By Rotimi FASAN
DID President Jonathan play Nero last week, fiddled while Rome burned? Was he at anytime in South Africa to celebrate the centenary of the African National Congress when Nigeria was held in the throes of a paralysing strike to restore oil subsidy?

Some reports said the President was indeed out of the country; but his special adviser on media, Reuben Abati, said such claim is a slander, that the President was very much in Abuja when the rumour mill went into overdrive on a non-existent presidential visit to SA.

True or false that is just one more evidence of how badly the Jonathan administration manages information. It waits until grass starts growing under its feet before acting.

Which is why today Boko Haram, a fringe group that should have been silenced immediately it started its campaign of terror early last year, now dictates the security agenda of the administration while the President howls to the world that he sits atop a government infested with the murderous group’s loyalists?

So when Abubakar Shekau, a spokesperson person for Boko Haram, appeared Osama bin Ladin-style between two Kalashnikovs, in a YouTube video justifying their actions and promising more troubles for Nigerians, Dr. Jonathan must have been sweating. It’s difficult to know what to believe these days but another anecdote has it that President Jonathan had, during one of the meetings between the administration and labour leaders before last week’s strike, vowed to die before a firing squad than reverse his unpopular decision to increase prices of PMS.

Beyond showing his level of determination, the statement is an indication of the President’s patriotism, a disease our leaders manage to contract once they get into positions of authority. They get more patriotic than the rest of us traitors to the motherland. So far the President rests in the cosy ambience of Aso Villa where a princely N3 million daily goes to titillate the presidential palate.

Far from the madding crowd on the streets, he must be getting reports by the minute of how youthful Nigerians fighting for their future and others simply enjoying a game of football in their neighbourhood are being felled by police bullets.

The strike action appears to have surpassed the expectations of its organisers. The crowds on the streets increase each day even as the markets and other places of commercial and government activities remain shut. Surely, the President and his team of advisers must have underestimated the resistance of Nigerians.

It was this very fact that probably led to the hubristic action of cutting of ‘subsidy’ from fuel products at a time negotiation was supposed to be going on. A government that acted as if it wanted Nigerians to understand the reason why it was no longer wise to retain subsidy decided, by its precipitate action, it could no longer wait to act out an already written script.

In doing this, the administration was only toeing a well-beaten path when leaders could send Nigerians on the fool’s errand of national debates such as the one that preceded the rejection of the IMF loan in the mid 1980s, even when government had already decided things in its own way.

General Babangida then kept Nigerians across the regions debating the necessity or otherwise of taking the IMF loan. In the end, he bowed to the superior argument of the people, or apparently so, and went ahead to impose a Structural Adjustment Programme that was the embodiment of the loan he had rejected on behalf of Nigerians.

Anyhow, Babangida allowed Nigerians their say while he had his way. But Dr. Jonathan who was yet to cut his political teeth chose to use it, the very first time he wanted to show he was his own man- he chose like Dracula to deep his unformed political teeth into the neck of Nigerians who can hardly see what has been his contribution to bettering their lot since he became President.

Amid growing social insecurity and economic failures, the administration decided to take the path of least resistance- punish Nigerians for his own failure of leadership. Rather than taking on Boko Haram or the cartel in the oil industry that has made nonsense of the subsidy government pumps into fuel importation, this government decided it would slap Nigerians in the face.

The consequence of that action is the fury that shut down the country in the past one week. It is a baptism of fire and President Jonathan must be experiencing right now what it means to be isolated politically.

It is not impossible that Nigeria might yet come to that point when ‘subsidy’ would be removed from oil but they would like to know what they would be getting in replacement for the unending subsidy removal. Every successive government has, since the 1980s, been removing ‘subsidy’ from fuel.

Each removal is preceded or followed with promises of all sorts of ‘palliatives’ but nobody sees them. Worse yet, in a few months time the same government that went to great length to remove subsidy would be talking of another removal and everyone is left wondering when subsidy was restored in the first place.

In all this, these so-called leaders continue to live in opulence; they have no idea what it means to stand on long queues to buy kerosene or pay for petrol. They live in official quarters, drive official cars and receive official pay. They expect Nigerians to make sacrifices they (the leaders) are not prepared to make or believe promises that would never be fulfilled.

This government plays too much of the ostrich. What it needs to do is take on the cabal that continues to make nonsense of attempts to make Nigerians enjoy better life. Expose the cabal and let Nigerians see those behind their misery.

But we all know things would never come to that level for the very people responsible for the criminal fleecing of Nigeria are the same ones sponsoring candidates into our legislative and executive arms of government.

They are the big financiers of presidential and gubernatorial campaigns and donate the largest sums during political events. They dictate who become our security chiefs and heads of our financial sectors. How can a commissioner of police arrest some goon in the pay of the moneybag who sponsored his appointment as the head of police? To cross them is to incur the wrath of the devil himself.

And it is in this sense that we must understand the cry by Jonathan which amounts to abdication really that his government is under the control of Boko Haram. Since he can’t fight his tormentors, the President has chosen to turn his fear on Nigerians. But as I once warned here, nobody wins a war against his own people. Chikena!