Mr. President, Enough Of Promises

Every year, Nigerians celebrate the arrival of a new year with so much pomp. After the celebrations, it is, for many of them, a return to gloom for the rest of the year.  The look towards the federal and other levels of government for succour through faithful implementation of policies and programmes, as it used to be in the immediate post-independence years, has long disappeared.

Celebrations for the arrival of 2013 are over and Nigerians are left to their devices. Only an inconsequential percentage,  mostly governments’ cronies, have any hope in the three levels of government to postitvely impact on their lives. It is time  President Goodluck Jonathan proved them wrong.

Since Christmas, the President has been waxing sweet on reversing the ugly drift in the living standards of the people. He has promised he would depart from the years of maladministration that have consigned many Nigerians to abject poverty and the country itself to primitive standards. Last week, he said he has been slow in action because he did not want to rush into decisions and implementation only to discover he had made a mistake. And only yesterday, he reiterated his administration would be moving fast in formulating and implementing policies and executing projects that would directly touch many lives and improve living standards.

Of course, only a few Nigerians believed him. That shows how bad government’s image has sunk before the people. And it is telling President Jonathan rhetorics stopped fooling the people a long time ago. What he needs to do is to start showing transparently that the government do care for its people.

For a start, he has missed the first opportunity to do so. The 2013 Appropriation Bill the National Assembly passed in December does not assure Nigerians that government has turned egalitarian. In the 2013 Bill, government and the federal legislators are still placing more concentration on egocentric spending for which recurrent expenditure is gulping N2.38 trillion. Execution of capital projects is once again condemned to suffer with an appropriation of a lower sum of N1.62 trillion.

The Jonathan administration has once again snubbed analysts’ informed position that it needs to exhibit more fiscal discipline on recurrent and devote more funds to capital works. The decay in infrastructure, especially power and roads, has remained and government’s annual promises to fix them have been unfulfilled, mainly because there are never funds to do so. When little funds are available, large-scale corruption in the Jonathan administration, which even the United States of America’s government has confirmed to exist, has rendered projection execution poor or even impossible. Without solid infrastuctural development, the Nigerian economy will never grow in practical terms. And the living standards of the people will always be the worse for it.

Jonathan must immediately start showing he has the will to battle the corruption monster. He needs to patently punish corruption within his cabinet and other sectors before Nigerians can start taking him seriously. So long as he continues to mother-hen corrupt ministers and other aides, his adnministration will never move fast, as he has promised, to implement any serious policy or execute any meaningful project for the people.

Happy New Year for Nigerians? It depends on how “born-again” the Jonathan adminsitration has become in its overall  management of the economy. Since he became president, the management has been, to say it bluntly, bad. Jonathan himself has been inept, his aides are widely believed to be corrupt and the federal legislators have been too greedy and self-centred. The challenge before the president is how to muster the will to make himself and others directly responsible for making Nigeria work.