As usual, his supporters wanted to know if there was something personal in my remarks. They could not, of course, accuse me of tribalism that time. Yar’Adua/Jonathan followed with the unwieldy seven-point agenda; I counseled three – power, roads and resolution of the Niger Delta conflict for the first term and others for the second –if ever there was a second.

In the year 1987, after an exhaustive study, personally funded, I sent a detailed report to Babangida’s Minister of Transport (name withheld for personal reasons) pointing out that in a few years, motorcycles (okada or achaba) would become the major means of urban transport on account of SAP.

“Of course you cannot know a man completely, his character, his principles, sense of judgment, not till he shows his colors, ruling the people, making laws. Experience, there’s the test”.

In all my years in the US, I never read of a president “commissioning” a state project. Jonathan seems set to break the “Mugu record” laid by Obasanjo. Is this leadership, given that no Ministry or parastatal this year has an approved capital vote mid-July?

We were mostly wrong. But, we discovered we were remarkably right on one point – never appoint someone as Chief Executive Officer, CEO, for a giant, multinational organization, employing hundreds of thousands of people and impacting the lives of millions who happened to be the last man standing after an accident – for the simple reason that they generally don’t know how to manage simple, not to talk of complex organizations.