Your Excellency, Mr.President, it does not matter anymore who wins the 20I5 elections. Nigeria at that time will need a leader who can manage widespread poverty at the Federal level and state governors, unlike the wastrels we now have, running the show. By 2015, Nigeria’s crude oil exports and earnings will be far less than what we realize now.

In a few weeks time, the Jonathan administration would have completed its second year in office after the 2011 elections – although it will also mean that President Jonathan would have completed his third year as President. It is time to take stock; to ask what has been achieved and what remains to be done.

The media, including me, made a terrible mistake a few weeks ago. It all started from a story in the PUNCH newspaper of April 5, 2013, by one Friday Olokor, titled “Only 27.2% of Nigerians’ll be poor by 2015 –NBS.” The title was totally misleading and other commentators, apart from me, reacted to what, we knew, was a fallacious statement. As it turned out, the Chief Executive of the National Bureau of Statistics, Dr. Yemi Kale, had already sent a correction to media houses in Abuja. Our copy at Vanguard had not reached Lagos by the time I wrote. That was the source of the error on my part.

The floods, which devastated many parts of Nigeria in 2012, should not have caught us by surprise – but they did. For more than a generation, scientists have been warning a deaf world and its leaders about the imminent catastrophe which would follow relentless global warming as mankind heats up his own “home” – the earth. Furthermore, we knew for centuries that the year starts in January and moves inexorably to December.

Many Nigerians over the age of 60 would recollect that statement. Right from our homes to our primary schools and, if we were lucky, our secondary schools, that moral admonition was drummed into our heads. Tell the truth.