The choice of Nigeria’s vice presidential candidate of Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, the then Governor-Elect of Bayelsa State of Nigeria came to many as a shock. This was coming from a background of a well-compromised primary of the Peoples Democratic Party’s which launched an uninterested candidate in the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua who died May 5, 2010 as the presidential candidate of the ruling PDP.
Against many protests from opposition about the failing health of the then candidate, President Olusegun Aremu Obasanjo, the then president literarily imposed Yar’Adua as the candidate and the later ‘chose’ the incumbent president, Goodluck Jonathan as his running mate.
Jonathan had before May 6, 2010 being confirmed as the Acting President of Nigeria from a sequence of events that made the Senate to so do from an unknown Principle of Necessity after the ailment of the former president became prolonged. Jonathan became the Commander-in-Chief and had not step down until his principal passed away on May 5, 2010 which made the mandatory constitutional confirmation of Jonathan as the substantive president imperative.
Having lived out the inherited tenure of his erstwhile boss, Jonathan was faced with the task of keeping a country balkanized with ethnic divides into one after declaring his interest to run for the office of the president; himself a candidate of the ruling party from Nigeria’s South-South region, noted as a minority and cheated for long against the North which believe must be consoled for losing its son as the president. Yar’Adua was serving his first term of the two terms he was entitled to according to the Nigeria’s constitution.
Goodluck Jonathan traveled the length and breadth of Nigeria canvassing for the votes of the Nigerian people. He anchored his campaign around TRANSFORMATION as a slogan; he promised to turn Nigeria into Eldora do. He promised that under him Nigeria would belong to all, a commonwealth that would guarantee the stake of everyone.
Jonathan took Nigerians to the memory lane of how he grew up in Otuoke, a fishing community in Bayelsa State of Nigeria without shoes, ‘I had no shoes,’ I am one of you’, he told his people. Armed with these promises and the expected change through the transformation gospel, Nigerians finally lined up and elected Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as its president and he got inaugurated as the first Nigeria’s president of the South-South origin.
Everyone was accepted that like the enigma Barrack Obama, the first black America to be president of America, that Jonathan has done the same although through providence in Nigeria through an election that was many violent reactions leading to death of many in the North, the region of his strongest opponent, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari Rtd. of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC).
Five months into the new government, people are beginning to ask if they truly got the whole essence of the meaning of the president’s transformation message.
Nigerians are lamenting that they did not ask their then candidate where he was transforming them into. They fear they would have asked if transformation could be positive or negative; they ask if the president was tactically briefing Nigerians of his intention to remove shoes from their feet when he reminded them he had none as a pupil in Otuoke.
These fears are well grounded. Since the time the late president, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua declared Amnesty Programmes for the resolution of the militancy in Jonathan’s South-South region, violence had reasonably reduced in the country. Nigeria’s economy was picking up and the citizens were full of praises to Yar’Adua who resolved the logjam without a shot of gun.
No sooner had Jonathan came on board than cases of bombing resurfaced and becomes a lexicon in the Nigeria’s daily life; this time by another group advocating the abolition of Western Education, Boko Haram. The sect aside that, is also engaging government in a battle of wits for the 2009 extra judicial killing of its erstwhile leader Mohammed Yusuf and attendant destructions carried out by the police against the sect.
Insecurity therefore becomes an identity commencing from the October 1, 2010 50th Anniversary’s bombing of the Eagles Square to the latest August 26, 2011 bombing of the UN Building in Abuja, the nation’s capital. Killings have been a daily recurrence.
Economically, oil is Nigeria’s mainstay. All organs and arms of government depend on the monthly sharing of the proceeds from the Federation Account to run government and keep the nation running. This made all streams of economy tied to the fluctuations and indices surrounding the global prices of petroleum products; a resource that Nigeria has but imports on a daily basis for the use of its citizens.
This is so because the nation’s four refineries have been comatose and a cabal known to government has been at the jugular of the people. These powerful individuals have variously engage in bunkering and sabotage efforts at turning the refineries around.
With these realities, governments have been seeking ways of rendering this cabal powerless but have always seen its victims in the Nigerian people. Deregulation of the products in the past from the military regimes have always forced the prices up, subjecting the masses to untold hardship and poverty while making the rich richer and mindless.
Nigerians are arguing that the bottom-line is corruption and urging government to direct its solution into seeking ways of combating graft that is so pronounced in almost all the sectors of the nation’s life.
Now that President Goodluck Jonathan is seeking almost by all means the removal of oil subsidy by January 2012, Petrol that currently sell for N65 is likely to be sold for N172 and the citizens are crying out loud through civil society, professional and interest groups that government stops the plan as its multiplier effects could break the peoples elasticity for absorbing hardship variously imposed by government.
With the obvious state of events today, Nigerians are continually asking how lucky they would be with President Goodluck Jonathan; whether good or bad, time will tell.
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