Those who categorise Nigeria as a failed state forget to add that it is equally a full-blown criminal enterprise. It is a reality many people in the country contend with, but few are willing to accept.

For a country acutely deficient in everything that makes a state functional, the communal violence, bomb blasts, kidnappings, and general insecurity in the country, are troubling in more ways than one. And we can only dismiss them at our peril.

We now know, thanks in part to WikiLeaks, why the new imperialism headed by the United States of America, had predicted that Nigeria could disintegrate by 2015. All things considered, it is hard to fault this prognosis. But this article is not about the sordid revelations by WikiLeaks on how Nigeria has been misruled and the characters responsible. It is about the moral leadership that is lacking under President Goodluck Jonathan.

We have about four years to doomsday, presumably. While we wait, perhaps it is helpful to address some fundamental concerns. If we ignore those who were focused on ethnicity or religion, we would still find enough people who a few months ago genuinely believed that Goodluck Jonathan was the man for the job. They were willing to back him even though he was running on the platform of a political party that ought to be on trial for its crimes against Nigerians. They implored us to make a distinction between the man and the party.

A hundred days on into his second stint as president and almost 500 days after he first took up that job, it is clear, even for the cheerleaders of the Jonathan presidency, that there is nothing to cheer about. There is hardly anything to show that President Jonathan appreciates the enormity of the country’s problems or the urgency they require.

In May, during his inaugural speech, President Jonathan promised us a transformation agenda. Considering what the country had gone through and the divisiveness that trailed the April polls, the expectation was that before long there would be concrete effort to address the myriad of problems confronting the country, including corruption, unemployment, poverty, infrastructural deficits, and communal violence. Unfortunately, the only transformation we have witnessed is more violence, sorrow, tears, and blood.

If not for the cronyism that has become the directive principle of state policy in Nigeria, there is no reason the Inspector General of Police and the National Security Adviser should stay a day longer on their jobs. But since he has refused to act, the president should take full responsibility as commander-in-chief.

President Jonathan is a Christian and he must be familiar with the saying that “He that is faithful in small things will also be faithful in great things”. Nowhere is this saying more applicable than in the country’s political leadership. Let’s take the small issue of providing moral leadership. And here, I urge readers to ignore what anybody has said about the president or for that matter the claims about the president by WikiLeaks.

President Jonathan swore to uphold the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. He has also said repeatedly that his administration will not spare any official whose integrity is called to question. Paragraph 3, Part I of the Third Schedule of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria provides that the Code of Conduct Bureau shall have power to:

(a) receive declarations by public officers made under paragraph 12 of Part I of the Fifth Schedule to this Constitution;

(b) examine the declarations in accordance with the requirements of the Code of Conduct or any law;

(c) retain custody of such declarations and make them available for inspection by any citizen of Nigeria on such terms and conditions as the National Assembly may prescribe.
Paragraph 11 of Part I of the Fifth Schedule to the Constitution provides that: