WHAT determines where President Goodluck Jonathan is found? Who decides who the President of the biggest black nation on earth meets? What considerations seal decisions on the President’s public conduct? We are concerned and we want to state our abhorrence to the continuous diminishing of the Presidency by the people the President meets and the miniscule circumstances of those engagements.

Our President should be too busy to be meeting all sorts of business people, especially in public. What is the motivation? Why does he have to hold those meetings? What do they do for Nigerians? Have we admittedly started running a government of influence peddlers?

It is unacceptable for the President and the Vice President to receive business people and for them to have the pictures of those events splashed on the pages of newspapers. Do they understand the implications? What is so important about the business of these people that the President and the Vice President have to receive them? Who mans the affairs of Nigeria while these fringe meetings are holding?

Are we such a nation that our President has so much time to spend on items that ministry’s directors should handle, and with the Vice President in tow. Now the implications! Some of these business people are smart enough to bamboozle everyone with their closeness to the President and they have all the evidence to prove it. They would be the same people who soon will not pay taxes and will have all manners of exceptions from import duties. Nigeria ultimately loses from these presidential indiscretions.

Our concerns are more profound. Where else does the President see serious heads of governments and presidents engage in these shenanigans? How does the President decide who to receive of the millions of business people who crave his attention? Will he be able to fulfil his avowed constitutional oath to be fair to all in the discharge of his duties? How does he decide who he meets and who he does not meet? What major businesses do these people propose that will require the President’s precious presence? Why are these business people, especially foreigners, not directed to the appropriate Ministers, ministry director and trade and commercial associations?

Nigeria is behind in many crucial indices for human survival. The President cannot waste further time on pleasantries that people exploit to ruin the nation. It is bad enough that we have wasted opportunities that accrued to the nation, sometimes by the mismanagement of the most irredeemable resource – time. Must we continue in that unbecoming direction?

In proposing a transformational agenda for the country, the way the President carries himself, the manner in which he interprets his offices, what he does, who he does it with and things he never does, are important. Nigerians want a departure from the decadent past and they hoped that is what a transformational agenda would mean.

Nigeria’s President in 2011, who is to lead all the influences that will make us one of the top 20 nations in the globe by 2020, should be far too busy to engage in these distractions of receiving business people, whose main interest could be to leverage on photo opportunities with the President for their own benefits.

We expect the President to spend most of his time in resolving matters that are crucial to the survival of the nation. They range from security to the environmental and infrastructural challenges the nation faces and they are mounting.

They should be engaging enough to leave him with no time to meet with people whose daily throng to his presence diminishes the President and leaves his Ministers unengaged.

So, Mr. President stop receiving all sorts of business people in Aso Rock.