By Dele Sobowale
“Trust is a matter of bets about future actions based on experience. A track record of keeping promises is a good predictor”. Rosabeth Kanter, Editor, Harvard Business Review; Sept-October 1992. (VANGUARD BOOK OF QUOTATIONS p 252).

In your address to your “Fellow Nigerians”, on January 7, 2012, after sneaking up on them and stabbing them on the back on January 2, 2012, titled WHY WE REMOVED FUEL SUBSIDY, you made some statements which are absolutely untrue.

I dealt with one last week, namely, your claim to “feel the pain that [we] all feel”. Within three days of the strike, several people in my community were without money and begging for food – any sort of food. You, Mr President, have just started spending the first month’s tranche of your N1 billion for food this year.

Even, a five year old kid can tell the difference. Furthermore, even some five year old kids now understand that they now suffer because of one fellow called Jonathan. I doubt if your kids are going hungry. So how, Sir, do you feel the pain except vicariously?

Yet, at a time like this, another untruth is the last thing Nigerians expect from their President. So, let’s agree, you don’t feel the pain.

Unfortunately, having exposed that fib, we must now confront the real heart of the matter. That address was full of the same justifications, uttered ad nauseum, by you and your officials. It sounded more like the noise of a broken record because it broke no new ground.

Furthermore, it failed to address the heart of the matter; and that is trust in the President. Frankly speaking, Mr President, Nigerians no longer trust you and that address worsened the problem. Some of us were distrustful very early. We have our reasons – to which I shall refer shortly.

Most people, who “voted for Jonathan not PDP” are now just waking up to the fact that our President lacks credibility. And that will constitute the biggest cross you will have to carry from now on –irrespective of how this face-off ends.

As long as Nigerians no longer trust you, assurances such as “whatever pain you may feel at the moment will be temporary”, “I am determined to leave behind a better Nigeria”(which leader ever promised to leave Nigeria worse off?), “Tomorrow January 8, I will launch a robust mass transit intervention” (pray, Sir, what is robust about 1,600 buses when Lagos alone has over 150,000?), are all empty words if the man uttering them does not command trust.

Let us not waste time, Mr President revealing the reason people don’t trust you. You lack a good record of keeping promises; redeeming pledges or admitting agreements which turn out not to favour you. At the expanded meeting of the PDP caucus held at the Presidential Villa on December 22, 2002, you were listed as the 35th participant out of 47.

(I have the complete list of the participants at that meeting – if you still insist on disputing the accusation). At that meeting, the majority position was eight years for the South and eight years for the North. Perhaps because you never expected to be a contestant for President in 2002, since you attended as Deputy Governor (spare tyre), you voted with the majority.

In 2010, finding yourself as the acting President, you denied any knowledge of zoning arrangement and that denial paved the way for your use of incumbency power to get elected in 2011.

Nigerians, at home and abroad, have repeatedly called for total probe of corruption and corrupt public officials – past and present. You, Sir, are, at once a past Governor of Bayelsa state and a present President of Nigeria.

The CCB disclosed that twelve other governors, including you, Mr President, had under-declared their assets and had been sanctioned and made to “make refunds”.  Let me present to you a true story you might not have come across – involving honourable conduct in public office.

One Mr Spiro Agnew, in 1968, was elected with President Nixon as Vice-President. Yet, on their second term, in office, and years after Agnew was the Governor of the State of Maryland, he was discovered to have had a small shady deal.

Mr Agnew, honourably resigned as Vice-President based on the disclosure alone. I can assure you, no President of the United States will remain in office if he was found to have contravened the law –even twenty years before he became President. That is why Americans can have trust in their Presidents. Did you by any chance pay the appropriate taxes on those assets you failed to declare?

I leave you to your conscience in order to move to other matters.

WHY ARE THE PROGRESSIVES COMPLAINING –2

“If you work with glue, sooner or later, you are going to get stuck”.

Leo Tolstoy,1828-1910, in WAR AND PEACE.

(VANGUARD BOOK OF QUOTATIONS p 76).

The “Progressives” now lament every wrong visited on them by President Jonathan while pretending that they know not how the man got into office. Indeed, it is no longer a secret that most of the Southwest, including my friends at THE NATION newspaper, voted for Jonathan.

The “Progressives” massively abandoned their own candidate – Nuhu Ribadu – to vote for the PDP candidate forgetting that they were entering into an agreement with someone whose record of redeeming pledges is atrocious.

Since that self-inflicted injury it has been one insult after another. First, the leader was charged to court by the Code of Conduct Bureau, CCB, for the same offence committed by Jonathan without being prosecuted. Then, lately, Lagos, a state which is perhaps the most peaceful nationwide, was invaded by the Army, on “orders from above” simply to intimidate the people who wanted to exercise their constitutional right to protest objectionable government policies. Never mind that majority of the protesters also “voted for Jonathan not PDP”; they have now seen the results of their folly.

Suddenly, the Governor, who supported subsidy removal, raised alarm; the National Publicity Secretary of the party echoed it; other “fellow travellers”, including the faithful media joined the chorus.

We laughed at them at Unijankara because we warned them and Nigerians not to vote PDP or any of its candidates. They will pay very dearly for their error in the next three years and four months; unfortunately, so will my fellow Nigerians.

$2 Billion oil block sold at $5 million in Nigeria. Forget Wikileaks. Read “Deleleaks”. Only N5,000 per copy.