No one should be adjudged a success or a failure based on the completion of just 25% of a task. However, it is perfectly reasonable to extrapolate from the trends of a person’s short run performance what outcomes can be expected in the long run. Given what President Goodluck Jonathan reported to the nation as his achievements after a year in office, he is on a path to failure.
No one should be adjudged a success or a failure based on the completion of just 25% of a task. However, it is perfectly reasonable to extrapolate from the trends of a person’s short run performance what outcomes can be expected in the long run. Given what President Goodluck Jonathan reported to the nation as his achievements after a year in office, he is on a path to failure.
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Jonathan’s May 29th speech was an ode to incompetence. The accomplishments claimed in that speech were pathetic admissions of the lack of vision and direction in Nigeria’s leadership. The content of the speech and the premise upon which it was based are an indictment of government and the process of governance in Nigeria. It is not so much the litany of failures masquerading as achievements that are worrisome; it was the lack of shame in the very public admission of those failures by the President. The silence of the Nigerian people is also startling. We seem to have revised our expectations so radically, setting them so low, that anything, even stagnation, passes for progress.
There were a number of things that the President claimed as achievements which are considered normal expectations of any government. Maintaining stability in the polity and ensuring free and fair elections are the bare essentials in any society. That is the minimum that is to be expected of a legitimate government. There should be no apologies in telling President Jonathan that he should expect no thanks from Nigerians for doing the normal, or the expected.
It is odd that the President of the world’s largest African nation, thinks it is fitting to announce to the entire world that some of his government’s major accomplishments in the last one year include reducing how much time it takes to clear goods at the nation’s ports to 7 days, developing an employment initiative that has so far generated opportunities for 1,200 youth out of a population of 150 million people – a paltry 0.0008% of the population, and achieving 4,000 MW of peak power generation.
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The failures in the power sector are particularly disconcerting. The leader of a nation that aspires to be one of the 20 largest economies in the world by 2020, thinks it is appropriate to call the generation of 4,000 MW of peak power a success? Let’s review the facts: In 1980, Nigeria was 97th in global per capita power production, 124th by 1999, and 125th currently. Thanks to Jonathan and the PDP, we have managed to maintain our dismal position in the bottom tier of global performance.
In 1999, peak power generation capacity in Nigeria was 3,000 MW. Now, the Jonathan led PDP government claims it is 1,000 MW higher. Progress is relative, and to understand the scale of Nigeria’s failures consider this; in the 13 years that the PDP has struggled to provide Nigeria with 1,000 MW of power, China has somehow managed to put in about 500 MW of new power generation capacity every week! That fact is numbing and damning. China has been able to develop in every two weeks, the same amount of power that Nigeria has spent 13 years and over $20 billion dollars struggling to generate.
For those who will argue that the power problem existed long before Jonathan case to office, the facts are that of the 13 years that the PDP has been in office, Goodluck Jonathan has been a part of the Presidency for 5 of those years, and President for the last two. Nigerians tend to suffer from collective amnesia, but surely we have not forgotten the dramatic manner in which Jonathan declared a state of emergency in the power sector when he took over after Yaradua’s death and named himself the Chairman of the Power Sector Reform effort. There is sadly still nothing to show in the power sector. China’s case however tells us what is possible. Under the PDP there has been close to $20 billion spent on power in Nigeria since 1999. This would translate to about $20 million per MW of installed capacity. The rest of humanity spends about $2 million per MW for large scale power generation, transmission and distribution.
Our President also brazenly admitted that the failures in the power sector are partly due to what he called “the problem of gas supply which arose essentially due to poor planning.” In case the import of this statement was lost to those who listened to the President’s speech, nothing speaks more to the abject lack of thought that goes into national planning in Nigeria, than the National Gas Strategy debacle to which the President alluded. The nation’s power plan is hinged on the use of natural gas as a fuel source. It appears that all the so called experts that were put on the power strategy committee were so focused on the monies to be made from the procurement and supply of generation, transmission and distribution assets that they forgot that without a fuel source, power cannot be generated.
Our experts forgot that Natural gas cannot magically move from Escravos and Bonny to locations in Lagos, Enugu, Abuja and Kano where power plants will be sited. Pipelines will have to be built, and in this era of rabid terrorism, Natural gas pipelines will be vulnerable to attack. Besides, it takes time to build pipelines. Without pipelines, the alternative will be to liquefy the gas and use tanker trailers or rail cars to transport the gas requirement. This will however also require major investments in liquefaction and storage capacity, and specialized cryogenic trailers to move the gas. For every 1,000 MW of power generation capacity, about 528 million gallons of natural gas will be required per day, as well as 88,000 cryogenic tanker trailers or 18,000 rail cars for transporting natural gas. Such massive infrastructural requirements cannot merely be imagined, conjured or prayed into existence. It takes planning – the type of detailed, rigorous, scenarios based planning that Nigeria’s leaders have proved they are incapable of.
In a serious nation, there ought to be consequences for such errors in planning, and a sense of urgency for recovering the opportunities lost. But this after all, is Nigeria – where the inept are rewarded and the corrupt are honored.
The other achievements the President mentioned are so comical, that while they do not bear serious discussion, they are worth repeating – even if only for their comic value. The achievements the President claimed in agriculture were not for novel technological advances, or policy changes that would enhance the access of farmers to sources of capital and expertise. Rather, we were regaled with stories about how one type of patronage in fertilizer procurement and distribution was replaced with another even more intrinsically corrupt form of patronage – the procurement and distribution of free cocoa pods to farmers. The brilliant strategy announced by the government for kick starting agricultural processing in Nigeria is the imposition of tariffs on wheat and the promotion of a cassava flour inclusion policy in bread making. Why is all this comical? It is because it is a little hard to imagine any of the Presidents of the world’s top twenty economies – a group to which Nigeria aspires – announcing such sophomoric policies to their nation and the world, as worthy achievements without laughing at the absurdity of not just the act itself, but the mere thought of such a show of shame.
The President announced an educational policy that called for more schools without addressing the severe challenges of quality in instruction and the dearth of materials that plague those schools that exist.
Jonathan talked about the Aviation sector and his administration’s efforts at making it safe and secure. The investigations are still on, but the unfortunate crash of the Dana Airline plane a few days after the President’s speech suggest that corruption by operators and regulators might have contributed to the loss of over 150 Nigerians in that crash.
The biggest joke of all was obviously the President’s claim that this administration is serious about tackling corruption. Under Jonathan, there has been no noteworthy prosecution and conviction of a public official by the EFCC or the ICPC. Besides, what moral authority does a President who has refused to publicly declare his assets have for claiming any seriousness in tackling corruption?
The biggest tragedy of all was the President’s failure to seriously address the issue of security. No one listening to Jonathan’s speech would have guessed that he was the President of a nation where lives are being lost daily to the menace of terrorism. The President’s speech offered no clarity on what his administration’s strategy would be to tackle the Boko Haram crisis. Nigerians want to know if there will be negotiations with Boko Haram. The long suffering Nigerian people who are losing their lives and limbs daily to bombs and rifle rounds deserve to know if they should expect an expanded security presence in their neighborhoods. They want to know when it will be safe to walk the streets again, and go to their places of worship without fear that they will be executed or bombed to smithereens. Nigerians want to know when they can breathe again. Those who expected any substantive proclamations on the nation’s grave security challenges would have been terribly disappointed by what the President had to say. Jonathan offered the usual palliatives - sweet nothings, topped off with the traditional sprinkling of patriotic pep talk. Nothing in his speech was even remotely reassuring. The fact that the bombs and the killings have resurfaced with a vengeance is testimony to the ineptitude of this government in guaranteeing the lives and security of its citizens. The fact that reprisal attacks have also begun is telling, and it forebodes a new phase in the crisis, one with severe implications for Nigerian unity. When citizens lose faith in their government’s ability to protect them, they are left with no recourse than to take the law into their own hands.
Jonathan’s May 29th speech was an unequivocal celebration of mediocrity. It was an announcement that at best what Nigerians can expect from this administration is stagnation and stasis. In today’s world, stagnation is retrogression. While Nigeria is marking time, mired in the cesspool of corruption and incompetence, other nations are making tremendous progress and taking giant strides.
Jonathan is failing. No alternative conclusion is possible.
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