Nigeria Content Online

A calamitous
national occurence was casually under-reported as a human interest or
crime story by some newspapers last week. It should have been the stuff
of screaming headlines and angry, editorials Fifty year-old Shuaibu
Atanda is a father of six hired by the Lagos University Teaching
Hospital to evacuate the bodies of dead babies on a contractual basis.
He was arrested on July 3 in the outskirts of Lagos with five
Ghana-must-go bags containing the corpses of 76 dead babies he was
contracted to bury at Atan Cemetery. Here are the gruesome details from
the proverbial horse’s mouth:

“I am a private
contractor with LUTH and I have been helping the department of Morbid
Anatomy to clear unclaimed babies corpses for the past two years. The
corpses the police found with me are corpses for the months of March
and April – 40 corpses for March and 36 corpses for April. I was
supposed to bury the corpses at the Atan Cemetery at Yaba but I was
financially down because I have used almost all the money I requested
from the hospital to bribe the people working at the Morbid and Anatomy
Department.

“I also bribed
people at the account department. I gave one Mr Abraham Ekohmi, the
unit head of the Morbid Department, N50,000; I gave one Mr Everest,
40,000 and two staff of the accounts department 10,000 each, so that I
can continue with my job. The money I charged the hospital for my
service is N185,000 and it was Mr. Ekhomi that inflated it to that
amount. After settling all of them, I was left with nothing to bury the
corpses at the Atan Cemetery at Yaba, because they were demanding
N90,000 for each month from me before they will collect the corpses.
Since I did not have the N90,000, I decided to help myself by taking
the corpses to a bush at Agbowa to bury them. It was because I have to
bribe my way that was why I could not afford the cemetery fees.” It is
tragic that this story had zero shelf life in our newspapers.

Subscribers to the
various – and increasingly visible Nigerian Internet listservs such as
Naijapolitics, Talknigeria, NIDOA, and Nigerianworldforum – even tried,
as we say in Naija-speak. Because most of them are based in
Euro-America and are part of the social regimes of national shock and
outrage that would have greeted the idea of seventy-six dead babies
discovered in bags in Britain, Canada, or the USA, they screamed for
about two or three days before that thread was forgotten. However, some
of the commentators went the predictable way of a knee-jerk
condemnation of Mr. Shuaibu Atanda. As far as I know, only Mr.
Ibukunolu Alao Babajide, an Arusha-based lawyer and a prominent member
of the Nigerian Internet community, offered reassuring perspectives on
the broader national and systemic implications of the tragedy.

Mr. Shuaibu Atanda
is one of those honest and hard working Nigerians who should be on the
national honours list as opposed to the extant culture of crowding the
worthless list with scurrilous members of the political status quo
whose only qualification for national honours is the fact that they
have been able to steal a couple of billions from the Nigerian people.
Mr. Atanda belongs in the class of those little dispossessed people who
not only bear the brunt of the visionlessness of the morons in the
rulership in Abuja but who also have to clean up after them.

When you turn your
University teaching hospitals to baby death factories (LUTH even has to
hire private contractors to evacuate the tons of dead babies they
manufacture!); when whatever is left of structure has, in turn, been so
corroded by corruption that even the roadside contractor hired to do
the job is unable to afford regular cemetery fees, why arrest and
criminalise him for taking the initiative to bury the bodies somewhere
else in the oustskirts of Lagos? None of the reports – including police
accounts – has indicated so far that he was doing anything untoward
with the bodies at the time of arrest.

The dead babies,
LUTH, and Mr. Shuaibu Atanda are all victims of the criminals in our
rulership. They should be held squarely responsible for the bigger
picture. It is infuriating to note that the same criminals who cannot
provide health care of Burkina Faso standards to Nigerians are the ones
now planning to steal N6.5 billion in the name of their yeye
independence anniversary later this year.

Shock is dead in
Nigeria. If Nigerians at home have lost the capacity to be shocked, as
the fact that the idea of seventy-six dead babies in Ghana-must-go bags
only registered as an imperceptible blip in national discourse,
shouldn’t our obtuse rulers at least pretend that they still care?

What, in the name of God, are Ken Wiwa, Oronto Douglas, and Ima
Niboro doing in Aso Rock? These are gentlemen who ought to know how
these things are done. These are gentlemen who ought to be able to tell
Oga Jonathan that when 76 Nigerian babies are found in Ghana-must-go
bags, there must be a comforting statement from the presidency. As for
Dimeji Bankole and David Mark, well, they were partying in Lucky
Igbinedion’s mansion in South Africa. Seventy-six dead Nigerian babies
aren’t enough to make them interrupt their faaji and rush to Abuja to
call for special hearings! Na so we see am.

In March of 2000, Pat Buchanan came to speak at
Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. Harvard being Harvard, the audience
hissed and sneered and made wisecracks. Buchanan being Buchanan, he gave as
good as he got. While the assembled Ivy Leaguers accused him of homophobia and
racism and anti-Semitism, he accused Harvard – and by extension, the entire
American elite – of discriminating against white Christians.

A decade later, the note of white grievance that
Buchanan struck that night is part of the conservative melody.

You can hear it when Glenn Beck accuses Barack
Obama of racism, or when Rush Limbaugh casts liberal policies as an exercise in
“reparations.” It was sounded last year during the backlash against Sonia
Sotomayor’s suggestion that a “wise Latina” jurist might have advantages over a
white male judge, and again last week when conservatives attacked the Justice
Department for supposedly going easy on members of the New Black Panther Party
accused of voter intimidation.

To liberals, these grievances seem at once
noxious and ridiculous. (Is there any group with less to complain about, they
often wonder, than white Christian Americans?) But to understand the country’s
present polarisation, it’s worth recognizing what Pat Buchanan got right.

Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas
Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of
admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities.
Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black
and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT
scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last
week on the conservative website Minding the Campus, was which whites were most
disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

This was particularly pronounced among the
private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s
socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For
whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was
three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar
qualifications.

This may be a money-saving tactic. In a footnote,
Espenshade and Radford suggest that these institutions, conscious of their
mandate to be multiethnic, may reserve their financial aid dollars “for
students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students,”
leaving little room to admit financially strapped whites.

But cultural biases seem to be at work as well.
Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: While most extracurricular
activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a
leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school ROTC, 4-H
clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances.
Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline
against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right wing or “Red
America.”

This provides statistical confirmation for what
alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented
groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class
whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and
regions.

Inevitably, the same under representation
persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and
philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.

This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites
alike. Among the white working class, increasingly the most reliable Republican
constituency, alienation from the American meritocracy fuels the kind of racially
tinged conspiracy theories that Beck and others have exploited – that Barack
Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a
Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants,
and so forth.

Among the highly educated and liberal, meanwhile,
the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of
wild anxieties about what’s being plotted in the heartland. In the Bush years, liberals
fretted about a looming evangelical theocracy. In the age of the Tea Parties,
they see crypto-Klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs everywhere they look.

This cultural divide has been widening for years,
and bridging it is beyond any institution’s power. But it’s a problem
admissions officers at top-tier colleges might want to keep in mind when
they’re assembling their freshman classes.

If such universities are trying to create an
elite as diverse as the nation it inhabits, they should remember that there’s
more to diversity than skin color – and that both their school and their
country might be better off if they admitted a few more ROTC (Reserve Officer
Training Corps) cadets, and a few more aspiring farmers.

© 2010 New
York Times News Service

The iron horse
features significantly in Igbo narratives, connecting with notions of
wealth, poverty, power, modernity, security, and interpersonal
relationships in a changing society. Transliterated from the Igbo
“anyinya igwe” (for the English word “bicycle”), iron horse represents
a people’s perception of the convergence of the familiar and the
unfamiliar, the natural and the invented Indeed, as a signifier, its
meanings keep shifting. For instance, while owning an iron horse was an
indication of great wealth and being in tune with modernity (or
culturally being with the oyibo), having it instead of a car in the
modern Igbo society is viewed as a sign of abject poverty. Little
wonder that the Mobylette, with its combination of the features of the
iron horse and the conventional motorcycle, was nicknamed “M zuru m ike
igwe” (May I take a rest from bicycle riding). Is it not astonishing
that one who also wants to take a rest from car driving in contemporary
Nigerian society and decides to ride an iron horse to church or work
becomes an object of ridicule? How so soon we forget!

The iron horse once
mattered. It was class, especially if it was the brand called “White
Horse”. Ride a White horse and the whole village would bow. In those
days, a suitor wishing to impress would look for someone in his village
who had a White Horse and beg him with some drinks to accompany him to
see his in-laws. That was a strategic impression management. As the
Igbo would say: “O gbajuo n’elu, o rute ndi no n’ala” (when the wine
keg fills to the brim up there, the wine will surely trickle down to
those below).

The owner of an
iron horse might not know how to ride it. The most important thing was
that he possessed an iron horse. Sometimes he would dress up for a
ceremony and since the iron horse must accompany him to boost his
image, he would roll it all the way to where he was going; or,
alternatively, someone would have to roll it behind him. And when he
eventually learned how to ride it, someone would always have to hold
the metal animal while he mounted.

It was part of the
homage to both the beast and its powerful rider. If wishes were iron
horses, those that held them for others to mount might ride! Well, it
seemed that when poor villagers were eventually able to buy their own
iron horse, its integrity suffered. Perhaps, this entry of the poor
into the circle of iron horse riders led to the introduction of a
bicycle license. If the poor must join in riding, they must regularly
pay for doing so.

The local council
had special license officials deployed like today’s police on the
roads. As would be expected, the local people needed to be wary if
their iron horse licenses had expired. An iron horse license official
could spoil someone’s journey by mounting a roadblock where it was not
expected.

Trust people in my
village for being their brothers’ and sisters’ keepers: those who
successfully passed iron horse license checkpoints always tried to
alert others that “onye akika agba” (literally, a person that carved up
someone’s jowl) was somewhere around the bend.

It was considered a
calamity to lose one’s iron horse to thieves. Even as the poor and the
nonliterate wanted to progress to by climbing out of poverty onto the
saddle of wealth, they also had to wrestle with the prevailing
structures of power, criminality, injustice, and a Eurocentric justice
system.

Seven Seven,
popularly known among his Igbo fans as “Okonkwo Asaa,” will always be
remembered for his musical narrative about Long John and his iron
horse. Long John in Okonkwo Asaa’s story is a stark illiterate who,
desiring to enjoy the things of modern technology and also to reduce
the suffering occasioned by trekking, decides to purchase an iron
horse. In his innocence, he fails to ask the seller for a receipt,
little knowing that the seller, like many dubious business people, is
determined to show him, a mumu, that “Na guy wack.” The seller raises
an alarm after Long John has paid and departed with the iron horse,
claiming that someone has stolen an iron horse from his shop. Long John
is arrested by the police and being unable to produce either the
receipt of the purchase or a witness, is detained. But he would not
give up: as a firm believer in tradition and poetic justice, he invites
the road, the mango tree on the road, as well as his ancestors, to be
his witnesses, with the police mocking and scolding him for being out
of tune with modern ways of justice.

The seller begins
the trip back to his shop with the recovered iron horse, rejoicing that
he has demonstrated astute business intelligence. But, either out of
recklessness occasioned by the excitement over his cleverness or the
quick intervention of the witnesses summoned by Long John, the iron
horse dealer is knocked down by a car and he dies instantly. The
bicycle falls beside the mango tree mentioned by Long John as one of
his witnesses. The police officers are so shocked and terrified at the
turn of events that they quickly release Long John and hand over the
iron horse to him.

Like Long John, I am back on my iron horse, riding to work in a
postcolonial Nigerian society where one has to construct one’s
importance and travel to power using a “special” vehicle.

The latest hot
political topic is the “Obama paradox” – the supposedly mysterious
disconnect between the president’s achievements and his numbers. The
line goes like this: The administration has had multiple big victories
in Congress, most notably on health reform, yet President Barack
Obama’s approval rating is weak. What follows is speculation about
what’s holding his numbers down: He’s too liberal for a center-right
nation. No, he’s too intellectual, too Mr. Spock, for voters who want
more passion. And so on.

But the only real
puzzle here is the persistence of the pundit delusion, the belief that
the stuff of daily political reporting – who won the news cycle, who
had the snappiest comeback – actually matters.

This delusion is,
of course, most prevalent among pundits themselves, but it’s also
widespread among political operatives. And I’d argue that
susceptibility to the pundit delusion is part of the Obama
administration’s problem.

What political
scientists, as opposed to pundits, tell us is that it really is the
economy, stupid. Today, Ronald Reagan is often credited with godlike
political skills – but in the summer of 1982, when the U.S. economy was
performing badly, his approval rating was only 42 percent.

My Princeton
colleague Larry Bartels sums it up as follows: “Objective economic
conditions – not clever television ads, debate performances, or the
other ephemera of day-to-day campaigning – are the single most
important influence upon an incumbent president’s prospects for
re-election.” If the economy is improving strongly in the months before
an election, incumbents do well; if it’s stagnating or retrogressing,
they do badly.

Now, the fact that “ephemera” don’t matter seems reassuring, suggesting that voters aren’t swayed by cheap tricks.

Unfortunately,
however, the evidence suggests that issues don’t matter either, in part
because voters are often deeply ill informed.

Suppose, for
example, that you believed claims that voters are more concerned about
the budget deficit than they are about jobs. (That’s not actually true,
but never mind.) Even so, how much credit would you expect Democrats to
get for reducing the deficit?

None. In 1996
voters were asked whether the deficit had gone up or down under Bill
Clinton. It had, in fact, plunged – but a plurality of voters, and a
majority of Republicans said it had risen.

There’s no point
berating voters for their ignorance: people have bills to pay and
children to raise, and most don’t spend their free time studying fact
sheets. Instead, they react to what they see in their own lives and the
lives of people they know. Given the realities of a bleak employment
picture, Americans are unhappy – and they’re set to punish those in
office.

What should Obama
have done? Some political analysts, like Charlie Cook, say he made a
mistake by pursuing health reform, that he should have focused on the
economy. As far as I can tell, however, these analysts aren’t talking
about pursuing different policies – they’re saying that he should have
talked more about the subject. But what matters is actual economic
results.

The best way for
Obama to have avoided an electoral setback this fall would have been
enacting a stimulus that matched the scale of the economic crisis.
Obviously, he didn’t do that. Maybe he couldn’t have passed an
adequate-sized plan, but the fact is that he didn’t even try. True,
senior economic officials reportedly downplayed the need for a really
big effort, in effect overruling their staff; but it’s also clear that
political advisers believed that a smaller package would get more
friendly headlines, and that the administration would look better if it
won its first big congressional test.

In short, it looks
as if the administration itself was taken in by the pundit delusion,
focusing on how its policies would play in the news rather than on
their actual impact on the economy.

Republicans, by the
way, seem less susceptible to this delusion. Since Obama took office,
they have engaged in relentless obstruction, obviously unworried about
how their actions would look or be reported. And it’s working: by
blocking Democratic efforts to alleviate the economy’s woes, the GOP is
helping its chances of a big victory in November.

Can Obama do
anything in the time that remains? Midterm elections, where turnout is
crucial, aren’t quite like presidential elections, where the economy is
all. Obama’s best hope at this point is to close the “enthusiasm gap”
by taking strong stands that motivate Democrats to come out and vote.
But I don’t expect to see that happen.

What I expect,
instead, if and when the midterms go badly, is that the usual suspects
will say that it was because Obama was too liberal – when his real
mistake was doing too little to create jobs.

© 2010 New York Times News Service

The case of Nigeria
is like the proverbial table of thieves, where there is no honour. The
new threat facing every Nigerian lies in the Eastern parts where one
stands the risk of being kidnapped once one is ‘perceived’ to be doing
well.

The government’s
response has been, to put it mildly, worrisome. Government officials
have inadvertently ‘settled’ these hostage takers in what might seem
like an attempt to appease those that are angered by their pilferage of
our resources and their high level of corruption.

The four
journalists that were kidnapped recently have enraged the public. The
President has read a riot act to the Inspector General to get to the
root of the matter but that for me is simply grandstanding. The issue
of kidnappings in Nigeria is actually a morality issue and nothing more.

From the first time
it came to public knowledge in the Niger-Delta, where expatriates and
foreigners were being kidnapped, government’s reaction to the mishaps
was pathetic. While in well-developed Nations, you hear government
officials saying things like, “We do not negotiate with hostage takers
or kidnappers,” in Nigeria the case is different.

And the reason is simple: Among thieves, there is no honour.

How can a man (the
principal thief), who has looted and stolen billions of money by any
means necessary, ask another (the subordinate thief) who has done what
he can within his power, not to steal by any other means? In this case
all the principal thief will be able to do is tell the subordinate not
to get caught.

So when the first
incident about the kidnapped expatriates was widely reported in the
media both locally and internationally, government officials felt
obliged to give the kidnappers what they demanded under the flimsy
excuse that they wanted to preserve Nigeria’s already bashed image.

So now the
Niger-Delta goons have set the pace and opened the warped eye of the
youngsters and desperate fast-lane money seekers to the gains of
kidnapping, only that this time around they no longer kidnap
foreigners, who now move amidst heavy security, but have turned their
gaze to their fellow brothers and sisters in the absence of the
white-skinned walking gold mines.

And what will the government officials do about this? Settle every single one of them!

And as time goes
on, more and more youths will resolve to the fast paced, money making
trade of taking hostages and kidnapping, after all they too are staking
a claim to their portion of the National cake

Little wonder why
so many people are trooping out of the country, even though many are
leaving for the façade they call ‘greener pastures’, there are also
some leaving because they perceive genuinely the danger ahead – but
they have the means. And that leaves the helpless innocents that don’t
have anywhere else to call home except here. The entire Nigerian
society is in grave danger.

Some might say I am
being unnecessarily paranoid but let me give those people a little
illustration of what I am talking about. Let’s go back to 1999 after
the triumphant death of the late dictator Sani Abacha and the
successful transition to civil rule. Where the AD held sway in the West
and through such factors as a track record and simplicity, a certain
former school principal was elected governor in one of the southwest
states.

Prior to that time,
this man used to drive a rickety old Peugeot 504 Salon car and was
often assisted by his neighbours every morning to jump-start his car.
But after about six months of being governor, this man had moved from
grass to grace. He bought a fleet of new luxury cars, built houses in
prime areas in the state and as well as in neighbouring states and sent
all his children abroad, forgetting the school he once headed as
principal.

I am sure this
story is not new to many Nigerians as this has been the case with many
top government officials. But here, a picture is being painted; a way
of life is been carved. Where are our values?

Though the
ex-governor in question is an old man now, what do you think he has
taught his children? What do you think he has taught his children’s
friends? It’s all a ripple effect.

Let’s all be honest
with each other. The armed robber or kidnapper is a man with a dual
personality. Firstly, he is your neighbour you see on your street as
you drive out to work. He is the man you see pushing his broken down
vehicle along the road. He could be the school principal going to
school early in the morning. He could be anyone. We must all be
responsible for each other. We must be responsible for our dear country.

I am sure so many
people that will read this piece also know a similar story of a man
that became a politician. They are the ones that set the precedent;
they are the ones that first kidnapped public funds, taxpayers’ money.
Every other event is a ripple effect that we caused when we kept quiet
and watched, waiting for a time we too would be in government.

I for one am not
disillusioned about government doing a thing, after all they are the
same: the man who steals with a pen, the man who steals with a gun is
what we call a thief and there is no honour amongst thieves.

I believe Nigeria will survive and the truth will prevail above all
things but I enjoin Nigerians to take responsibility and start to look
inwards – that’s the only way. If everyone changes, Nigeria will change
as a whole.

Our unpreparedness
for disasters we know to be inevitable is the bane of our problems in
this country. The government, it seems, is never in a hurry to learn.
To ban, maybe, but not learn. Our leaders would rather throw money at
problems instead of thinking about why they happen and what should be
done to prevent them. Recent events have caught our government and its
various agencies pants down, a scenario always followed by a scramble
to pass the buck. We refuse to learn any lessons from past mistakes.
The isgraceful performance of our national team, the Super Eagles,
during the just concluded World Cup in South Africa was as result of
unpreparedness and lack of commitment to duty. One would have expected
that a tournament as important as the World Cup, especially an edition
holding in Africa for the first time would inspire a determination to
excel, instead of the last minute preparation that inevitably led to
the worst performance in our World Cup history. Millions of naira went
into the hole called the Nigerian Football Federation (NFF), yet the
expected miracles did not happen. And President Jonathan did not waste
time in producing the usual knee-jerk reaction by banning the entire
football federation and the national team, before a FIFA ultimatum
caused him to have a rethink.

The
episode further opened the world’s eyes to our perpetually ineffectual
method of handling situations. An even more serious malaise than our
football failings is the kidnapping epidemic. After more than three
years, our government and its security agencies are yet to show us that
they have what it takes to stay ahead of the criminals.

We probably would
not have known the extent to which the Nigerian Police has contributed
to the problem if not for the recent kidnapping of four journalists and
their driver. The ugly incident has thrown light on just how out of
touch the Inspector General of Police, Mr. Ogbonnaya Onovo, is
regarding crime in Nigeria. After the journalists were freed – freed by
the kidnappers, not rescued by the police – the number 1 cop declared,
“the crime is a new phenomenon…” Has he been on sabbatical these past
three or four years? Can someone please send

Mr. Onovo a list
of the high-profile victims of kidnapping – cutting across the entire
country from the North to the South East to the South-South? Can all
those people who have shunned the

customary
end-of-year visits to their villages please let the IG know the reason
for their drastic decision? Can a crime that has grown in leaps and
bounds over several years qualify to be termed “a new phenomenon?” On
top of this startling misjudgment the police were ill equipped and
unprepared to rescue these journalists. The fact that the IG himself
had to run to Abia State reveals a lot about what is wrong with our
police force. Will the IG have to relocate to the site of every
kidnapping crime to personally oversee rescue

efforts that we
all suspect are bound to end in futility? Now that the ordeal is over
the journalists are safely back with their families and the kidnappers
back in their lair to regroup and prepare for the next strike.

The government and police have also returned to their clowning
around. Mr. Onovo is taking credit for a job he clearly bungled, while
the Abia State government – under whose watch the state has descended
into anarchy – has dethroned three traditional rulers for allegedly
sponsoring kidnappings and robberies in the state. Did they just find
out that these traditional rulers sponsored the kidnappers and armed
robbers? How long have the police and other security agencies in the
state been investigating these individuals? Or are they merely the
latest in a series of scapegoats with which the police and state
governor can save face before Nigerians? (It is this same Abia State
governor who has been busy in the last few weeks changing political
parties and attempting to sack his deputy).

Now is the time to
find a lasting and sensible solution to this kidnapping problem. We
suspect that the police force will need a major shake-up. A police
force that cannot ensure that kidnappers find it difficult to operate
deserves nothing less than decommissioning. If Onovo and his men cannot
solve this kidnapping problem now, how do they intend to cope in the
thick of the coming election season?

Imagine Facebook existed during the reign of Sani Abacha.
Instead of inviting traditional rulers to the screening of the ‘Diya Coup’
videos he’d simply have tagged them on Facebook; if, that is, he refrained –
against the advice of persons like Al-Mustapha – from totally banning the
social networking site in Nigeria.

Sadly we will never know. Abacha did not wait to see the
Internet boom. Obasanjo and Yar’Adua who on the other hand saw it did not care
much for it; they were our own George W. Bush.

Goodluck Jonathan is therefore a breath of fresh air.

Not only is he the first Nigerian president from a minority
ethnic group, he will also go down in history as the first Nigerian leader to
embrace social networking as a tool of governance. If Obasanjo was our
Television President (recall the Presidential media chats, and the nationwide
broadcast announcing that the Senate President and Education Minister were
thieves), Jonathan is our Facebook President.

As I write this he is the most popular Nigerian on Facebook.
Only two weeks after joining he has amassed more than 120,000 followers. Apart
from a glitch early on, that saw the defacement by some e-miscreants of the
president’s photo pages (images of an unknown nude man suddenly appeared in the
hallowed presidential arena); Mr.

Jonathan has been having a blast. Thursday morning he had about
116,000 “likers”. Twenty-four hours later the number had risen to more than
121,000.

A cartoon by our own Zapiro, the inimitable Asukwo E.B., has Mr.
Jonathan in bed, eyes glued to his laptop, while he tells a sleepy dame that
he’ll remain awake for a bit longer; he has to check his Facebook page. If I
had any drawing talent I’d instantly create my own cartoon: Aunty Dame wagging
her finger furiously at the President, muttering: “Today you are going to tell
me who the First Lady is; me or that Lap-top…”

Mr. Jonathan’s Facebook page sure is the place to be these days.
Next time you wonder why no one is commenting on your update or note, or poking
you; why the alleys of Facebook seem deserted, wonder not far: all are smitten
and have succumbed to the allure of e-AsoRock. Every presidential update is
commented upon and “liked” by not less than 2,000 people. Compare that with the
half dozen comments that most of us would be grateful for.

If half as many people liked Obasanjo we’d be talking about a
fourth term for the old man today. (It’s a good thing Obasanjo wasn’t on
Facebook as president; imagine this appearing in newsfeeds all over Facebook,
while both men were still in office: “Obasanjo is no longer listed as being in
a (political) relationship with Atiku.”

The multitude of fawning comments on the page say a lot about
the Nigerian psyche. In a land under the siege of Big Men, we are suckers for
accessibility and a semblance of humility. Murtala Muhammed stands out in the
annals of Nigerian history for many reasons, one of which is that he shunned
the trappings of power expected of his position – long, sirened convoys with
animals-in-uniform hanging from every corner.

Recall also how Governor Ayodele Fayose became a folk hero of
sorts in Ekiti for his penchant for eating in roadside bukas and stopping to
buy suya and roasted corn in public. Governor Fashola stands out in Lagos for
the unobtrusiveness of his convoy – flashing siren lights without the sound.

And recently I saw former Cross River State governor Donald Duke
walk into the Genesis Deluxe Cinemas in Lekki, with his wife and daughters – if
you didn’t know him you wouldn’t have guessed this was an ex-governor and a
current presidential candidate. As they joined the queue to buy popcorn, I
almost simultaneously joined the Donald Duke fan queue (were it not for the
cynicism I have learned to wear as a protective mask).

Moral of the stories above: Nigerians, citizens of a land
perpetually starved of heroes and (true) humility, are drawn in a mysterious
way to Big Men who strive to not act like Big Men.

The president must have discovered that Facebook is one cheap
and easy means to be a Big Man who does not appear to be a Big Man.

But watch out Mr. President. Your current monopoly of Facebook
might not last very long. One Very-Important-Personality has also recently
discovered Facebook. Max Gbanite, a diehard IBB supporter (the man never tires
of writing long rambling pro-Babangida essays on the Internet) told a Nigerian
newspaper last week: “Babangida enjoys reading Facebook and sends messages
under a different name; Babangida is a gigabyte thinking man, he is not
operating on the outdated DOS (Disk Operating System) level.”

There it is: Maradona is now a fan of Facebook! Indeed the
battle ahead is a “Gigabyte” one, and Nigeria’s next president just might be
decided on Facebook! But jokes apart, two questions for you, dear reader: one,
what will you do when that inevitable friend request from IBB shows up?

Two, have you “liked” Goodluck Jonathan today?