By Donu Kogbara
THE enormous outpouring of goodwill that President Goodluck Jonathan inspired during and last year’s election season has largely and gradually evaporated.

Wherever I go nowadays, I hear bitter complaints and contemptuous remarks about his personal style, his administration and the people around him.

Even within his South-South home zone, the instinctive and widespread loyalty he once enjoyed is fading fast; and angry gripes about Jonathan, his wife (Dame Patience) and their cronies and subordinates are increasingly commonplace.

Developmental and security problems

Given that this limping country has yet to solve its numerous developmental and security problems, it is obvious that a lot of the criticisms Jonathan faces are reasonable. But I believe that some of his critics have highly suspect motives.

Jonathan definitely needs to radically transform himself, do more for his core Niger Delta constituents and earn the genuine respect of all Nigerians.

He needs to become a visionary, role model and hero. He needs to search his soul, discipline/expose/liberate his mind and jettison pedestrian thought processes, dreary banal statements and the same old ways of doing things.

When millions of citizens of all religious persuasions, generations, socio-economic groups and ethnic origins decide that you are a decent kinda guy and invite you to be their Oga for at least four years, you are truly blessed. Leadership is a privilege as well as a responsibility; and Jonathan needs to return the favour.

He needs to be much more introspective, much more rigorous on an intellectual level, much more focused and much more effective.

Confronting challenges

He needs to dynamically, fearlessly and sincerely confront the myriad challenges that we would like him to undertake on our behalf.

He needs to unceremoniously dump any member of his team who is not willing or able to operate in an honest and competent manner. He needs to prove that he can be a seriously serious man of substance. 

However, a significant percentage of disgruntled anti-Jonathan elements don’t have a leg to stand on. Many happen to be Northern grandees who achieved little or nothing when they were in charge for nearly four decades. And their pious insistence that Jonathan should out-perform them is downright hypocritical.

Those who inhabit glass houses should not throw stones!

  Church matters

THE latest drama to occupy the public sector space revolves around the fact that Gitto, a foreign construction company that has received quite a few juicy government contracts, built a church in Otueke, President Jonathan’s village.

The church is being described as a bribe and Jonathan is being accused of corruptly benefitting from the patronage he has lavished on Gitto.

I really don’t understand why Nigerians are so fond of ignoring bigger issues and concentrating on relatively trivial details. Why pick on a church in a village when there are so many other glaring examples of unethical conduct in high places?

Better a spiritually uplifting place of worship that serves an entire community than the individualistic frivolities – jewellery, private jets, etc – that VIPs normally purchase with the funds they corruptly extract from eager-to-please contractors!