These days, there is one argument that is
persistently heard when a section of
Nigerians attempt to explain why the
President of Nigeria Dr. Goodluck Ebele
Jonathan is largely perceived as having
under-performed during his four-year tenure
that is running out in a few months. This
negative perception is so aggravated in
some quarters that some disgruntled sharp-
tongued commentators simply rephrased his
name in some social media outlets to read
“Goodluck Ebola JoNothing” while a now
deceased Facebook commentator of blessed
memory once described him as “Emir El-
Retard-een Jonathan”. These abuses
underscoring the frustration of several hobby
commentators often end up amusing the
President’s opponents while it is generally
taken with utmost contempt by his admirers,
who cannot understand why people are
taking the freedom of expression to the
extent of ridiculing the country’s own
President.
These days, we hear the argument that
hardly anyone could have done better than
this President under the atmosphere of
genocidal and coercive insurgency that the
northern political elite has subjected the
country to. It is indeed, no secret that some
northern leaders, in the run-up to the last
Presidential election in 2010, vowed to make
Nigeria ungovernable if Dr. Goodluck
Jonathan insisted on becoming President,
while the northern tenure under the zoning
arrangement was cut short by the untimely
death of the former President.
In fact, the rapid pace at which events have
happened within the tenure of this
presidency renders the chronicling of events
almost impossible. Yet a fairly alert mind
should be able to reflect on some events
that unfurled within the past three and a
half years of Dr. Jonathan’s Presidency.
Also read: Jonathan easiest
sitting president to defeat in an election
It started on a very bad note when the
President – in reaction to the deeply-rooted
chaos in the Nigerian Football Federation
(Nigeria’s governing soccer body) that saw
the national team end up with a shameful
performance in South Africa 2010 –
disbanded the national team, dissolved the
Federation and suspended international
outings for two years. FIFA raised its voice a
few days later and the President chickened
in immediately. He had not done his
homework properly and did not consult with
the proper experts for advice before hastily
announcing actions beyond the reach of his
powers against FIFA. Boko Haram had not
yet thrown a single stone, not even from a
catapult.
Shortly afterwards, signs began to emerge
that Boko Haram was stepping up its
campaign of violence by striking at soft
targets and taking scores of innocent lives.
If anything, these initial actions signaled the
need to address the issue head-on and as a
matter of utmost priority. The President
reacted and took the matter very seriously.
He plunged himself into the politics of
reaching out to those, who he thought
mattered most and distancing himself from
those, who he thought mattered less. The
choice was his and his alone. He appeased
them with some power-sharing
arrangements, when he thought the people
mattered most and offered them and their
cronies, lofty government appointments. In
return, he was repeatedly assured that the
menace will be over not later than six
months into the future. He took it all with
deep satisfaction and took to assuring
Nigerians with dates, by which the menace
of Boko Haram would be confined to the
trash can of history.
In his confidence and complacency, he
turned his attention to another front.
Without the requisite deep-thought, analysis
of pros and cons and the need to take the
bull by the horn, he lied and had his
ministers lie repeatedly to Nigerians that he
had no plans to remove fuel subsidy. Then
on January 01, 2012 he gave Nigerians the
demonic New Year’s gift of subsidy removal
against all wise warnings of risking a
revolution if he did. The President
unwittingly responded that he was ready for
a revolution. He was not taken hostage by
Boko Haram at the time. Inspired by the
widely reported Arab Spring, traditionally
fearful Nigerians took to the streets and the
President escaped a full-scale revolution by
the whiskers at the cost of a few innocent
lives.
In the meantime, Boko Haram’s insurgency
was turning nasty and showing early signs
of insurgent sophistication. His predecessor
and mentor Olusegun Obasanjo offered
himself for mediation – a task none of those
people he appeased took upon themselves.
He ended up ridiculing the former President
and having his paid agents rain abuses on
the old man with jeers and scorns. The
choice was his.
Flashback to the subsidy protest: The
nationwide uproar beamed the flashlight on
the filth in the oil sector and all its
attendant evils. The intelligent option of
creating self-sufficiency in refining crude oil
and discontinuing the regime of importing
refined fuel was the final settlement that
killed the nationwide semi-revolution.
Investments were to be made in fixing old
refineries and building new ones. A
memorandum of understanding was even
reached with Chinese engineering companies
at the initial stage. We had no report that
resources had to be withdrawn from the
project to facilitate the fight against Boko
Haram. No. Yet, the whole project died a
quiet death while the regime of fuel
importation continues unabated to the
benefit of corrupt importers, who no one
dares to question. Not because Boko Haram
stops anyone at gunpoint! The President is
simply held hostage by the corrupt power of
the capital.
The speed at which the sins of people are
exposed, who try to expose the scale of
thievery in the oil sector underscores the
excellence of President Jonathan’s
government when he chooses to expose
thieves. Half of the energy invested in
nabbing the lawmaker Farouk Lawan’s
acceptance of bribe to kill a part of his
investigations on subsidy thieves was never
invested in catching any of the oil thieves
indicted. Yet Boko Haram did not incite this
ineptitude. The mole planted in Ribadu’s
committee was never planted in any NNPC
body to track corrupt officers.
Bursting the Nigerian Governors’ Forum with
undemocratic means had nothing to do with
Boko Haram. Having the President’s wife
meddle in the politics of Rivers State and
attempting to have 5 lawmakers rule over 27
others in the Rivers State House of Assembly
had nothing to do with Boko Haram.
The President’s only flagship project of
success – the reactivation of the railway line
from Lagos to Kano – was not disrupted by
Boko Haram even though Kano is at the
heart of Boko Haram’s operation. Yet Boko
Haram is blamed for making governance
difficult for the President? Boko Haram did
not force the President to grant a national
pardon to former Governor Alamieyesigha,
who has been officially adjudged corrupt and
declared an international fugitive. Today this
former Governor wields far more political
influence in Jonathan’s Nigeria than the
cleanest of all public figures. Boko Haram
did not incite the President to make lords of
militant touts in the Niger Delta nor has
Boko Haram stopped the arrest and public
prosecution of powerful brains behind illegal
oil refineries all over the Niger Delta region.
Even Co-President Asari Dokubo declares
openly that President Jonathan will “not
dare” (repeat: “not dare”) to refuse running
for re-election. “Else he can’t come back
home na! E no fit!” No single comment was
issued by the President to rebuke the young,
exuberant slime ball. Did Boko Haram ask
the President to grant that much power to a
thug?
The Niger Delta insurgency did not stop
Olusegun Obasanjo from negotiating away
Nigeria’s foreign debt. It did not stop him
from pushing through with GSM, with
NAFDAC and the installation of the EFCC
even if its operations were more one-sided
than otherwise. It did not stop him from
building 6 power stations that would have
been operational today if he had more time
at his disposal. And I am not alone in the
belief that an Obasanjo third term would
have done Nigeria far more good than this
disastrous Jonathan term has done.
Obasanjo did not submit to militants who
undermine him publicly like Asari Dokubo
does Jonathan today. Obasanjo confronted
as many powerful forces as he could and
they joined hands to give him a fight.
Without prejudice to those areas in which
President Obasanjo also had his failures,
these powers it were that successfully carved
out the perpetual evil image for the old man
with which many people associate him today
in a convenient bandwagon effect.
On the contrary, President Jonathan shied
away from confronting any force that is
opposed to the interest of the state except
those that challenge his personal ambitions.
Today, his apologists are unfortunately in a
desperate search of a scapegoat for the
resultant dismal failure. First it was Boko
Haram. But we know today that the
President did not take on the background
forces to nip the tragedy in the bud and
tolerated if not partially participated in
propping up a version of Boko Haram. Now,
they blame the Americans for failing to sell
weapons to defeat Boko Haram. We now
know however that the Americans only
refused to sell attack helicopters that can
easily be bought from Russia and scores of
other sources.
Also read: Jonathan named most
performing president since independence
Now, they are engaged in shadow-boxing
over political defections. But high level
defection from one party to the other is
nothing new in the Nigerian democratic
tradition. The overriding precedent case
played out in 2007 when the Supreme Court
of Nigeria validated the defection of a sitting
Vice President from the ruling party to an
opposing party. I am one of many Nigerians
who thought – in the face of logical
considerations at the time – that the
Supreme Court Judges may have either been
standing too tall on the high grade of
intoxication or were simply drowned in their
conspiracy to teach the overbearing
Olusegun Obasanjo a very serious lesson.
Whichever way it was, they did a serious
disservice to the nascent democracy that is
now hanging on the system as an albatross.
The logic was simple. If for any reason then,
Olusegun Obasanjo died as President, his
Vice President, who was elected with and
handpicked by him as a candidate of the
PDP, would automatically have become the
new President from another party, whose
program the electorates knew nothing about
and did not vote for. It was the second
highest office in the land.
The lesson there was clear. Whether or not,
the judgment was passed under the
influence of intoxicants or emotions, and no
matter how wrong the judgment was, it had
definitely been passed and cannot be
overturned. It is the law of the land until the
constitution is explicitly amended to reflect
another unmistakable reality. It therefore
goes that the fact of being elected on the
platform of one party should and does not
automatically translate into the loss of an
office upon defection to another party. It was
the case with Governor Isa Yuguda, who
defected from the ANPP to the PDP,
Olusegun Mimiko, who defected from the
Labor Party to the PDP, Governor Rochas
Okorocha, who defected from APGA to the
APC as well as Governor Rotimi Amaechi,
who left the PDP for the APC.
I therefore wonder aloud, why President
Jonathan simply refuses to accept his fate
in the spirit of political sportsmanship each
time a leading politician defects from his
party even in these dying minutes of his
presidency. The futile persecution of
Governor Rotimi Amaechi does not seem to
have shown the President the limits of his
impunity. The same scenario is now being
replayed against Aminu Tambuwal, Speaker
of the House of Representatives. The
botched amateurism of the Rivers State
House of Assembly ended in dangerous
bloodshed. It did not teach Jonathan any
lesson. He sought to trick the House of
Representative to re-convene under the
guise of extending some worthless state of
emergency only to attempt to stage-manage
the impeachment of the Speaker. Now that
this too has failed, efforts are said to be
underway to arrest the speaker. I will dare to
ask how Boko Haram has influenced this
show of impunity which shows the President
as constantly being petty, unintelligent and
often failing to do the right thing at the
right time.
But Nigeria will never be the colossal failure
that it is today, if people do not routinely
set the wrong agenda and priority every step
of the way. Today, rather than focusing on
the illegal and impuned invasion of the
premises of the House of Representatives by
armed policemen who would jump into the
bush for safety at the shout of armed
robbers, and soldiers who run away from
Boko Haram, Nigerians are hurling stones at
lawmakers who scaled the fence to frustrate
the planned second illegality of
impeachment. This should ordinarily have
been a point, at which the fact of the
Nigerian legislature being populated by
celebrated and high-profile thugs ought to
have occupied the back seat in the face of
the more urgent issue of presidential
impunity.
The threat by the opposition APC to form a
parallel government if the presidential
election is rigged is now the cry of brutal
defiance by an opposition that smells a rat
in the President’s extreme desperation to
retain the presidency. The recipe is clear.
Insurgency is already on course in the north.
A brutally aggrieved opposition will render
escalation an easy task. The Niger Deltans –
I assume – are ready as well. Obasanjo once
cried out and warned of an army being built
by the President with an arsenal of lethal
weapons. Is 2015 the watershed to ending
the amalgamation?
Of course, Nigeria is made what it is today
with the immense help of hungry and
willfully collaborative praise-singers, who
give incompetent politicians like President
Jonathan the leverage that they need to
survive and drain the stability of national
interests. After all, these are the same
people who conjure the fairy tale of grand
performance by the President that no one
else sees but they alone! It simply remains
to be seen where Jonathan thinks he will be
taking Nigeria and how he will end as a
person and page in the history of a now
dejected Nigeria.
- MyNews24

http://m.news24.com/nigeria/MyNews24/Is-Boko-Haram-the-true-cause-of-Jonathans-dismal-performance-20141125

Will read on sunday after church, I will have much time then...

Interesting questions .. ......

Did Boko Haram, Opposition and "Born to rule" make him do these things?

Yes. 80% of it caused it.

[b]Even a typical nigerian student that failed his waec exam will blame waec or blame his/her teachers or blame the school he or she finished from,which means no one wants to be called a failure so they try to give excuses .....now back to jonathan,if insurgency could be his excuse for performing poorly then he should have tackled insurgency right from the very day he stepped into the office as a president,before he became a president some people were already telling him that they will make nigerian ungovernable for him so if goodluck jonathan had COMMON SENSE then he should have prepared his mind,vision and tactics that will make him to be a successful president........NO ONE SHOULD GIVE AN EXCUSE FOR FAILURE...when you fail admit that you fail and think of how you can perform better,blaming insurgency for your failure shows that you as a president do not even understand what it means to be a leader of over 150 million people,over 200 tribes,over 30 states.......him think say e easy??now I know why some people do say he is clueless...when they achieve something,his pet "doyin okupe"is always quick to talk and dance but when they they fail they start using the insurgency as the reason for their failure....QUOTE ME ONLY IF YOU HAVE SENSE....[/b]

If the president cannot tackle violence headlong, then he isn't fit to lead. He can't hide behind a flimsy excuse like this or why was he elected in the first place if not to manage situations like this?
If boko haram is an excuse, then he should allow capable hands to do the Job to avoid jeopardizing our lives for another 4 years. An average Nigerian life seems next to nothing these days.

They promised to make the country ungovernable for him,so I blve they hv succeed in achieving that..