By Douglass Anele
That said, I am not sure that Jonathan and members of his cabinet have read let alone absorbed the principles of effective leadership documented in the memoir, considering the mediocre handling of our national affairs since May 29, 2011.

In the not too-challenging task of selecting Nigerians for national honours, for instance, the President and his team manifested poor judgment, because the list of honourees, as usual, is dominated by members of the ruling and business elite whose avarice and lack of patriotism are the principal causes of Nigeria’s underdevelopment.

So, it is just not enough for Jonathan to possess the biography of a great leader and give it to others to peruse: it is very important that he and his lieutenants should study, digest, internalise and put the lessons derived therefrom into effective use in governance. Now, what paradigm or model of effective leadership has our President absorbed from Lee Kuan Yew’s biography – assuming he has actually read the book? What feedback did he get from the ministers and advisers he gave it to read, especially concerning how they intend to practicalise its insights for national development? If effective governance based on performance is used as a standard in answering these questions, the honest answer is: the President and his team thus far have not demonstrated that they have learnt any useful lessons about leadership from Yew’s biography.

From another perspective, members of the National Assembly constitutionally empowered to counterbalance and check excesses of the executive arm of government, despite overwhelming national outcry against legalised looting of the treasury, have continued in their evil sybaritic ways as if the voices of Nigerians do not matter at all. Senators and House members are still collecting outrageous allowances, still enjoying perks of office far beyond their meager contributions to national development. Jonathan, as the number one citizen of Nigeria, is not setting a good example in terms of wise management of available scarce resources, judging from the fact that the federal government is still spending huge sums of money on frivolities, despite the global economic meltdown which has adversely affected countries with much better economies than ours. I suspect that if the President and other “pigs” in the giant Animal Farm called Nigeria continue to run things the way they are doing presently, the country would be bankrupt sooner than later. Now, on the much debated removal of fuel subsidy, the federal government has once again manifested the very features of ideological bankruptcy that brought our country to its present condition of arrested development – tardiness, incompetence, deceit, lack of transparency, accountability and sensitivity to the needs of downtrodden Nigerians. Every responsible government subsidises one thing or another which it considers critical to the welfare of its citizens.

For instance, in the United States of America, which is the Mecca of neo-liberal capitalism and free market ideology, government still subsidisesthe agricultural sector because President Barak Obama and his cohorts understand that food security is aconditio sine qua non for America’snational security. That is why food and several other derivatives of agricultural products are relatively affordable in the United States. Sometime ago, a minister from Venezuela declared in Abuja that for twelve years prices of petroleum products have remained the same. Venezuela is an oil-bearing country like Nigeria.

Hugo Chavez and his team know that the alleged attractions of deregulating the oil sector cannot be compared with the benefits Venezuelans derive from affordable petroleum products. In Nigeria matters are different, because we have a democracy of the rich, by the rich and for the rich, a corrosive democracy in which the ruling elite dominated by unpatriotic elements have continuously failed woefully to rise to the challenge of transparent, responsible and disciplined leadership. Anyway, neither President Jonathan nor any of the champions of fuel subsidy removal has established beyond reasonable doubt that there is fuel subsidy, except perhaps in the sense that government does not charge the international price for crude oil refined in Nigeria. Going by the exchange rate of the naira to international currencies like the dollar, euro and pound sterling and the price of crude oil in the international market, the pomp price of Premium Motor Spirit should be higher than the current official price of N65 per litre. That is an incontrovertible fact. But must the crude oil to be processed for domestic use be sold at the same price as what obtains in the international market? A responsible government cannot allow that, because the citizens deserve to benefit from the natural endowments of their country.

As a result of corruption, planlessness and indiscipline of successive administrations in Nigeria, the refineries have been systematically crippled so that a few rich business tycoons can exploit the opportunity to rip off Nigerians through importation of refined petroleum products. Since for many years now due to the country’s inability to refine enough crude oil to satisfy domestic consumption, what government officials euphemise as fuel subsidy is probably the difference between the total cost of importing petroleum products and making it available and the prices they are sold at the filling stations.

Even so, a genuine people-oriented government ought to available to the citizens verifiable facts and figures to clarify the processes entailed by importation of refined petroleum products: that is, how the importers are selected, where they are getting the products from, whether they are getting the best bargains in the market, and the landing cost per litre.

By speaking in vague generalities about spending N250 billion annually on fuel subsidies, the federal government is creating the impression that it has something to hide, perhaps to protect big-time oil marketers that have been patronising top government officials and the ruling party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The argument that funds that will accrue to government after the removal of fuel subsidy will be used to address problems in critical sectors such infrastructure, education, health etc. is disingenuous; it is the same hocus pocus or shibboleth late Gen. SaniAbacha used when he imposed a petroleum tax and created the Petroleum Trust Fund to manage revenue derived therefrom. To further demonstrate government’s lack of sincerity on the issue of subsidy, a top government official justified planned hike in electricity tariff by claiming that government will, after the price increase, subsidise electricity consumption for the poor. To be concluded.