Thought Experiment: What if Goodluck Jonathan were still president?

You cannot even lie that this has not crossed your mind.

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March 28th, 2015: Imagine if you had rejected all of Muhammadu Buhari’s promise of Change and voted for transformation instead. Basically one and the same message except that the one got Buhari the honour of being transformed from “General” to “President” while the other changed Goodluck Jonathan’s Presidential fate. Maybe forever.

But we ask again: What if what we had was continuity at the Federal level and Goodluck Jonathan remained President?

We won’t have had Solomon Dalung

Currently one of the worst Ministers to have ever manned any ministry, Solomon Dalung was appointed the Minister of Youth and Sports in November 2015 by President Buhari. It may not have changed much in the Nigerian sports sector but we sure won’t have had to bear watching and listening to this man on top of everything else.

While we won’t have had any need to hear Mr Dalung nor see the red of his beret, we would have continued to suffer under the impression that we were still in the second decade of a 6-decade rule by PDP as predicted by Vincent Ogbulafor, the party’s national chairman.

If Jonathan had remained President, the Fulani herdsmen slowly shaping up to become an insurgent group would have been dismissed as the mercenaries of the President’s enemies from the North who just wanted to ensure the failure of the government the same way the Boko Haram was considered with levity for so long.

Speaking of the Boko Haram, the release of the Chibok girls may never have happened. Or how do you release girls who your advisers strongly believe were not kidnapped in the first place? In fact, many of them still believe that the April 2014 kidnap was just a hoax.

On the economic front, things may likely have been slightly better than they are right now. A President Goodluck Jonathan would have been surrounded by a team of able and knowledgeable economic advisers whom he’d have listened to. That is if said advisers were not so blinded by the greed to fill only their dollar-lined pockets.

But that’s the thing, the unparalleled amount of disdain shown to Jonathan and his team by Nigerians an account of their gross misappropriation of public funds and outright corruption in most cases should have told him something about the need to rid himself of them.

Even if the recession had hit the way it did last year, with President Goodluck Jonathan, there’d have been very little or no hesitation to float the Naira. So really, things won’t have been this bad. Except you’re one of those who say MMM is bad for the economy because that would have still happened.

Finally, if there is anything we know about Goodluck Jonathan, it is the fact that he had absolutely no problems visiting backwater places -mostly to pay condolence visits.

If Goodluck were president right now, Namadi Sambo won’t be President right now, because Jonathan won’t be on any vacation. He’d be in Rann, Borno visiting the survivors of Wednesday’s accidental military jet bombing… or not.

One comment

  1. Thank God he is not. Buhari’s gross incompetence wouldn’t have been exposed. #mytake

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