Africa Is a Country

Nigeria, come get your president

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Nigeria, come get your president

By
Africa Is a Country

Goodluck Jonathan, the incumbent in Nigeria, gets the hashtag treatment - gets mocked on Twitter - for his government's inaction and policy uncertainty on a range of fronts.

Credit: @mohammed69, via Twitter.

It baffles us why politicians and public agencies–especially unpopular ones–think they can still control their images in the age of social media. Take the New York Police Department’s @NYPDNews account on Twitter to #MyNYPD campaign (to boost the police’s profile among New Yorkers). The idea was to ask members of the public to post photos they took with “friendly” officers. Instead, Twitter users hijacked the hashtag with photos of wrongful arrests and police brutality. Which brings us to Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria’s president. There are also occasions when some genius invents a hashtag to mock a politician. Like last week when Jonathan visited victims of the Abuja bomb blast and managed to strike the same “deeply-concerned-chin-stroking” pose in every single photo.

Via Twitter.

When Jonathan wasn’t doing a crap job of pretending to be concerned for the cameras, he spent the week of the bombing dancing, no doubt playing Fruit Ninja on one of the golden iPhones handed out to guests at his daughter’s wedding the day before the blast (this was not even his first order of gold iPhones, how many does he need?). The important thing is he was doing precisely nothing to protect Nigerians and resolve the Boko Haram crisis.

Right after the news of the bombing broke, what did Jonathan say to his grief-stricken nation? “We’ll get over it.” Easy to say when you’ve got several gold-plated iPhones to play with. Who is advising this man? Answer: a medium-sized army of highly paid “special advisers”.

The images of Jonathan struggling to feign sympathy for wounded people bleeding in hospital beds confirmed what everyone already knew from Jonathan’s abysmal record in government: he simply doesn’t care about ordinary Nigerians.

It wasn’t long before Nigerians on Twitter mocked their dear leader with the hashtag #GEJPOSE. Good for them.

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