doubled
what it was in 2007. According to
statistics available on the Debt
Management Office (DMO) website,
the external debt stock as at 1999
was about $28bn; by March 2007
was $3.3bn, $5.7bn by December
2011, $6.5bn by December 2012
and $6.7bn by March 2013. What
does the Nigerian government have
to show for its massive external
borrowing? Is it the erratic power
supply or the weekly train services
which service an insignificant
fraction of the population?
Government borrowing ought to
inject needed cash into the social
sector of government by funding
critical priority areas such as health,
basic education, water, and roads.
Can we proudly say we have seen
considerable improvement in these
sectors?
Incidentally, barely a week after
Jonathan’s celebration of
‘achievements’, two of his ministers
– Zainab Kuchi and Labaran Maku,
admitted in public that 120 million
Nigerians still lived in darkness.
This clearly indicates that either this
government is not reading from the
same script, or those that authored
Jonathan’s brandished
‘achievements’ live in another
planet. It may also be that the
government has been caught up in
its own web of lies, because
however carefully managed a lie is,
the truth will always come out in the
end.
Those brandishing figures to say
that unemployment in Nigeria is on
the decrease probably live in
another country. Unemployment in
Nigeria has grown from about one in
five people in 2010 to about one out
of every three willing and able to
work but jobless in 2013. Many
youths beg to differ with these
figures stating that these are more
likely to represent the employment
rate rather than unemployment.
While You-Win and Sure-P may be
conceptually steps in the right
direction, they have remained
meaningless slogans as it will take
a lot more than them to get the
teeming unemployed population off
the streets. Most of the youth simply
have no hope in what the future
holds for them. The truth is that
most of the insurgency being
experienced in the country in its
various forms from Boko Haram to
kidnapping and Niger Delta militancy
is a direct offshoot of the idleness
and unemployment among restless
youths.
What is clear though is that not only
is President Jonathan determined
that he has passed his mid-term
exams with flying colors, he has
also declared that he has passed
the final 2015 exam too, and will
promote himself to a second term
whether we like it or not. His
surrogate voices like Kingsley Kuku
and Dokubo have already
announced the results of the next
presidential elections that we all
hope will take place in 2014! These
voices have made it clear that
mayhem will be visited on the rest
of Nigeria by the Ijaws if Jonathan
does not contest and win the next
presidential election. Jonathan has
also embarked on a journey of
annihilating any source of dissent
within his toxic party, the opposition
and the country in multiple fronts.
within the PDP, he has procured the
suspension of Governors Rotimi
Amaechi and Magatakarda
Wammako for daring to oppose his
choice to lead the Nigeria
Governors’ Forum (NGF). By
endorsing Jonah Jang – the pathetic
and hapless loser of election of the
NGF which every citizen saw on
video with Rotimi Amaechi as the
clear winner, Jonathan has
descended to even lower moral
standards. Seeing these old people
going round shamelessly refuting
what we all saw clearly on video, I
sometimes wonder how people like
Jonah Jang and Olusegun Mimiko
sleep at night! Opposition leaders
like General Muhammadu Buhari
and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu are being
constantly attacked in the media by
Jonathanian surrogates while the
constitutional rights of citizens are
regularly violated to frustrate the
merger and emergence of the All
Progressives Congress (APC).
In the light of all these, it is clear
that when Jonathan loses the 2014
presidential elections (not in 2015
as most people assume), he will pull
a Laurent Gbagbo stunt, dig in and
declare that he has not lost, with his
surrogates unleashing violence on
anyone perceived to be in
disagreement. The next two years
will be therefore a period of great
challenge to Nigerians during which
round-the-clock vigilance must be
the watchword of all those that care
for our nation and its people.
We all need to be proactive in
insisting that the next elections be
free, fair and credible. To ensure
this, INEC must eliminate human
intervention and manipulation of
election results by ensuring that
polling unit-level results go to a
computerized collation centre via
encrypted technology on INEC’s
VSAT and the nationwide public
telecommunications network, thus
eliminating paper-based Forms
EC8B to F, as well as the collation
centers of electoral fraud,
manipulation and corruption. The
opposition political parties have
already recommended that the next
elections should all be held on the
same day to reduce the logistic and
material costs and the like, and
eliminate the multiple sources of
rigging and manipulation, among
others.
The foregoing litany of failures and
underperformance of government in
social, political and economic
spheres will fill more pages than
this column can take. Things have
never been as bad as we have it
now and no gloss-paper document
can mask the frustration of the
people. The few people who praise
the performance of this government
or the direction it is headed are
those who have benefitted
inordinately from the skewed
opportunities at the expense of the
majority. Some of the major sectors
of the country’s economy which
would make a difference now and
for future generations (security,
electric power, healthcare,
employment and education) are
being toyed with for political gains.
It is not the President’s duty to ‘try’.
After all he made promises during
his campaign which he ought to
fulfill. It is his constitutional duty to
protect the lives and property of the
citizens and it is our right as
citizens to hold our leaders
accountable. Rather than engage in
petty arguments and gloating over
marginal improvements in figures as
compared to previous
administrations, this administration
needs to demonstrate its plans to
not only halt the slide, but leave a
secure future for the next
generation. Instead of taking all
criticisms in bad faith, a government
that genuinely has the interest of the
people at heart should prove critics
wrong by improving performance
and being accountable to citizens.
In the end, it was a truly shameful
spectacle for the president to sing
and dance around with a document
that does not have a basis in reality
and claim achievements that few
people can see or even feel. Judging
the mid-term (lack of) progress of
Goodluck Jonathan does not require
any kind of extra-ordinary skills or
gifts. Are you better off now than
you were three years ago? Are you
more secure than you were a few
years ago? Can you pay school fees
without breaking the bank? Are
more people in jobs than they were
a few years ago? Are Nigerians
better united today than before
Jonathan’s ‘election’? Do you even
feed better than you did two years
ago? The verdict is up to you.
On final note, we waited in vain for
the much-touted document to be
made available online or widely in
print as promised by the Minister of
National Planning. As at the time of
writing this, we are yet to see the
fulfillment of this Jonathanian
promise. If and when the Mid-Term
Report of the so-called
Transformation Agenda is available
we will do a point-by-point
analysis.