USA Africa Dialogue Series - Media chat: An analysis of a president’s speech

Media chat: An analysis of a president's speech

BY KAYODE KETEFE

In a media chat last Sunday, President Goodluck Jonathan spoke at length on a number of important issues, all bordering on current socio-economic and political affairs in the polity. 
In this piece,  this writer  seeks to analyse and extrapolate on  some controversial areas in that speech with a view to assessing the logic deployed in support of some of the submissions. After all, we as free citizens, have the right to hold up the utterances and policies of our ruler against the objective criteria of professed missions, democratic tenets and, more importantly, logic and rationality.
Space will not permit extensive treatment of the entire speech, I intend to restrict the scope of my scrutiny to four areas.
To start with, the President justified his travelling to Rio Janeiro, Brazil, to attend the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development while Kaduna and Yobe states were boiling. He said "Those who are worried that I travelled are acting out of ignorance because the tactics of the terrorist is to strangle the government. If they hear that the President of Nigeria or the Vice President could not travel because they struck, they will celebrate it. If the President couldn't go to Brazil because of Boko Haram's attacks on Kaduna and Damaturu; that will send a wrong signal to the international community and the consequences will be too great."
One does not feel comfortable with this rationalisation because the two reasons given – to prove a point to the terrorist group(s) that the government is not cowed by its dreadful activities, and secondly to avoid giving the international community the wrong signal that the Nigerian government had been rendered operationally ineffectual as a result of terrorist activities, does not hold water in the light of the more preponderant concerns.
Refraining from making such travel in the prevailing circumstances would have been a humane display of feelings of respects to the victims and empathy to the relatives of the deceased of the pogroms.  Presidents the world over have been known to cancel important local and international engagements on accounts of tragic occurrences involving large number of their compatriots.
Cancelling the trip to Brazil would have been a sensitive acknowledgment of our collective fate as we struggle for survival against the onslaught of a common enemy; an identification with the people's plight and a soul-bonding invitation for partnership with the peoples of Nigeria.
It would be recalled that President George Bush wept openly during a live telecast moments after the November 9, 2001 terrorist attack on the United States. It never crossed Bush's mind to consider that shedding tears, in empathy with the wasted American souls and the bereaved, would be construed as a triumph by the Al-Qaeda, neither did he reckon that the international community would consider his tears as a dishonourable betrayer of emotions. His focus was simply on the grieving American people.
Secondly, the reasons the President gave for non-disclosure of his assets was not in the least convincing. Hear him,  "Assets declaration is a matter of principle. I have nothing to hide; I declared my assets as Vice-President because the President then did it...It is not the President declaring his assets that will stop Boko Haram. And what is the difference between when I was the Vice President and President; what have I acquired since then?"
Now if words have meaning, the above-statement sounds exceedingly self-indicting. It is like the president is saying  his predecessor set a good example in the area of transparency and openness  which he as the then VP followed but now that he is numero uno, he is not bothering himself on setting similar good example which others can follow.
Thirdly, on the issue of employment and job creation, the president said "We should be grateful that out economy is growing and with the economic growth, there are potentials for job creation, people will come and invest and through these investments, jobs will be created."In terms of job creation, we have short, medium and long term measure. In the short term, we are planning to employ 370,000 people..."
The above statement definitely offers no succour to millions of unemployed or under-employed Nigerians. Our successive governments have always conceived wonderful plans and blueprints on job creations and youth empowerment from time "immemorial" with no palpable and qualitative difference in the status quo.
After two years in office (first year as a vacancy-filling president and the second as duly elected president) the president should have been able to point, in quantitative terms, to verifiable achievements in the areas of job creation  instead of feeding us with further promises which do nothing but imbue us with feelings of deja vu.
Lastly on the issue renaming of UNILAG as Moshood Abiola University, the president did not address the question of the appropriateness and the genuine desirability for the change beyond stating that late Abiola deserved it and that the students were too young to appreciate Abiola's contributions to Nigeria's democracy.
Well, for somebody who had been denied his due mandate as a president, it would have been more appropriate to name the "Aso Rock" itself after Abiola, rather than  changing overnight the 50-year-old brand of an internationally acclaimed institution.  
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com