By common consent President Goodluck Jonathan’s performance in his first hundred days in office has not been exactly stellar. Quite the contrary. For a start, his avowed fight against corruption has been as highly selective as his godfather’s – I mean the real McCoy not Chief Edwin Clerk - witness, for example, how he replaced one chairman of his party on dredged up allegations of corruption with another chairman with a worse case of corruption hanging on his neck, the apparent difference being that one was pro zoning while the other, con.

Second, the Niger Delta remains as restive as it was before he took full charge in May because of his seeming inability to move the general amnesty granted by his predecessor, Alhaji Umaru Yar’adua, to the next level.

Third, instead of even some marginal improvement, power supply in the country has only deteriorated even though the wet season has brought plenty rain for our hydro-electric power plants that supply the bulk of our electricity; the president’s blueprint for improved power supply which he unveiled last week and which should give cause for hope looks more like the same old wine of privatization and opaque contract awards served in a new bottle.

On next year’s elections, probably the greatest test of his performance, his appointment of Professor Attahiru Jega as chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) which he himself said, rather gratuitously, he did against advice from his party, has been universally acclaimed. But then one tree does not make a forest; as the radical human rights lawyer, Mr. Femi Falana, has repeatedly pointed out, the bulk of INEC’s resident commissioners remain PDP partisans and the states, not Abuja, are where the bulk of electoral frauds take place.

More importantly, the president’s party remains the bastion of “garrison democracy” that the Real McCoy has bequeathed to Nigeria; witness, for example, the highly selective manner the party has been granting waivers to returnees who have not met its minimum two-year membership requirement to contest elections for party and public offices. Any wonder then that Alhaji Aminu Bello Masari, a former speaker of the House of Representatives and erstwhile leader of the party’s Reform Group which fought tooth and nail for President Jonathan’s ascendancy in the face of stiff opposition from a so-called Yar’adua cabal, would leave the party in a huff as he did recently and dismiss it as totally incorrigible?

One may disagree or not with the Nigerian Tribune’s choice of words and metaphors in its assessment yesterday of the president’s performance in his first 100 days, but chances are that most Nigerians would agree with the newspaper when it said “President Jonathan by his performance in office so far has not been able to convince Nigerians that he has the grit and even the charisma to lift Nigeria from its doldrums. Any light at the end of the tunnel, it would now seem, may be the one from an oncoming train.”

There are at least two related reasons for his lacklustre performance and a third to despair about the future under him as president. First, he has focussed his energy on keeping the power he got by luck, some would say by divine providence, almost to the exclusion of doing any useful work. This much is pretty obvious from the way he has been spending money to rally support as if money will soon be out of fashion. It is also obvious from the fact that by buying four aircrafts at a time the nation could least afford them  he has shown more concern for his own creature comfort than for the basic needs of his poor and deprived compatriots.

Second, I think the man has listened too much to all the glib talk about luck being his destiny as much as it is very much his first name. Luck is, of course, very much part of our lives and God in His Divine Wisdom distributes it unevenly among His creatures. But then even mother-luck has its limit which is why the Good Lord gave us the sense to know when not to push it.

This is not to say that the president is certain to fail in his bid to win his party’s presidential ticket for next year’s election and even to go on and win the election itself by hook or crook. With former president, Olusegun Obasanjo’s declaration last week that for the PDP whose board of trustees he chairs, and by inference, for his protégé, the motto for next year’s election is “Operation Totality,” words reminiscent of his “do or die” 2007 elections, it will be a miracle if the president’s bid, at least for his party’s ticket, fails.

All the luck in the world would, however, not make him a good president thereafter. He would, in addition, need show what idea he stand for instead of allowing himself to be pulled in different directions by the ideas of others as seems to be the case so far.

Above all he would need to show the world that he is as much the commander-in-chief of his home front as he is the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

President Jonathan would not be the first in Nigeria or beyond to grapple with what I referred to in an article on these pages over nine years ago as the First Lady Syndrome. We have seen such a syndrome on display in Asia, in Latin America and even in the United States, the world’s most prosperous and most liberal democracy.

As recently as in January this year The Economist carried an article on the depiction of Sara, the wife of Mr. Benyamin Netanyahu, the much feared Israeli prime minister, by the country’s media as “a henpecking harridan,” and the man himself as “her squirming victim.” It quoted a “prominent commentator” as saying Netanyahu was not fit to hold his job “because of his domestic circumstance.”

However, as the 2004 Christmas edition of the self-styled newspaper said in an article it entitled “Powerful women in Africa,” nowhere is this syndrome as acute as it is on the African continent. “In Africa,” it said, “chaotic and corrupt, where proximity to power is paramount, first ladies can wield greater influence than any minister.”

It went further to say that “Of all Africa’s big ladies – as with so many of the continent’s excesses – none has been bigger than Nigeria’s.”

When Obasanjo returned to power as civilian president in 1999, he promised to put an end to what most Nigerians regarded as the cynical manipulation by wives of the exalted positions of their husbands as First Citizens at various levels of government. As we all know he failed woefully.

Then Yar’adua came along and made more or less the same promise; he said in his inaugural speech that he would lead by example. Logically that included curbing the well-known excesses of First Ladies.

In my article on these pages on June 13, 2007, I said the president can show he meant his words by starting from his home front, especially given his conservative background and his wife’s rather limited education.  It is now a notorious fact that he too failed woefully.   

Now se seem saddled by another First Lady who, to all intents and purposes, wants to surpass all her predecessors in meddling in the affairs of State. She has since set precedence as the First Lady to go round the country at the tax payers’ expense campaigning for her husband’s bid for high office.

She is also the first First Lady to openly rebuke an elected public officer – a governor, that of her own state, to boot.

President Jonathan may have all the luck in the world but if he allows his wife, Dame Patience, to carry on like a “henpecking harridan” and himself as her squirming victim Nigeria and Nigerians would be in for much ill-luck.

Happy Birthday

My little brother who writes a well regarded column in Daily Trust on Tuesdays under the pen name of Muhammad Al-Gazhali is 50 today. Here’s many more returns and prayers that your ink should never dry.   

Of rotational presidency and all that-By Mohammed Haruna