We deserve better than mere good luck. After 50 years of existence as a country we should not be dependent on the luck of the gambler, the opportunism of a traveller and the well wishing of a fisherman in an oasis! But Nigeria is in the hands of whatever fate has in store for him/her/it––we must provide all the possibilities of political correctness!
Wishing anyone good luck assumes that that person has what it needs to undertake whatever task the person has been set or has set him/herself. This is the kind of greeting you wish a Mandela as he is sworn in as president of South Africa. He has come to the position taking risks and winning, especially when he decided that as leader of the African National Congress he would go ahead and talk to the enemy since the enemy wished to talk to him and hope that his comrades in the movement would trust him to do the right thing by them. I played the part of Govan Mbeki in the film Mandela and de Klerk and all my lines were questions to Mandela as he went into his talks with the Boers! But he went in and he won. Wishing President Mandela good luck at his inauguration as president of South Africa had a basis in previous tasks undertaken and brought to success.
It is the kind of greeting to give to Barack Obama at his inauguration as president of the United States of America in the light of his epic struggle to win the nomination and then to win the presidency. Whatever trials and tribulations would beset him in the next five years would beset him against the background of identifiable tasks previously achieved.
It is the kind of greeting you give to Usain Bolt as he prepares for another 100 metres dash knowing that he had already set a previous world record doing that dash. But good luck Nigeria? In what context? Wishing Mandela good luck had a context. He worked within an existing institutional infrastructure built we understand for whites only but made to serve every South African citizen. Barack Obama operated within an institutional infrastructure which worked no matter who to work it. Wishing him good luck had a context. Mr. Bolt perhaps spent his youth running away from street bullies, misguided law officers and his irate parents. On what basis can we wish Dr. Jonathan good luck besides simply calling out his first name?
Dr. Jonathan has started on the wrong footing by entertaining the idea of more state creation in Nigeria. If there is anything that is needed in Nigeria it is putting an end to the creation of states which are no more than channels for the distribution of petrol dollars that has kept the failed state of Nigeria together. It is one of the institutions that have continued to fuel unpunished and unpunish-able corruption. One of Ibori’s self-exoneration was that the state of which he was governor did not complain that he had stolen money from it, why would the federal government that had no locum standi be complaining!
Dr. Jonathan makes promises about doing something about the power supply without spelling out what he intends to do. President Olusegun Obasanjo claimed that the power question was the work of saboteurs and as a military general working as a civilian president of Nigeria he could not deploy the military power necessary to deal with saboteurs. So they continued their damaging of the Nigerian psyche, never mind the circumstance.
Then came Yar’Ardua, of blessed memory, who claimed that the power problem was created by a mafia but he was not long with us to face the mafia. Anyone who knows that has happened in Italy, the original home of the mafia, and how the president there has worked assiduously to prevent any legal check on the mafia, can imagine what would have happened if Yar’Adua had been around long enough to challenge our mafia. With what, other than good luck, would Dr. Jonathan fight the importers of generators?
Maybe Nigeria is a gambling country. Nothing in its previous history points to good luck in its efforts. Political unrest, civil war, financial mismanagement, judicial killings as well as judicial irresponsibility, and idiotic impositions on the future have been some of the headlines in its 50 years history as an independent country. To take the last item first – idiotic impositions on the future. It is well known that people who have failed in the past have a knack of imposing on the future in order to claim the rights of existence in the present. People who have never lifted a hoe would threaten to fill values and reduce mountains to plains for fair play. If only the future could defend itself against such impositions.
The first and perhaps the most annoying imposition on the future was made by that master of Nigeria’s failures, General President Olusegun Obasanjo who claimed that some private university would produce a Nobel Prize winner in five years in Nigeria! Of course he knows nothing of the institutional infrastructures that support universities such as Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Cape Town and numerous others around the world.
And then there are the idiotic Vision 2010, Vision 2015, Vision 2020 which each failing Nigerian government has imposed on the future shamelessly, continuously, without doing anything that would make such futures merely permissible through the building of infrastructures. The greatest of such infrastructure would be the provision of continuous power supply to the whole country. Thinking of which one should ask publicly if it is true what conspirator theorists insist is an attempt to stop the industrialisation of the south of the country by denying electricity supply to the whole country. There was a time when about 65 per cent of the industrial power of Nigeria was based in the South of the country. This was said to be unacceptable for the powers that be in the North. As a result the leadership of the power supply corporation sabotaged their own year after year, decade after decade, in order to inflict political punishment on their rivals in the South. And Nigeria became the world capital of imported generators.
There is a myth that winning gamblers know when to stop. Winning gamblers do not know when to stop. They in fact do not want to stop because they wish to break the house. Losing gamblers of course never stop until they win, when they then want to break the house and they become losing gamblers!
So, once more, our chances are skewed. Dr. Jonathan, good luck!
cooooool
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