Written By Editor
A
loosely bound group of yesterday's men and women seems to be on the
offensive against the Jonathan administration. They pick issues with
virtually every effort of the administration, pretending to do so in the
public interest; positing that they alone, know it all. Arrogantly,
they claim to be better and smarter than everyone else in the current
government. They are ever so censorious, contrarian and supercilious.
They
have no original claim to their pretensions other than they were
privileged to have been in the corridors of power once upon a time in
their lives. They obviously got so engrossed with their own sense of
importance they began to imagine themselves indispensable to Nigeria.
It is dangerous to have such a navel-gazing, narcissistic group inflict
themselves with so much ferocity on an otherwise impressionable public.
We are in reality dealing with a bunch of hypocrites.
With
exceptions so few, they really don't care about Nigeria as a sovereign
but the political spoils that accrue from it. And so they will stop at
nothing to discredit those they think are not as deserving as they
imagine themselves to be. President Jonathan has unfairly become the
target of their pitiable frustrations.
Underneath their
superfluous appearance, lies an unspoken class disdain directed at the
person and office of a duly elected president of the country. It is a
Nigerian problem, perhaps. In the same advanced societies which these
same yesterday men and women often like to refer to, public service is
seen and treated as a privilege. People are called upon to serve; they
do so with humility and great commitment, and when it is all over, they
move on to other things. The quantity surveyor returns to his or her
quantity surveying or some other decent work; the lawyer to his or her
wig and gown; the university teacher, to the classroom, glad to have
been found worthy of national service. When and where necessary, as
private citizens they are entitled to use the benefit of this experience
to contribute to national development, they speak up on matters of
public importance not as a full-time job as is the case in Nigeria
currently.

What then, is the problem with us? As part of
our governance evolution, most people become public servants by
accident, but they soon get so used to the glamour of office that they
lose sight of their own ordinariness. They use the system to climb: to
become media celebrities, to gain international attention and to morph
into self-appointed guardians of the Nigerian estate. They mask self
interest motives as public causes and manipulate the public's desire for
improvements in their daily struggles as opportunity for power grab.
They are perpetually hanging around, lobbying and hustling
for undeserved privileges. They exploit ethnic and religious connections
where they can or join political parties and run for political office.
They even write books (I, me and myself books, packaged as cerebral
stuff); if that still doesn't work, they lobby newspaper houses for
columns to write and they become apostolic pundits pontificating on
matters ranging from the nebulous to the non-descript. Power blinds them
to the reality that we are all in this together and we have a unique
opportunity to do well for the taxpayers and hardworking electorate that
provide every public official the privilege to serve.
Unsatisfied
with the newspaper columns, they open social media accounts and pretend
to be voices of wisdom seeking to cultivate an angry crowd which they
feed continually with their own brand of negativity. They arrange to
give lectures at high profile events where they abuse the government of
the day in order to gain attention and steal a few minutes in the sun;
hoping to force an audience that may 'open doors' for them, back into
the corridors of power. These characters are in different sizes and
shapes: small, big; Godfathers, agents, proxies. The tactics of the big
figures on this rung of opportunism may be slightly different. They
parade themselves as a Godfather or kingmaker or the better man who
should have been king. They suffer of course, from messianic delusions.
The fact that they boast of some followership and the media often
treats them as icons, makes their nuisance factor worse. They and their
protégés and proxies are united by one factor though: their hypocrisy.
It
is in the larger interest of our country that the point be made that
the government of the day welcomes criticism and political activism.
This is an aspect of our emergent democracy that expands on the growing
freedom of expression, thought and association but there is need for
caution and vigilance, lest we get taken hostage by the architects of
odious disinformation. Nigerians must not allow any group of individuals
to hold this country to ransom and no one alone should appropriate the
right to determine what is best for Nigeria. The accidental public
servants who have turned that privilege into a life-long obsession and
profession must be told to go get a life and find meaningful work to do.
Those
who believe that no one else can run Nigeria without them must be told
to stop hallucinating. The former Ministers, former Governors, former
DGs, and all sorts who have been busy quoting mischievous figures,
spreading cruel propaganda must be reminded that the Jonathan
administration is in fact trying to clean up the mess that they created.
They want to own the game when the ball is not in their possession.
They want to be the referee when nobody has offered them a whistle. They
seek to play God, forgetting that the case for God is not in the hands
of man. One of the virtues of enlightenment is for persons to have a
true perspective of their own location in the order of things. What they
do not seem to realise or accept is that the political climate has
changed.
When one of them was in charge of this same estate
called Nigeria, he shut down the Port Harcourt airport and other
airports for close to two years under the guise of renovation. The Port
Harcourt airport was abandoned for so long it was overgrown with weeds
after serving for months as a practice ground for motoring schools. It
was reopened without any improvement and with so much money down the
drain, and the pervasive suspicion that the reason it was shut down in
the first place was to create a market for a new airline that had been
allowed the monopoly use of the other airport in the city.
Under
President Jonathan, airports across the country are being upgraded,
rebuilt and modernized; in less than two years, the transformation is
self-evident. Perhaps the greatest hypocrisy from our see-no-good
commentators comes from the one who superintended over the near-collapse
of the aviation sector who is now audacious enough to claim to be a
social critic.
For the first time since 1999, the Nigerian
Railway Corporation is up and running as a service organization. The
rail lines have become functional from Lagos to Kano; Ewekoro to Minna,
and very soon, from Port Harcourt to Maiduguri, Abuja to Kaduna and
Lagos to Ibadan. They couldn't do this in their time, now they are busy
looking for money that is not missing with their teeth. When questions
are asked, they claim they invented the ideas of due process and
accountability. They once promised to solve the crisis of electricity
supply in Nigeria. But what did they do? They managed to leave the
country in darkness with less than 2,000 MW; abandoned independent power
projects, mismanaged power stations, and uncompleted procurement
processes. The mess was so bad their immediate successors had to declare
an emergency in the power sector. It has taken President Jonathan to
make the difference. Today, there is greater coherence in the management
of the power sector with power supply in excess of 4, 200 MW; a better
conceived power sector road map is running apace, and the administration
is determined to make it better.
They complain about the
state of the roads. Most of the contracts were actually awarded under
their watch to the tune of billions! They talk about corruption, yet
many of them have thick case files with the Economic and Financial
Crimes Commission, the courts and the police on corruption-related
charges. One of them was even accused of having awarded choice plots of
government land to himself, his wives, his companies and other relations
when he was in charge of such allocations! Really, have we forgotten so
soon?
These yesterday men and women certainly don't seem to
care very much about the Nigerian taxpayer who has had to bear the brunt
of the many scandals this administration is exposing in its bid to
clear out the Augean stable. They'd rather grandstand with the
ex-General this, Chief that, Doctor this and ex-(dis)Honourable Minister
who has no record of what he or she did with the funds the nation
provided them to deliver results to protect our interest so that we
don't end up continuing to make the same wasteful mistakes.
It
is enough to make you shudder at the thought of any of them being part
of government with access to the public purse; but then we've already
seen what some of them are capable of doing when in control of public
money, authority and influence; and to that the people have spoken in
unison – they have had enough. Nigerians are wiser and are now familiar
with the trickery from these persons whose claim to fame and fortune was
on the back of their public service.
Our point at the risk of
overstating what is by now too obvious: We have too many yesterday men
and women behaving too badly. We are dealing with a group of power-point
technocrats who have mastered the rhetoric of public grandstanding:
carefully crafted emotion-laden sound bites passed off as meaningful
engagements. That is all there is to them, after many years of hanging
around in relevant places and mingling in the right corridors, all made
possible through the use/abuse of Nigeria. Our caveat to their audience
is the same old line: let the buyer beware!
Dr. Abati is Special Adviser (Media and Publicity) to President Goodluck Jonathan
PSN
Five
men accused of brutally raping and killing a woman on a New Delhi bus
have today pleaded not guilty. The girl’s body is pictured being taken
home
Anger: Indian women participate in a silent procession to mourn the death of the gang rape victim
Fury:
A lawyer representing the men said they signed statements in the
special fast-track court today saying they were innocent. Activists are
pictured following the girl’s death
Horrific:
The girl was savagely attacked when she boarded a bus with a male
friend after a trip to the cinema in December. An Indian woman holds a
placard during a protest
Anger:
The savage assault caused outrage throughout India. Protestors are
pictured trying to break through a police cordon during a demonstration
in New Delhi
A
dream destroyed: A man bows his head at a candlelit vigil for the
23-year-old student – affectionately called ‘Bitiya’, or ‘little
daughter’ by her parents – who died after being gang-raped on a moving
bus in New Delhi
Speaking
out: The 28-year-old IT specialist friend of the rape victim has spoken
about their closeness. This is a file picture of protestors
Accused: A Delhi police van, believed to be carrying the five accused men, leave a court last week
