Celebrating the Face of Democracy in Africa at 65

Reno Omokri

Quite literally, the best President that Nigeria has ever produced is Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan. Why? Because Nigeria thrives with democracy, and no other person, living or dead, has given Nigeria the democratic dividends that President Jonathan has.

You see, every election cycle produces more disputes that are taken to the various election petition tribunals than the preceding one. The only elections that bucked that trend were the Jonathanian polls. In 2011, there was a 47% reduction in election petitions from the 2007 polls.
The Chair of the Commonwealth Observer Group that monitored the 2011 Nigerian general election, former Botswana President, Festus Mogae, said of those polls:

“Previously-held notions that Nigeria can only hold flawed elections are now being discarded and this country can now shake off that stigma and redeem its image.”
And the trend continued into 2015. But post 2015, we have returned to the pre-Jonathan trend.
And why did we see that pattern under President Jonathan? Because, as he so aptly put it, “It is better to lose power at the cost of gaining honour, than to lose honour at the cost of gaining power.”

Those institutions and infrastructure for which Nigeria now depends on for her greatness and prestige bear the Jonathan imprimatur, including the single-largest individual civil engineering infrastructure in Nigeria, by way of the Abuja-Kaduna super-fast railway, which was built by the Jonathan administration.
This includes the single-largest individual investment in Nigeria since her return to civil governance in 1999, by way of the Escravos Gas to Liquid project, which is billed to provide 26% of Nigeria’s domestic gas supply, and much more for export.

And no other policy has added to Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product in her history, from 1914 to date, like the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Development Act, 2010, otherwise known as the Local Content Act.
That Act forced the oil industry majors to employ Nigerians in all cadres, and to only look abroad if they could not find suitably qualified Nigerians, and to award contracts to Nigerian companies for all engineering works, except no Nigerian corporation can provide the needed works and services.
That legislation has been credited as being the catalyst that saw Nigeria’s GDP overtake South Africa’s as Africa’s largest GDP, after the rebasing of our economy by the National Bureau of Statistics.

And there is much more to say. Including that, Jonathan inspired and signed the Freedom of Information Act, which widened and deepened the democratic space in Nigeria and promoted transparency in government and the private sector.
That legislation was the spark for a conscious effort, driven by Dr. Jonathan himself, which saw Nigeria eliminate corruption in the fertiliser distribution system, by way of the e-wallet system. That policy, along with the introduction by the Jonathan government of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS), which the administration introduced in 2011, requiring the fingerprinting of all civil servants as a prerequisite for salary payments, helped reduce corruption in Nigeria.

Through IPPIS, Nigeria flushed out 50,000 ghost workers during the Jonathan administration’s Presidency, and $800 million that would have been paid to them in annual salaries and entitlement was saved in the treasury.
Those two policies and the FOI law were cited by Transparency International as the main reason why Nigeria made her best-ever improvement in that global agency’s Corruption Perception Index, moving from 144 the previous year, to 136, an 8-point improvement. Thus, those who say Jonathan did not fight corruption do not speak from a factual position.

Former President Jonathan was also particularly and unusually personally involved in curbing youth unemployment, probably because of his background as an indigent youth who went to school without shoes.
Nigeria has a median age of 18.3 years. Our population is young. So the Jonathan administration introduced the Youth With Innovation in Nigeria initiatives, AKA YouWIN, which according to the World Bank, was two and a half times more effective than Mexico’s similar youth job initiative and ten times more effective than Turkey’s own version.

No wonder the National Bureau of Statistics, posited that the Jonathan administration created 6 million jobs through programmes like the YouWIN initiative, Local Content Law, Graduate Internship Scheme, Nagropreneurs and SURE-P.

I know former President Jonathan personally. I named my last child after him. He is not a cleric, or a holy man, and does not have moral absolutes. But unlike a lot of people who do, I have seen him project personal virtues that have left his psyche and permeated the national psyche, thereby injecting a serum of sustained progress, which saw Nigeria becoming the third fastest-growing economy in the world under him in 2015, as ascertained by CNNMONEY (although the World Bank disputed that, and said we were rather the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world at that time),
Dr. Jonathan projected these virtues, and others, like his desire to improve the lot of the then 12.5 million out-of-school children in Nigeria, which saw him build 165 almajiri schools nationwide.

Nigeria’s street children have never had a mortal friend like Dr. Jonathan, who lived through poverty, and overcame it, and was determined that they would do likewise.
Which is why in addition to those 165 almajiri schools, he built 14 new federal universities, and under Jonathan, there was no Nigerian state without at least one federal university.

Born on Wednesday November 20, 1957, as one of only two surviving children to a canoe builder, Lawrence Ebele Jonathan and his wife Eunice Aye Afeni, he was doted upon by his parents as their second surviving child (the first is a successful teacher).
He would go on to get an education, sometimes having to paddle to school. His determination to emerge as the first graduate from his line propelled him to study, until in the year of our Lord, 1981, a 23-year-old Goodluck Jonathan graduated with a Second Class Honours Upper Division degree in Zoology from the University of Port Harcourt, Rivers State.

At that time, there was nothing like blocking in Nigeria. If you were not intelligent, you could not graduate with such high scores.
He ultimately secured a PhD in the same discipline, and became Nigeria’s first doctorate-holder President, and thus it is no surprise that not only did education thrive under his leadership, but through his vision and servant leadership, Nigeria was the first nation to defeat the Wild Ebola Virus in the year 2014.
It is for these and other feats, that I believe that Dr. Goodluck Jonathan is Nigeria’s best President ever. I am proud of him. I am honoured to have served under him. And on the occasion of his 65th birthday, I join his many admirers to say, happy birthday to the face of democracy in Africa.