My Achievements Are Yet To Be Matched- Jonathan Responds To Shettima, Accuses Him Of Having A Hand In Chibok School Girls Kidnap

Former President Goodluck Jonathan has hit out at critics of
his administration, saying his achievements in government are
yet to be matched by his successor.
In a statement issued by his spokesperson, Ikechukwu Eze, on
Friday, Mr. Jonathan said Governor Kashim Shettima of Borno
State’s claims that his administration was dogged by poor
choices and bad governance were “parochial and jaundiced.”
The former president was responding to Mr. Shettima’s
statement at the book launch of Bolaji Abdullahi, the
spokesperson of the All Progressives Congress, APC, in Abuja on
Thursday.
Mr. Jonathan challenged the governor to come clean over the
roles he played in the kidnap of the Chibok school girls,
stressing that it goes beyond the dismissive claim that
‘Jonathan thought I kidnapped Chibok girls.’
“He should be able to tell us if it was Jonathan’s poor
choices that led the governor to expose students of
Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok to avoidable
danger, in total disregard of a federal government directive to
the governors in the three states most affected by Boko Haram
to relocate their students writing the West African School
Certificate Examinations to safe zones,” said Mr. Jonathan,
who was president between 2010 and 2015.
The statement further described Mr. Abdullahi’s book titled
‘On a Platter of Gold- How Jonathan won and lost Nigeria”
as sour grapes and full of lies and gossip written by someone
who was still aggrieved at his removal as minister during the
Jonathan administration.
Below is the full text of the statement:
Our attention has been drawn to the claims made by the
governor of Borno State, Kashim Shettima on Thursday at a
book launch to the effect that former President Dr. Goodluck
Jonathan wasted the goodwill he commanded because of bad
governance and poor choices in office. He was also said to
have accused Jonathan of believing that he was behind the
kidnap of the Chibok girls.
As a man who had never seen anything good in the
administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan on
account of the party and other differences, it has remained
our considered view that in a democracy, Governor Kashim
Shettima and others like him are entitled to their opinion, no
matter how jaundiced.
However, it is a sad commentary on the character of some of
our politicians that they go to any length to make spurious
statements, in pursuit of the sad narrative to remain
politically correct. We cannot be deceived by his crocodile
tears and patronizing claim that “Jonathan is essentially a
decent man”, which is a ploy he deployed to justify his
false allegation of a lost glory.
The man who today speaks of squandered goodwill should be
able to tell Nigerians what percentage of the votes Jonathan
got in 2011 from Borno State at the height of that his
envisaged glory according to Shettima, and what it became in
subsequent elections. What was obvious yesterday and has
remained so today is that Governor Shettima and those
who think like him never liked Jonathan based on some
parochial and paternalistic sentiments.
We didn’t expect anything less from Governor Shettima,
knowing the ignoble roles he played in frustrating the war
waged by the past administration against Boko Haram, even in
his own Borno State.
He should be able to tell us if it was Jonathan’s poor
choices that led the Governor to expose students of
Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok to avoidable
danger, in total disregard of a Federal Government directive to
the Governors in the three states most affected by Boko Haram
to relocate their students writing the West African School
Certificate Examinations to safe zones.
The governor is now denying that he had no hand in the kidnap
of the Chibok girls even before anybody accused him of
culpability. However, we share the view of those who insist
that the governor had other things up his sleeve when he
promised the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) that he
would secure the girls, and ended up doing the very opposite,
by deliberately abandoning them to their fate, without any
security presence in their school.
It is instructive that while other governors in the zone heeded
the security advice, Shettima remained the only one that
flagrantly flouted it. Should we also fail to point out that
his decision to reward the principal of Chibok Secondary
School, who was uncharacteristically absent on the night
terrorists stormed the school, with the post of a commissioner,
did throw up more questions than answers?
Talking about accountability, perhaps, Shettima should also do
well to explain to the good people of Borno State and
Nigerians what he did with the over N60 billion Local
Governments fund, left by his predecessor, Senator Ali Modu
Sheriff.
We understand Governor Shettima and those who spoke like him
accused Jonathan of bad governance and poor choices, and we
would like to know if it was bad governance that led Jonathan
to assemble a-yet-to be matched crop of dynamic cabinet and
economic management team made up of tested technocrats like
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala in Finance ministry, Shamsuddeen Usman in
Planning, Olusegun Aganga in Trade and Investments as well as
Akinwumi Adesina leading the charge in Agriculture. The
efforts of the Jonathan administration in repositioning
Nigeria’s economy remain self-evident and it must have indeed
been poor choices at their best for Jonathan and his team
to have recorded the following key achievements:
* Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product rose to $503 billion in
2013 and became Africa’s largest economy and 26th in the
world; from 3rd and 4th respectively.
* Nigeria became the number one destination for Foreign
Direct Investment in Africa under former President Jonathan,
with the numbers rising from $24.9 million as at 2007 to over
$35 billion in 2014.
* Jonathan Government delivered over 25,000 kilometers of
motorable federal roads from just a quarter of that number in
2011.
* The Jonathan Administration resuscitated the railways in the
country after about 30-years of hiatus
* Jonathan’s Agricultural Transformation Agenda ended
fertilizer racketeering, encouraged more young Nigerians to take
to farming, boosted local food production and took the country
closer to self-sufficiency in food production by recording more
than 50% reduction in food imports. It was as a result of this
that the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United
Nations, for the first time, voted Nigeria the largest producer
of Cassava in the world.
* Power generation under Jonathan was boosted to about 5,000
megawatts in 2014 up from 2,000 megawatts in 2011.
* Prices of food and other household items remained stable
and inflationary pressure was down to a single digit.
* Under Jonathan, Nigeria controlled clinically Ebola outbreak
to the admiration of the whole world, became Guinea-worm-
free and also eradicated polio, with United States billionaire
and renowned philanthropist Bill Gates, praising Nigeria’s
successes against polio as one of the great world achievements
of 2014. Sadly polio has returned to the country with the
likes of Shettima in charge of the endemic states.
* Under Jonathan Life expectancy in Nigeria rose from 47
years in 2010 to 54 years in 2015.
* Just before Jonathan left office, CNN Money projected that
Nigeria’s economy in 2015 would become the third fastest
growing economy in the world at 7 percent behind China at 7.3
percent and Qatar at 7.1 percent.
Was it bad governance and poor choices that reformed the
political and electoral processes to the extent that the United
Nations is now pleading with the government of the day to
strive to maintain the standards established by Jonathan?
Fortunately, Nigerians know where they stand with all of their
leaders. All those who are calling Jonathan names today, and
accusing him of having become quite unpopular, should simply
take a walk on the streets of any Nigerian city as real
leaders do. That way, they will accurately gauge their own
approval and test their popularity with the Nigerian people.
On the book entitled “On a Platter of Gold- How Jonathan
won and lost Nigeria” written by Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi,
National Publicity Secretary of the All Progressives Congress,
we have watched for some
time as some outrageous fabrications are extracted from its
pages day after day by the media. When the publication of the
book, with an ominous title, was first mooted, we knew it will
be full of bile and
sour grapes. We didn’t expect truth, sincerity, and accuracy
of narration, given that the author who was sacked from his
ministerial position by the subject of the book, is now the
spokesman for the ruling APC.
We will, therefore, like to dissociate former President
Jonathan from the book’s salacious contents, with all the
obvious distortions, lies and exaggerations. Its pages are
populated with gossip, politically influenced newspaper
articles, uncoordinated raw data, and unproven claims. Sadly,
the author did not help matters, as there was no rigor or in-
depth investigations towards establishing the veracity of the
allegations the book contained.
For instance, it is ridiculous for the author to have claimed
that the president was forced to sack a certain minister by
another cabinet member when the obvious truth known to
all key members of the administration was that the President
acted based on the recommendation of an internal committee
that investigated the matter. This, unfortunately, is the kind
of baseless claims and narrative that run through the entire
book, and it would be pointless devoting our time towards
making a case by case response to all its ridiculous
allegations.
We will like to remind Nigerians of what former President
Jonathan said earlier in the year when a similar book was
published, that only the key actors in his government and in
the 2015 presidential elections could give an exact account of
what transpired, not speculations and conjectures by third party
spectators. That time will come someday.