MDadmin
Last weekend, the PDP was in Bauchi to hold a North East regional rally. It was a roll call of the biggest names in the party, all led by President Goodluck Jonathan. As usual, Jonathan bungled his rally by playing politics instead of being Nigeria’s president.
He accused the governors from the region of creating the condition which allowed the insurgency in that region of Nigeria to fester. And betraying his inability to rise to presidential heights, he still compared what was happening in the North East to militancy in his own state. But do these PDP people think at all? Do they honestly have a sense of honour or a sense of shame? It is incredible that they could hold a rally in Bauchi, yet the same president could not spare time to visit Yobe to commiserate with the people on the tragic massacre of Nigerian children a few weeks ago.
Jonathan refused to visit; he could not send his vice, Namadi Sambo; and the Minister of Education never saw a need to also visit. Those children are not theirs, obviously, and the region could have been in Sudan, or wherever, as far as they are concerned.
Presidential responsibilities
A caring president who sees every part of his country, his own, would have also visited Borno in the wake of the attack on Maiduguri and the Giwa barracks in the city a couple of weeks ago.
Jonathan has continued to allow petty politicking to becloud his presidential responsibilities in respect of his relationships with Borno and Yobe. It is instructive that the same president allocated merely N2 billion as fund for the reconstruction of the entire North East part of Nigeria. Yet he found $1 billion to fight oil theft in the Niger Delta.
If the past is our guide, it won’t surprise if the $1 billion end up in the pockets of Niger Delta militants, allies of President Jonathan. The PDP cannot expect people of a region that the president has not shown any modicum of empathy to also vote for them and its president, Goodluck Jonathan.
We must collectively remind President Jonathan that he has not acted presidential in the way that he has responded to the continuing suffering in that segment of our country. There is a long list of indecencies in the way the PDP denizens have related to the feelings of Nigerians.
That is the way the party increasingly became, having become addicted to power without responsibility since 1999. But President Jonathan and his PDP sunk much lower into absurdity over the last weekend by flying into Bauchi to hold a rally.
It was a most unfortunate display of insensitivity by a president who swore to an oath to do justice to all sections of Nigeria, without exception! Those in the ruling party as well as those who rule us just don’t appreciate the weight of the responsibility they willingly chose to carry.
