Man is often in a precarious if not callous relationship with Time. Right from the conception of Man, Time strictly starts counting! One is often enthralled at the mindlessness of Time as people wait with bated breath for changes in seasons and other transitions. Time delivers and dispatches our expectations. They, Man and Time, are at once twin phenomena that symbolize and demonstrate the competitiveness inherent in all dreams and achievements. Time ticks for Man and Man races against Time. There is no one alive who does not have to eat, work, sleep, study, struggle etc against Time, as a dreaded piece of device, literarily installed in the head, or mounted on the complex console of Man’s mechanism for pursuing personal and societal goals.

It is the stethoscope that tests our consciousness; a measure of our readiness for life and stimuli to the interplay of forces and concepts that determine and decide our progress in our chosen enterprise. It makes Man sound his car horn maniacally, beat traffic light illegally, jump the gun or break protocols against all civilized standards. Man would give anything to be ahead of Time, to beat Time, but Time appears often to have its way and carry the day. In queues – in other places too – Man desires to take his place in a position that is not in accordance with his arrival. At the best of times, Man celebrates any advantage he seemingly records against Time. People and institutions celebrate birthdays and anniversaries depending on how they have fared with the exigencies of Time. It governs our comings and goings; provides the ink with which diaries are kept and history is written.

In the main, Time’s relationship with Man appears to be strictly business-like! To help him, it offers different timepieces for different callings and enterprise, so that there are different ‘time zones’ or ‘pieces’ that Man applies to effectively assess his progress, reward performance or advise improvement in his multiple occupations and distractions. In life, as the only context of man’s experiential participation, there has come to be social time, business time, leisure time, academic time, political time, sports time etc. Therein lies the dialectics of Man-Time relationship. At age 35, for instance, a footballer is about to hang his boots, due for retirement from the beautiful game, while at the same age in the military, an officer is just about beginning to shine his boots with pride and unbridled sense of heroism, willing, with many more years ahead, to honour his allegiance to fatherland.

In athletics – in sports generally – facts, figures and records are strictly defined by Time. The gun is shot; the athletes take off the mark, strain their muscles to breaking point, thump the ground with ferocity, burst sweat glands and get soaked to the pants, to beat Time. Every discipline in athletics has its own time and timing and athletes are expected to conform to such timings. In mere seconds, Usain Bolt powers himself into the hearts and minds of millions of admirers across the world in the 100 meters discipline. His 9.58 record stands out of reach in the vaults of IAAF, and other athletes now chase that record, to run it down, in a greater record time. In just 9 seconds, Bolt sends the world into ecstasy and spends minutes in flamboyant celebration, after every race, perhaps to round off the competitive moment, knowing that mere seconds, before thousands of people, do not come across as satisfactory. Even within the sub-ten seconds, every split second counts. An athlete’s performance is evaluated within the 100-meter stretch in 10-meter, 50-meter marks, the home stretch, across the finishing line. That is 100 meters dash!

Conversely, in politics especially the model that plays out in this part of the world, where opposition sleeps with the whistle of discontent stuck in their mouth, such linear narrative is not out of place. Not unlike many words and phrases produced by politics, first hundred days in office, from the time of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, has provided a political calibration, in a manner of speaking, for testing the dimensions of a government’s performance in office within this timeframe regardless of such government’s belief or preparedness for such an appraisal. Right from independence, our political expectations have been complicated made more so by those who stretch our capacity to hope and wait in a manner Joseph Conrad has called ‘a pathetic immobility of patience’. Nigerians seem to have been shortchanged far too long; from 1999, for example, when we were told that our resumption of democratic governance was a ‘learning process’, ‘a nascent democracy’ and as such the ‘dividends of democracy’ would only trickle down to the people. That was the explanation offered. In some way, however, Nigerians knew full well that there was a wholesale onslaught on their sensibility.

The first eight years – from 1999 – has completely paled into insignificance, what remains are the vestiges of those years of deception, and the principal characters, ironically, are still around broadening our negative capability for tolerance. The wantonness of our politicians over the years has honed our sense of vigilance. It is not as though Nigerians cannot wait for the present government to succeed but they have lost the capacity to do so. With improved digital technology and communication, Nigerians now engage in an intense appraisal of their leadership. On a daily basis! It has to be admitted that this is not the best time to be a politician, for this is a season of distrust.

So, when the evaluation of the first hundred days of this government is being greeted with opposing claims and other generalities, there are sufficient grounds to be struck with a sense of déjà vu. The denial that no promises of CHANGE or achievement were made for the first hundred days in office is both unsettling and self-defeating. If the cabinet is yet to be formed due in large part to the coup de grace in the hallowed chambers or due as has been suggested to the president’s endless search for incorruptible Nigerians, and if till this moment, a clear-out political blueprint is still elusive, then Nigerians are entitled to the moral high ground of demanding a report card, yes, even in first hundred days! The ruling government has been far too reactive. How many more weeks and months should this government continue to belch the reported rot of the last administration in their utterances and rationalizations? Must every posture even when regressive be explained away or woven into the tapestry of the oft-touted moral background and integrity of the president? Body language, it has to be said, invalidates an affirmative disposition though the president’s men and their party have admitted body language into their own evolving political lexicon as evidence of the president’s taciturnity and celebrated preference for action. The reference to the profligacy of the past government is beginning to wear out, to lose its potency and validity, making the government sound repetitive and sometimes downright monotonous!

The first hundred days in office, as a concept of political Time, is a political reality in Nigeria, as elsewhere. All beliefs and patterns of expectation should not be overhauled in the name of an inclusive commitment to CHANGE. Can the party in power now add it to their own lexicon? At least, it has a meaning for Nigerians for whom the past 16 years still looks like a yesterday that would not go away. Time and the counting of it has become our collective pastime as we watch and monitor the progress of this dispensation. The politics of first hundred days in office notwithstanding, the buzz about it serves to help the government realize that Time is passing callously, and if May 29 to date still looks like a couple of hours ago, then the party in power needs to gird up their loins. Nigerians are desirous to celebrate the success of the party in power as our own collective success, especially in the areas of insecurity, corruption and other falsities.

We cannot, to celebrate their failure, wish that the prevailing insecurity subsisted. We cannot, to dance at their poor performance, wish that corruption should endure in our political sphere. The point has, however, been made severally: the party’s blueprint on the one hand and the cleansing of the Augean stable on the other should be juggled concurrently. After all said and done, Nigerians would be utterly disappointed if in the end, with all its prospects, this government’s achievements and poor performances are separated in an agonizing photo finish! Time, of course, is of the essence!

ThisDumebi[b][/b]