IMAGINE how many Venezuelans, Algerians and Angolans would drown in laughter, should their presidents tell them that a major achievement of the regime, for which it seek new mandate is ensuring a uniform price of petroleum products throughout the country.

And precisely on the 13th of last month at the ruling party convention in Abuja, President Goodluck Jonathan claimed that having ensured a uniform price of petroleum product across the country, he is entitled to be elected to the highest office in the country.  A man, so proud of a modest issue of uniform price of petroleum products in a country desperately in need of big ideas to sort out fundamental disconnect in its social, political and economic life is the least deserved for the highest office in the land.

In very simplistic and shallow form, President Jonathan has dismissed the idea of sovereign national conference, claiming that after one hundred years of its colonial fabrication, Nigeria has no need to re-examine herself.

The depth of Nigeria’s socio-economic and political crises require far more than routine governance, of administration and service delivery.  However, even the basic rudiments of administration and self-delivery are difficult to accomplished, without addressing the fundamental flaws in the structure and institution of the country.

President Jonathan has not demonstrated any imaginative insight to these structural and institutional flaws but has rather relapsed to the comfort zone of vain political promises.

Critical decisions that would stem the tide of Nigeria’s sustainable decline would definitely challenge the existing privileges of the ruling elite and their hangers on and therefore would not be taken lightly.

The current arrangement of 36 states which is merely an inefficient and expensive administrative outpost for the corrupt and incompetent central authority is both inappropriate and useless as an organ of a workable federal arrangement.  The governors have since the return of civilian rule constituted themselves into a notorious cabal for political bargain and extortion.  In their various states, they operate chiefly as mafia kings, stealing blind their respective states treasuries, doling out patronages without recourse to law or even decency.

They orchestrate a rule of fear and intimidation, with the federal authorities condoning and cuddling them for political purposes.  No respectable federal structure works in this way.

Gradually, unelected traditional rulers are biting out more of the political pie.  The entire title of the Nigerian state is becoming a huge bogus and laughable.  With traditional rulers increasing visibility and role, the country is gradually shedding every pretence to republicanism, a political status that was not won lightly in 1963, when the Queen of England was stripped of any political role.  How ironic that traditional rulers who should have confined their role to purely cultural matters are weighing in heavily in the country’s political life, distracting and distorting its constitutional evolution.

The distortionary role of traditional rulers coupled with state government’s interference have rendered the local government administration ineffectual and hardly responsive to the rural population.  The local government has literally ceased to function to improve the quality of lives but as a corrupt conduit for draining resources in the rural areas.

To fix the challenges of these nature is beyond the rhetoric of ‘good governance’.  It requires a deeper understanding of the critical and strategic disconnect in the institutions and structures of the state.  Even the endemic nature of corruption in the country is beyond the routine administration of the justice system, legislation and strengthening of anti-graft agencies.  As crucial as these steps are, the structural nature of corruption in Nigeria’s political and public life, require a deeper re-examination of the fabric of the state in a thorough-going restructuring and institutional changes.

For all these deep structural challenges to pull the country from the malaise of dysfunction and malfunction, President Jonathan offers a commonplace, rudimentary platitudes.  He does not appear to understand that governing the country in the old and conventional way is not sustainable.  While the country creaks and decomposes into a structural anomaly, President Jonathan and his disparate and discordant political entourage sing the old tune of mere administrative repair.  It does not register in their modest political insight that mere administrative issues cannot be fixed, without the deeper and fundamental political questions being resolved.

President Jonathan in the nearly past one year since he came to office has not demonstrated any singular art of creative insight into Nigeria’s numerous challenges.  For him, the continuous carnage in Plateau State, the Boko Haram challenges and the rising crime level are just a question of law and order.  His best solution, which has not ended the conundrum is the deployment of soldiers and policemen.

For him, and his entourage, these are security challenges for which the police and army represent the simple answer.  This again demonstrates the profound deficit of imaginative thinking.  The lingering crises across the country are the cumulative residues of the unanswered national questions.  National questions is the unending process of seeking consensus and accommodation of any people at any historic moment.  All nations exist and subsist by continuously addressing the national question at any moment of critical challenge.

Britain with several centuries of constitutional evolution has not shied away from the challenge.  The previous Labour government did not simply describe the Scottish, Irish and Welsh nationalism as treasons but responded with a political concession and accommodation that provided self-governing institutions to these groups, including for the first time a parliament in both Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

President Jonathan and his entourage which profits from the disfigured structure of the country, vehemently deny that there are national questions and do not even remotely contemplate a platform to answer it.  But their attitude of indifference to the national question pushes the country to the brink.

The scheduled election in the next few months is crucial not in the sense that it would solve any of the country’s nagging problems, but would prepare a framework to begin to address the issues.

President Jonathan has shown the least readiness to embrace the gamut of challenges, and it is for these reasons that Nigerians should reject President Jonathan’s bid to be elected.

Mr. Onunaiju, a journalist is based in Abuja