On his death bed, Alexander The Great envisioning his demise to be around the corner, summoned his army generals and told them his three ultimate wishes: The best doctors should carry his coffin; the wealth he has accumulated (money, gold, precious stones) should be scattered along the procession to the cemetery; and his hands should be let loose so they hang outside the coffin for all to see! One of his generals who were surprised by these unusual requests asked for some clarifications and this was what Alexander The Great said:

“I want the best doctors to carry my coffin to demonstrate that in the face of death, even the best doctors in the world have no power to save; I want the road to be covered with my treasure so that everybody sees that materials acquired on earth will stay on earth even as the acquirer dies; and I want my hands to swing in the wind so that people will understand that we came to this world empty handed and we will leave this world empty handed after the most precious treasure of all is exhausted, and that is TIME”.

One thing that cannot be recycled is wasted time. Lost time is never found again. Goodluck Jonathan realized this too late and it caused him a fortune. He once attempted to buy time by succeeding in pushing through the postponement of the elections by six weeks, until it suddenly dawned on him that by labour, it is easier to find food and water, but all of his labour will never ‘win’ for him another hour. And today, the thought that he made history as the first democratically elected president of Nigeria to be defeated at the polls strikes as perfect for an explosion, and has served as fodder for jokes at the bars where Nigerians gather to relish pepper soups and quaff away sorrows.

But to every unpleasant happenings, there is always a deontology (ask Patrick Obahiagbon). When Arthur Ashe, the legendary Wimbledon player was dying of AIDS which he got due to infected blood he received during a heart surgery in 1983, he received ‘deontologies’ from his fans, one of which conveyed “Why did God have to select you for such a bad disease?” To this Arthur replied: 50 children started playing tennis, 5 million learnt to play tennis, 500, 000 learnt professional tennis, 50, 000 came to circuit, 5, 000 reached Grand slam, 50 reached Wimbledon, 4 reached the semi-finale, 2 reached the finals and when I was holding the cup in my hand, I never asked God “Why me?”

So no matter how many ‘deontologies’ people might prop up for Goodluck Jonathan’s failures, courtesy also demands that we pat him on the back and wish him well especially for accepting defeat honourably. After all, of about 170 million Nigerians of his time, he was the only man from his region that has joined the league of the only 5 persons who were democratically elected as presidents, and the only Ph.D holder that has reached that coveted height. On this premise, he is an achiever on his own right. But we need to be clear on our own premise too irrespective of scale and metaphorical hue, because misunderstood premise might precipitate to misconstrued precedence.

From the aforementioned, one of the major reasons why Goodluck Jonathan failed in his political pursuit was because he thought he had time but he never knew life went by so quickly. He mistook a tenure to be 8 years instead of 4, and he forgot so soon that one year is just a mere 365 days and a day, a paltry of 24 hours.
He thought he would always have a tomorrow in office and hence paid abysmal response to the more than 91 electoral promises he made to the masses in 2011. He thought he had all the time in the world: to revive the rail system into world class standard; to complete the second River Niger bridge; to deliver stable constant supply of electricity; to diversify the economy; to create jobs; to enhance access to education; and to fight corruption and terrorism among others. He was a facsimile of Emperor Nero; he slept while Nigeria fizzled. And before he could wake up, it was already time!

Goodluck Jonathan slept with his two eyes closed until insecurity succeeded in terminating the lives of some 20,000 Nigerians, kidnapped some, and rendered some 3 million others refugees in their homeland. Under his nose, corruption persisted and corrupt individuals were not chastised opening wide the suicide iron bars of looting. Under his watch, public debts and exchange rate ratio accentuated, external reserves more or less, depreciated; and poverty incidence and unemployment levels simultaneously reached an all time high.

As he slept, Nigeria lost her soul and Nigerians became susceptible to ethnocentrism and prone to xenophobic attacks. At home, ethnicities turn others of different ethnic groups into objects of mockery, while thousands of Nigerians most of whom sneaked into other countries in an attempt to enjoy opportunities which their country refused to provide for them, were most times denigrated and given a kiss of death by their hosts. Since Nigeria now has no soul, nothing is betrayed by hurting her. You could wreck her infrastructure through corruption, destroy her refineries, wreck her national airlines, destroy her national shipping lines, restore her railway to Second World War locomotive standards in the 21st century, destroy her universities, spend more than $16 billion to import darkness, and all you would get are Nigerians complaining that they have been marginalized from the theatre of wrecking and destruction. But gracefully, these are all in the past as the searchlight now beams on the present.

To avoid going the way of GEJ, Muhammadu Buhari, despite all surmountable foreseeable challenges, should like water from a busted dam arrive with plans that can make Nigeria to refuse to be an infuriating address even at the tamest of times. The pace with which he does these will determine his appreciation of time. As Late Prof. Chinua Achebe puts it, “a man who means to buy palm wine does not hang about at home until the entire palm wine in the market is sold”.

Metaphorically speaking therefore, it is clear that ‘G’MB is bequeathed a Nigeria that has for so long enjoyed an exponential and monumental growth in decadence and inertia; a country with a history of un-rebuked underachievement, iced by public officers who have imbibed into their bone marrows the attitude of extravagance and conspicuous consumption in a sea of poverty.

As outlined in my article “Symptoms of a Sick Country” as published by the National Review Magazine in their January-February edition of 2014, ‘G’MB is taking on authority in a Nigeria characterized by “gruesome road accidents as a result of bad roads; police shootings of innocent people sometimes on act of disputes over N20 bribes; lecturers who demand sex or cash in exchange for good grades; students who offer sex or cash in lieu of hard work; civil servants who pocket billions in public funds entrusted in their care; law makers who won’t give a straight answer about their entitlements; local government officials and governors who stow away hundreds of billions each month in ‘security votes’ – and then pocket huge contract sums as well; highways daubed with a thin film of tar and declared “constructed”; neighbourhoods swallowed by flood water; civil servants and private sector employees who go for months without pay; civil servants and private sector employees who go for months without putting in a decent day’s job; daily traffic jams that seem choreographed from hell; hospitals stripped of equipment; hospitals where high bills and death are the only guarantees; and school buildings in such dismal shape that class conscious rodents abandon them for classless cockroaches”.

‘G’MB has just collected a mantle of leadership in a Nigeria where the ruling class connives with multinationals to dupe citizens; a country where homelessness is the rule rather than the exception; a country where 81% of its population generate their own electricity through alternative sources to compensate for irregular power supply; a country where people randomly maim and kill for sheer catharsis; a country where there are more than 6,000 uncompleted projects and more than 45,000 ghost workers; a country where every man, every decision, every policy is weighed and viewed through a religious and tribal prism; a country where universities and polytechnics are bereft of equipment and research funds; where cities have no trash disposal systems; where many adults are so crushed by hardship that they declare their own children witches and wizards; and a country where the naira that used to equal the dollar now weakens daily.

To sum it all up, there is much to be done and if ‘G’MB is determined to maximize time, he can accomplish a lot. Of course, no sane person will expect him to build a perfect Nigeria in 4 years even if he has got a magic wand – no government has ever done that in the world. Even in the United States, the leading democracy, the April 2013 jobs data shows that approximately 23 million Americans are unemployed. That is almost the entire population of Ghana which a 2012 head count put at 24.9 million. But just as Obama had a tough time with re-election in 2012 because U.S unemployment rate reached 8%, GMB might even have a tougher time in 2019 or even go the way of GEJ if present statistics did not improve.

Statistics must show that our today (‘G’MB’s administration) is better than our yesterday (GEJ’s administration) if he must have a head way. It is a familiar knowledge that during GEJ’s era, the United Nations once rated Nigeria as the 8th most violent country on the face of the earth; UNESCO once ranked the country as the 8th most illiterate country in the world; and the CPI once placed Nigeria in the 135th position out of 176 countries surveyed for corruption. In this same era, average life span was once pegged at 52 years; the gap between the rich and the poor sometime increased from 0.39 to 0.42; and in 2013, reports made it clear that Nigeria was the worst place for a baby to enter the world. In GEJ’s era also, statistics once pinned the total expenditures on education to about 3.5% of GDP, while the Nigeria Bureau of statistics (NBS) says that unemployment is at 24% and growing at 16% annually; etc.

Thanks to information technology. Concomitantly, Nigerians will continue to keep tabs on how much these statistics improve before 2019; how much their lives improve; and how much ‘G’MB fulfils his own electoral promises among which include: making the naira equal to the dollar; establishing a welfare system that will pay between N5, 000 and N10, 000 per month to the poorest 25 million Nigerians; free primary education plus free meal; and providing millions of public housing etc. Unlike his predecessor propounded if he had won, ‘G’MB doesn’t need to spend much on public relations as most Nigerians now have the whole world on their finger tips. From the comfort of their bedrooms, they can even monitor how he lives his life in Aso Rock.

This is Africa! Every morning a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up, it knows it must out run the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. Figuratively, it doesn’t matter whether ‘G’MB is a gazelle or a lion. The most important thing now is that the sun is up, he better start running. The less than 15 million Nigerians that voted for him and the more than 155 million others that stood afar off wish him well. Till 2019 by the grace of God.

Orji Iheanyi is a Public Affairs Analyst and a Consultant Agronomist and can be reached at orjilla@gmail.com

Heard of the story of Alexander the great sometimes ago,its quite inspiring.