Okolo Chimennma
In the run up to the 2015 Presidential elections I supported Goodluck Ebele Jonathan not because he was infallible or a saint but I saw him genuinely making efforts for the progress of Nigeria!
One thing for sure; I didn’t expect him to change all the things that were negative with Nigeria in four/eight years.
I also didn’t expect him to change Nigeria to Eldorado in four/eight years either.
But he did make efforts!
He got the best hands he could to help him:
He got Okonjo-Iweala, Olusegun Aganga etc for the economy.
He got Barth Nnaji for power, then Prof. Nebo.
Then he went and brought Aruna Oteh for SEC and lured Ms. Omobolanle for Telecoms and got the creative Mrs. Stella Odua for aviation.
He knew the importance of sports and got the youthful Mr. Bolaji to head the sports ministry.
Then he got Atahiru Jega to head the INEC.
And he brought Akinwumi to head the Agriculture ministry.
GEJ was more interested in pushing the development of Nigeria over his own political Interests!
He built more roads than those before him (ask Fashola), increased our electricity generation capacity, eliminated fraud in the fertiliser distribution to farmers, built our economy to make it the No. 1 destination for foreign direct investments, revived our rails system (which has been comatose for over 30 years), he got Innoson to become Nigeria’s first indigenous car manufacturing and then got others to assemble cars here.
He encouraged the youths to become masters of their destinies through the Youwin, Gwin etc programs. He boosted agriculture via several intervention loans and easy to access fertiliser.
He went and built schools for the itinerant almajiris in the north and 12 new federal universities, set up the maritime academy in Gbaramatu etc.
On corruption; it’s on record that he relieved some of his ministers of their duties on allegations of corruption. He set up the BVN system, TSA, NPISS etc to check corruption.
He encouraged the separation of powers by reducing interference with the other arms of government even when it would affect him negatively (but we called him weak).
These are few things the man GEJ did to endear himself to me and many others like me.
However, propaganda got him out of power in 2015.
Like I said I never expected miracles but the efforts were worth commending.
Now I ask; can we see any concerted efforts from President MohamaduBuhari and his team to make Nigeria better than they met her? From economy to education to sports to power to corruption and infrastructure? Where can we say this government has performed even averagely? I challenge the defenders of this government!
Okolo Chimennma is a lawyer, political commentator and environmental rights campaigner
