“If I don’t deliver second Niger Bridge at the end of my tenure, I will leave this country and go and live elsewhere because the failure cannot be defended.”---former President Jonathan.
On August 30, 2012, former President Jonathan, then sitting President, still basking in the euphoria of the 2011presidential election triumph vowed that he would go on exile if his administration didn't build the second Niger bridge.
He made the vow not in Abuja, but right at the heart of the commercial city of Onitsha during a Town Hall Meeting.
In tow was Dr. Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, Finance Minister and Mike Onolomemen, Works Minister, who unfolded details the financing, technical and contracting arrangements related to the construction of the bridge.
Peter Obi, then Governor of Anambra State, and all the WHO is WHO in Igbo land were witnesses to the vow. All hopes were raised that the worst scenario would be that by 2015 the bridge would ready for use by motorists and the sufferings of travellers on that route would come to an end.
Come 2015, there was no second Niger Bridge, and interestingly, President Jonathan could not live up to his vow.
Now the former President is still strutting around the political landscape and sounding sanctimonious. He forgot that he made the promise not during some campaign hustling, but as a sitting president.
He forgot that he left the second Niger Bridge not as an abandoned project but a new project the PMB administration must start afresh.
And at the end of the day, some people will call Jonathan's recent vituperations opposition politics?
When of course it is nothing but politics without integrity; a tasteless politics of the manipulation of religious and sectional sentiments.
- Yakub Aliyu
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