I  suspect that not even the most loyal supporters of President Goodluck Jonathan will privately, honestly disagree that the President has not had a good outing in recent times, certainly not in terms of public perception. And in politics, perception is everything. Perception shapes the image of the man or woman in the eyes of the public. That is why perception has to be carefully managed because it can cast an ordinarily capable and well-meaning person in an unfair and negative light that can un-make the best efforts of the person.

To be honest, the President has been dogged by a series of gaffes and faux pas. Those who agree with this observation may see the failings in the context of recent events, especially the dastardly act of October 1. But I would go right down to Jonathan’s first act as the President of the Federal Republic – his swearing-in on 6th May, 2010. Anyone who has looked closely at the TV footage of that event will share my utter consternation that the president was holding the Holy Bible, the heart and soul of the oath of office, beneath the sheet of paper containing the text of the oath! Few would fail to see this as the sacrilege that it really was. But the question is: how many of us noticed? Surely if the people around the president, the President’s Men, noticed, they would have done something about it. This is what Americans call failure of staff work. But this is a minor failing compared with the more fundamental issue of what our president says and how he says it. 

We must bear in mind that the modern presidency is managed in every detail including unscripted occurrences. I recall Bill Clinton leaving a press conference during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, amidst calls for his resignation, and heading for a door marked Exit. His handlers, visualizing the newspaper headlines the next day, quickly steered him towards another door. Deliberate utterances are subjected to even more rigorous scrutiny and brainstorming.  

Here we should examine the presidential debacle that followed the Eagles’ own debacle in the 2010 World Cup. Our president had commanded that Nigeria should thenceforth withdraw from all international football competitions until the country puts its football house in order. No reasonable Nigerian would disagree with the president’s objective. Nigerian football needed a hard kick up its backside. But was it the president of the Federal Republic who should deliver it? Was there no one around the president who should have advised that FIFA would severely frown at this overt political interference in the sport? Was there not a minister of sports who knew the rules, and advise and warn, as ministers should, and not egg the President on to take a macho stance in a contest with the President of FIFA which he was bound to lose? And was there no one around who knew that right then France was under threat of sanction from FIFA because the French government was deemed to have interfered in French football following their own 2010 debacle?

The result of this, the second in a series of yet more staff failures, was that the President was forced into a humiliating U-turn. Twenty-four hours to the expiration of FIFA’s ultimatum, the President of the Black World’s largest nation was forced to eat a mouthful of his words, to the chagrin of many Nigerians. 

The sadness of it all is that the president’s objective could have been carried out if he had been properly advised to leave the intended action to the minister who could have used the instrumentality of the NFA Board, whose tenure was about to expire anyway, and FIFA would have been no wiser.

I truly see no reason why a President who had been made to look so inept and weak at home and abroad should not have quietly retired or re-deployed whoever was responsible for putting him in such bad light. 

The consequence of bad or timid advice, and the poor staff work that give birth to it, is that when failure is not sanctioned, and is sometimes even rewarded, change does not happen, and those who should be penalized for incompetence begin to feel like supermen and the cycle of poor results continue. We saw example of this at the end of September when the president, with all due fanfare, decided to make his first pronouncement on the vexed question of zoning within his party. The president categorically stated that that zoning in the PDP constitution applied only to posts and positions except the presidency. A firestorm followed.

Rival candidates for the PDP nomination threw the entire party constitution at Jonathan, and some neutral observers saw egg on the president’s face when Clause 7 (2)(c) or something like that, was extracted to show that zoning actually covered all elective public and party posts. And if what we saw was the exact provision of the PDP constitution, then the president was quite clearly misled.

If that is so, the question is who misled the president? And what price did he pay? Or maybe the president did not seek advice from his myriad party, political and other advisers; which would in itself raise questions about how our presidency is run. 
This is, however, essentially a party’s political matter, which those of us who are apolitical may wish to consign to the minor league of poor staff work. But not so the president’s comments following the bomb outrage of October 1.

Recent experience in a world that is plagued by terror and insecurity has shown the caution as well as strength and determination with which leaders react to moments of national outrage. One notable characteristic of such moments is that those leaders are aware that they are speaking beyond their home audience, and to posterity. Their statements are often well considered, crafted and pronounced with due attention to history. The one example that will suffice here is from a president who has never been accused of being cerebral - George W Bush. The man who was shown to have been caught off guard by 9-11 was on the right page of history when he decided to comment on the tragedy. He said, and the world applauded: “Freedom and Fear are at war…” and added “We will bring them to justice or bring justice to them…”

Now contrast this with what the president was reported to have said about the possible villains of October 1. Not even the later attempt to disclaim and explain made any difference in a world of instant media and citizen journalism. The finger, as in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, has written and moved on. 

A situation where the president of the Federal Republic was seen to be engaged in a verbal tennis ball with the leader of a terrorist organization who had the ear of Al-jazeera, did not make us look good; nor did the belated explanation by the president’s men ameliorate our embarrassment. The damage had been done.

The point is that the president’s reaction should have been better advised and much more cautiously worded, and those advising him should have realized that their first duty was to protect the president from embarrassment and where necessary provide him with credible deniability.

Finally let me comment briefly on two recent presidential innovations. First, the introduction of the teleprompter in presidential speech-making is quite laudable. But if it must be done, let it be done well. Admittedly this gadget is the way of the 21st century. Although seasoned orators like Barack Obama make it look like child’s play, it is perhaps one of the trickiest gadgets of modern times, as any newscaster will tell you. It was therefore quite ill-advised for the president to be thrown into the deep end, as it were, in his October 1 broadcast. Jonathan’s severe handicap in using the facility was so painfully obvious, and was compounded when he was constrained to abandon it and resort to the hard copy of his speech. Now we have to ask, which techno wizard was responsible for this fiasco? And if we may add, why was an Independence Day broadcast not made from inside the presidential Villa, against a backdrop of the national flag and the standard of the commander-in-chief?

The second innovation is the use of Facebook as a presidential medium of communication. Again while this may work for Obama, we have to ask, how many Nigerians have access to the internet or know what Facebook is about? In any case why should our president first announce his intention to run for office on Facebook before telling his fellow citizens? 

These may be small matters in a country where anything goes, but we must bear in mind that while Goodluck Jonathan may be the president, and his handlers may feel that they own him, it is Nigerians who own the institution of the presidency.

Over the years, observers of the US presidency, from which we grafted ours, have noticed the decisive role that advisers and aides play in shaping a successful presidency. From John Kennedy, through Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, those presidencies that have been judged to be successful boasted some of the best and brightest minds America can produce. We cannot expect less from our presidency