By Ochereome Nnanna
WHEN President Goodluck Jonathan returned from his controversial Brazil trip where he attended the Earth Summit, he took a commendable consequential step: by speaking to the nation through a Presidential Media Chat.

It was a consequential step in that things had piled up and Nigerians needed to hear from him why he did certain things or refrained from doing certain things or did certain things the way he did them, or whether he was prepared or not to do certain things.

Like millions of others around the country and beyond, my pals and I decided to watch every minute of the chat instead of the quarter final of the Euro soccer championship between England and Italy last Sunday evening. It pays to listen whenever the President speaks, even if, like our President, he is not exactly Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan or Rev Dr Innocent Chukwuma, the Anglican Bishop of Enugu who delivered a powerful funeral oration in Enugu during Ikemba Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu’s burial on March 1, 2012.

I must confess that his performance in terms of delivery was way above what we have seen of him in the past. For instance, he neatly parried the question of whether he would respond to the “summon” of the National Assembly over the security situation in the country. He said addressing the nation through the National Assembly was a normal part of democracy and therefore “no big deal”.

To me, dragging the President to the House of Reps to answer questions (even in a closed session) on how he is dealing with the terrorist insurrection is a little bit gross. I don’t see a president going to disclose security details to a large crowd of 360 people, whose real individual interests and loyalties can only be guessed at. No security adviser would permit that. The only time I envisage the President would respond to such “summons” is probably when he is under an impeachment trial as we saw with former American President Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.

And I think he was being sensational when he alluded to being “abused”. He said abusing him has now become “a big business”. I wonder how one can get rich by abusing a president. Show me the business and I will go into it. I want to remind President Jonathan that every coin has two sides: the obverse and the reverse. Being in public office is often likened to taking a psychotropic drug, such as marijuana (which I smoked only once when I was cajoled into it by fellow students in the 1980s), opium, hashish, heroin crack and coke. There is always the high and then the low.

I remember about barely a year ago when GEJ was swimming in the ocean of goodwill, having just been sworn-in after winning his first election ever. His election is touted to be the second freest and fairest only bested by the annulled Abiola one of June 12, 1993. The romance continued until when the administration decided to withdraw the subsidy on petrol in January 2012.

Many of those who shouted “Hosanna in the highest” now started shouting “crucify him, crucify him”. Such is life. Whenever a president or governor begins to put his policies to work, particularly when such policies would bring about changes in the ways people are used to living their lives, his performance rating will plummet. When he succeeds, the rating will jump again.

GEJ is very fortunate in that most of the people who are “abusing” him are his real friends who want him to succeed. They want him to be a strong and effective leader able to crush Islamist insurgents and any other insurgents that seek to undermine the unity and progress of our country. They want him to succeed in the electricity rehabilitation project, to improve the economy and create jobs, transform our infrastructure and restore the health and educational sectors. By the time he excels Nigerians will be happy to give him a new mandate wholeheartedly in 2015. Only few are enemies who clap when he makes mistakes (such as offering to dialogue with terrorists).

GEJ did not maximise the opportunity to tell Nigerians how he was transforming the economy. For instance, about the railways, he simply told his interviewer: “You should be commending us” without giving us the reason to do so. No facts, no figures, no expatiation. Same with agriculture where he only made the cogent point that fertilizer profiteering has been annihilated. It is a reflection of this administration’s general lacklustre attitude to public communication.

There has been a steady decline in the art of public speaking or communication among our people, and this manifests both at the level of leadership and our children. Ask your child to recite a memory verse and he/she will immediately freeze and begin to spew out words like a toy parrot. Listen to our legislators. Many of them are unable to “captivate” the audience. The art of parliamentary oratory plummeted after the eradication of the Westminster system of government when Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and Chief Samuel Akintola dazzled audiences inside and outside the parliament with their oratorical skills.

Some of our finest presidential communicators since the end of the civil war were General Murtala Mohammed, President Shehu Shagari, General Ibrahim Babangida and President Olusegun Obasanjo as an elected president. These were educated from the 1950s into the 1960s when the school system properly equipped the youth with interpersonal communicative skills. It is difficult to see an American educated person who cannot neatly put his meaning across.

We have a lot of work to do in restoring the art of public speaking both in English and vernacular. A Nigerian should be able to speak the English and his mother tongue (and perhaps other Nigerian languages) with easy skill. Enough of putting ourselves through a grind just because we want to listen to our leaders!