Former President Goodluck
Jonathan has accused Kashim Shettima, Borno state governor, of frustrating the
war against Boko Haram during his administration.
He said the governor exposed the
girls of Chibok Secondary School to danger by failing to heed the federal
government’s directive to relocate them while writing the West African School
Certificate Examinations (WASCE).
Jonathan said this in reaction to
Shettima’s claim that he nearly removed him as governor in 2014 over the
disappearance of Chibok schoolgirls.
In a statement issued on Friday
by Jonathan spokesman, Ikechukwu Eze, the former president also described ‘On a
Platter of Gold- How Jonathan won and lost Nigeria’, a book written by Bolaji
Abdullahi, as “sore grapes and full of lies and gossip”.
THE FULL STATEMENT
Our attention has been drawn to
the claims made by the Governor of Borno State, Kashim Shettima on Thursday at
a book launch to the effect that former President Dr. Goodluck Jonathan wasted
the goodwill he commanded because of bad governance and poor choices in office.
He was also said to have accused Jonathan of believing that he was behind the
kidnap of the Chibok girls.
As a man who had never seen
anything good in the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan on
account of party and other differences,
it has remained our considered view that in a democracy, Governor Kashim
Shettima and others like him are entitled to their opinion, no matter how
jaundiced.
However, it is a sad commentary
on the character of some of our politicians that they go to any length to make
spurious statements, in pursuit of the sad narrative to remain politically
correct. We cannot be deceived by his
crocodile tears and patronizing claim that “Jonathan is essentially a decent
man”, which is a ploy he deployed to justify his false allegation of a lost
glory.
The man who today speaks of
squandered goodwill should be able to tell Nigerians what percentage of the
votes Jonathan got in 2011 from Borno State at the height of that his envisaged
glory according to Shettima, and what it became in subsequent elections. What
was obvious yesterday and has remained so today is that Governor Shettima and
those who think like him never liked Jonathan based on some parochial and
paternalistic sentiments.
We didn’t expect anything less
from Governor Shettima, knowing the ignoble roles he played in frustrating the
war waged by the past administration against Boko Haram, even in his own Borno
State.
He should be able to tell us if
it was Jonathan’s poor choices that led the Governor to expose students of
Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok to avoidable danger, in total
disregard of a Federal Government directive to the Governors in the three
states most affected by Boko Haram to relocate their students writing the West
African School Certificate Examinations to safe zones.
The Governor is now denying that
he had no hand in the kidnap of the Chibok girls even before anybody accused
him of culpability. However, we share the view of those who insist that the
Governor had other things up his sleeve when he promised the West African
Examinations Council (WAEC) that he would secure the girls, and ended up doing
the very opposite, by deliberately abandoning them to their fate, without any
security presence in their school.
It is instructive that while
other Governors in the zone heeded the security advice, Shettima remained the
only one that flagrantly flouted it. Should we also fail to point out that his
decision to reward the principal of Chibok Secondary School, who was
uncharacteristically absent on the night terrorists stormed the school, with
the post of a commissioner, did throw up more questions than answers?
Talking about accountability,
perhaps, Shettima should also do well to explain to the good people of Borno
State and Nigerians what he did with the over N60 billion Local Governments
fund, left by his predecessor, Senator Ali Modu Sheriff.
We understand Governor Shettima
and those who spoke like him accused Jonathan of bad governance and poor
choices, and we would like to know if it was bad governance that led Jonathan
to assemble a-yet-to be matched crop of dynamic cabinet and economic management
team made up of tested technocrats like Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala in Finance
ministry, Dr. Shamsuddeen Usman in Planning, Mr Olusegun Aganga in Trade and
Investments as well as Dr. Akinwumi Adesina leading the charge in Agriculture.
The efforts of the Jonathan administration in repositioning Nigeria’s economy
remain self-evident and it must have indeed been poor choices at their best for
Jonathan and his team to have recorded the following key achievements:
* Nigeria’s Gross domestic
Product rose to $503bn in 2013 and became Africa’s largest economy and 26th in
the world; from 3rd and 46th respectively.
* Nigeria became the number one
destination for Foreign Direct Investment in Africa under former President
Jonathan, with the numbers rising from US$24.9 million as at 2007 to over US$
35 billion in 2014.
* Jonathan Government delivered
over 25,000 kilometres of motorable federal roads from just a quarter of that
number in 2011.
* The Jonathan Administration
resuscitated the railways in the country after about 30-years of hiatus
*Jonathan’s Agricultural
Transformation Agenda ended fertiliser racketeering, encouraged more young
Nigerians to take to farming, boosted local food production and took the
country closer to self-sufficiency in food production by recording more than
50% reduction in food imports. It was as a result of this that the Food and
Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, for the first time, voted
Nigeria the largest producer of Cassava in the world.
* Power generation under Jonathan
was boosted to about 5,000 megawatts in 2014 up from 2,000 megawatts in 2011.
* Prices of food and other
household items remained stable and inflationary pressure was down to a single
digit.
* Under Jonathan, Nigeria
controlled clinically Ebola outbreak to the admiration of the whole world, became Guinea-worm-free and also eradicated
polio, with United States billionaire and renowned philanthropist Bill Gates,
praising Nigeria’s successes against polio as one of the great world
achievements of 2014. Sadly polio has returned to the country with the likes of
Shettima in charge of the endemic states.
* Under Jonathan Life expectancy
in Nigeria rose from 47 years in 2010 to 54 years in 2015.
*Just before Jonathan left
office, CNN Money projected that Nigeria’s economy in 2015 would become the
third fastest growing economy in the world at 7% behind China at 7.3% and Qatar
at 7.1%.
Was it bad governance and poor
choices that reformed the political and electoral processes to the extent that
the United Nations is now pleading with the government of the day to strive to
maintain the standards established by Jonathan?
Fortunately, Nigerians know where
they stand with all of their leaders. All those who are calling Jonathan names
today, and accusing him of having become quite unpopular, should simply take a
walk on the streets of any Nigerian city as real leaders do. That way, they
will accurately gauge their own approval and test their popularity with the
Nigerian people.
On the book entitled “On a Platter
of Gold- How Jonathan won and lost Nigeria” written by Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi,
National Publicity Secretary of the All Progressives Congress, we have watched
for some time as some outrageous fabrications are extracted from its pages day
after day by the media. When the publication of the book, with an ominous title
was first mooted, we knew it will be full of bile and sour grapes. We didn’t
expect truth, sincerity and accuracy of narration, given that the author who
was sacked from his ministerial position by the subject of the book, is now the
spokesman for the ruling APC.
We will therefore like to
dissociate former President Jonathan from the book’s salacious contents, with
all the obvious distortions, lies and exaggerations. Its pages are populated
with gossip, politically influenced newspaper articles, uncoordinated raw data
and unproven claims. Sadly, the author did not help matters, as there was no
rigor or indepth investigations towards establishing the veracity of the
allegations the book contained. For instance, it is ridiculous for the author
to have claimed that the President was forced to sack a certain minister by
another cabinet member when the obvious truth known to all key members of the
administration was that the President acted based on the recommendation of an
internal committee that investigated the matter. This, unfortunately, is the
kind of baseless claims and narrative that run through the entire book, and it
would be pointless devoting our time towards making a case by case response to
all its ridiculous allegations.
We will like to remind Nigerians
of what former President Jonathan said earlier in the year when a similar book
was published, that only the key actors in his Government and in the 2015
Presidential elections could give an exact account of what transpired, not
speculations and conjectures by third party spectators. That time will come
someday.
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