The year of Gooodluck By Ose Oyamendan

What a year! It still feels like last week when we all held candles, singing songs of hope as Goodluck Jonathan completed an unlikely journey from a journeyman deputy governor to the presidency. We all knew that anyone not happy with the election was either suffering from a serious case of bad belle or needs God in his or her life.

Seriously, who could complain when the leader of the main opposition party went against his own party’s candidate and nodded at his followers to vote for the man with the good luck? Or when his main challenger planned on a northern strategy for an election to govern a whole nation.

I love Jonathan. I have to put that out there in case there’s a celestial agenda at play here. You don’t want to be hustled and hassled in the hell that Nigeria is sometimes and then get condemned to an eternity of seasoning in the fires of hell because you made that mistake of going against heaven’s agenda which I’m sure the Jonathan group will lay claim to.

So, today, I have come to sing Jonathan’s praises and defend him. I have come to write about a year of unparalleled success. For a start, I have never seen a candidate win an election and immediately go about changing the portion of the constitution that deals with the length of the term of his office 

People think that is power mongering. Well, what would you rather a president monger? Rumors or rumors about things not as salacious. And, so what if it led to the current accusation of seeking a second term? What is wrong with an ambitious man? Do people know the opposite of an ambitious man?

Let me tell you what you get when you get an unambitious man in power. You’ll be lucky to have an area boy with starched attire. Now, we have a man with a Ph.D. lusting after power and everyone joins a choir of protests. You can never satisfy Nigerians 

I wish I wasn’t hungry and thinking about where the next naira would come from otherwise I would have got myself a placard, scribble “JONATHAN FOR LIFE” on it and plant myself in the middle of the Third Mainland Bridge so the world would know what’s what.

I truly feel bad for the president about the insecurity in Nigeria. It makes him look, well, incompetent. But, what’s a doctor of zoology to do? Boko Haram is not a group of animals bouncing around cages. They are human. How is this even fair? The man went to school to study one thing and now he’s faced with another thing! Totally unfair. And, those of you who think differently just know that you’re jabbering against a divine mandate here and don’t expect Jonathan to dip his finger in the cool waters of heaven and drop some water on your hell- scotched tongues.

I loved the fuel subsidy imbroglio in January. I knew the president was a doctor but no one told us he has a streak of a comic genius in him. The way the whole thing was managed felt like Richard Pryor WAS orchestrating it. One morning, Nigerians woke up and the fuel price had changed. It was like in the government’s infinite wisdom, it felt Nigerians won’t notice. That’s the way it always happens in the movie.

Trust Nigerians not to follow a script. They had the guts to pour on the streets for almost a week, imitating people from other lands with their shameless Occupy Nigeria movement. Who occupies his own land and designs a T-shirt announcing it? I don’t sit in my house with a T-shirt proclaiming “Ose’s Couch”.

But, what does the president do? He unveils a masterstroke and appoints Nuhu Ribadu whose own party leader had sacrificed him to pave way for the Jonathan presidency to a position that effectively makes him the anti-oil baron. This is what Ibrahim Babangida used to do in his hey days. Find the most popular guys and put a bucket on mud on their head. Then, sit back and watch them dance their way out of a mud spill.

I have one minor complaint, Mr. President. Where is the power? I’m not asking for too much. I don’t even want you to put a date to it. I just want to know if regular power supply would return in this lifetime? You see, I grew up in an era when power outage was so irregular that when it happens we used to scream, “NEPA”. Then, as if to mock us, the power would be back within minutes. I knew I was spoilt then. Is today a punishment for the past?

You and your team probably don’t read anything these days, Mr. President. I don’t blame you. It’s tough to get past the congratulatory sections of the newspapers. All those thick texts are like the devil’s scribbling. But, if you or your team are trolling through the web, looking at those sites that makes a man and woman’s heart go boom-boom, I just want to say, keep the deaf ears turned to the critics. What do they know.