Yet another presidential gaffe
By Editorial 19 hours 1 minute ago

•Jonathan’s attempt to demonise Lagos over fuel protests is careless and condemnable


PERHAPS it is not inconceivable that even kings and presidents sulk, either when generally things have not gone their way; or when a policy they laid much store by has taken a terrible hiding from an irreverent public.

What is not conceivable is when such sulking is made a piece of public presidential speech. Worst still: when the audience of that presidential address are youths being given a pat on the back for doing well; and when the logic of that rather simplistic sulking is no more than presidential old wives’ tale!

That is the sum total of the latest exchange between President Goodluck Jonathan and the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) on a rather careless presidential comment on Lagos, vis-a-vis the controversial withdrawal of fuel subsidy, a strike on which ground the country for the whole of seven days, from January 9 to 15, until the strike was called off on January 16.

Hosting National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members who made the NYSC President’s Honours Award in Abuja on January 16, President Jonathan had grumbled rather aloud that his government could not continue to subsidise the pump price of petrol for adult delinquents who had 10 to 15 cars, and gave those cars to their juvenile delinquent children to cruise around by the grace of cheap petrol “in Lagos”!

This rather careless statement has worked up to lather the ACN, the ruling party in the state. In a riposte fired by Alhaji Lai Mohammed, ACN’s national publicity secretary, the party interpreted the president’s comments to be an assault on the integrity of Lagos as a city-state and foremost economic contributor to the Nigerian pot; as well as the proud bastion of democratic dissent that has not only kept budding Nigerian dictators at bay, but secured the delicate balance of the Nigerian polity.

The party, quite correctly, cautioned the president against ethnicising pan-Nigeria anger against his ill-thought out fuel subsidy removal policy. It also told the president to be wary of making Lagos and Lagosians the wilful object of his ire, else he might just box himself into a politically precarious corner. The ACN then asked for a presidential apology to the government and people of Lagos.

To start with, the ACN rebuke is welcome and we fully ally ourselves with it. The reason is simple: the presidential cut is most unkind and unfair. Lagos might have been the beach head for the mass protest against the hugely unpopular petroleum downstream deregulation policy. But then the same Lagos just taught the rest of Nigeria the beauty of largely violent-free protests, in which the people, without breaking heads or hacking limbs, made their voices heard loud and clear.

But even the more sublime beauty of the Lagos protests, with its epicentre at the Gani Fawehinmi Park (GFP), now informally renamed Gani Freedom Park (GFP), was the tenor and composition of the protesters. Though Lagos is ethnically Yoruba, the organisers built on the city’s status as a former federal capital and the enduring commercial capital to amass a truly metropolitan and articulate pan-Nigeria crowd that proved democratic dissent is not necessarily treason. Why the president should pooh-pooh the city’s demonstration of solid democratic culture with insult is bewildering.

But, of course, the president with his misguided handlers wanted to secure a regime, even if it harbours dangerous anti-democratic tendencies. But the Lagos protesters did not want to topple the government, even if they were determined to topple its anti-democratic penchant. Still, all these niceties are often lost to desperate power merchants, driven by power for power’s sake.

But on that, Lagos has bad news. From the colonial age of Lugard, to the military generation of power ruffians and now to the present age of “cabals” (for and against Jonathan), Lagos has stood firm to insist on what is best for the democratic polity. Even a president with a notorious record of unforced gaffes ought to have kept quiet to lick his wounds, instead of enveloping himself in another avoidable controversy from which he would emerge even more diminished.

http://www.thenationonlineng.net/2011/index.php/editorial/34422-yet-another-presidential-gaffe.html

GEJ is a m.oron and a very silly one at that.