The John F. Kennedy administration was short lived following his gruesome assassination. But it was substantive, inspiring, luminous and mythical.
His zestful administration, also referred to as The New Frontier, was enamoured of and adored. It was likened to the Camelot Era.
The Kennedy Era is remembered with nostalgia as a period of inordinate possibilities and optimism. It was an era in which America set a timeline for landing on the moon. It was an era in which good deeds were accomplished in the fashion of the utopian and lofty ideals of King Arthur.
Based on the legend of King Arthur as adapted from the 1958 novel, THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING by Terence Hanbury White, the lyricist and Kennedy’s classmate at Harvard University, Alan Jay Lerner, captured the vitality and effervescence of the brief Kennedy era. He wrote:”Don’t let it be forgot/that once there was a spot/For one brief, shinning moment/That was known as Camelot”.
Apart from his personal magnetism and charisma, what made the Kennedy administration outstanding and enabled it to accomplish so much in such a short time was his star-dudded cabinet and aides. Among them were the cerebral Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Abraham Ribicoff, Arthur Goldberg, Theodore Sorensen, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Mc George Bundy.
But more memorable was Kennedy’s meticulously crafted and powerfully delivered Inaugural Address of 20th January 1961. Though cabinet members and aides made inputs, it was authored, after series of rewrites and edits, by Kennedy himself. Ranked as one of the best three Inaugural Addresses in American history, its climax was :”…ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”.
In concert with the exalted global vision and nobility of purpose which he succinctly articulated in his Inaugural Address, President Kennedy shortly thereafter issued an executive order establishing the famous Peace Corps. A pool of 130,000 trained American volunteers went out of America to help other countries to develop their manpower. Several volunteers served in Nigeria. Among them was Benjamin D. Stickney. He taught in Government Secondary School Abuja(now Suleija). He later became a Professor of Education at the University of Colorado, Springs.
We are today being summoned to serve and sacrifice for our country. Since his advent to power, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s refrain to us is that we should persevere in spite of the very hard times. And following the withdrawal of subsidy on petrol, our existence has become dire: All costs associated with transportation and living have shot through the roof. From N238.11 per liter when he assumed office, Premium Motor Spirit(PMS) or petrol now sells at N700 per liter in some parts of the country. As I write, the Naira, having been floated, is not only in free fall, it exchanges at N1,300 per U.S. Dollar. As the Naira plunges to its depth, so conversely the cost of living is upwardly bound. The country imports nearly all goods which are denominated in Dollars. With our foreign reserves either wholly depleted or non-existent, the country, as at last week, is said to be owing foreign suppliers not less than $10billion in unsettled Letters of Credit(LCs).
Few Nigerians can afford more than one meal a day. Large swathes of at least three geopolitical zones have been taken over by terrorists, bandits and kidnappers. Most parents and guardians cannot afford to send their children and wards to school in a country that boasts of the highest out of school children in the world.
One of the most pathetic stories of our time must be that of the elite Federal Government College(FGC) Maiduguri, Borno State. According to that school’s Principal, Malam Umar Habeeb, only five out of 240 students newly admitted into the institution could collect their admission letters due to economic hardship.
Grim as these are, and even as these sagas speak eloquently to the bad place we are as a country, both the Executive and Legislative Branches of government are carrying on oblivious of this sad reality. It is as if they live in the extra terrestrial. The Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration runs the most bloated cabinet since 1999. When we thought we had seen the most outsized cabinet and political appointees in the Shehu Shagari administration, a cabinet which was lampooned by the late Dele Giwa, the present government seems to excel in the profusion of Ministers and Aides.
As if that were not bad enough, and while the country pines in penury, the President’s delegation to the United Nations General Assembly(UNGA) last September was said to have spent $507,384 on accommodation alone at the five-star St. Regis Hotel in New York. It is instructive that this huge amount was being spent in one of the ten best hotels in New York as the government was negotiating for a loan of $422million to fund 15 million households.
If the Executive branch is being ludicrously profligate, the Legislative branch is on a reckless buying binge of Sports Utility Vehicles(SUVs) put at at least N75billion. The arguments advanced by the National Assembly for the procurement of 2023 Toyota Land-cruisers and Prados simply verge on the addle-brained. According to its spokesperson, Senator Sunday Karimi, the Legislators need the SUVs because our roads are awful and they need rugged vehicles to endure them; it is a tradition for Legislators to be given such SUVs to serve out their four-year tenures; Ministers have more than one SUV; even Governors and Local Government Chairpersons are cheuffeur-driven in SUVs etc.
One would have thought that ours, being a democracy and a government of the people for the people, is not a government of the self. Therefore, high premium ought to be placed on the plight of the majority who are hurting. Also, one would have thought that if the Legislators had gone for something cheaper, they would not only have set a good example, their sacrifice would have compelled the Governors and the Local Government Chairpersons to climb down from their high horses and go for vehicles that are cheaper as well. And one would have thought that going for vehicles that cannot endure the bad roads would serve as a spur for the Legislators to insist that the roads be fixed.
What the Executive and Legislative branches have chosen to do by their insensitivity and brazenness is to wallow in opulence while those who voted for them are wallowing in penury. Their calls for sacrifice and self-abnegation are hollow. They are bereft of empathy and they are hypocritical. Even though John F. Kennedy exhorted his compatriots and other world citizens to sacrifice for humanity, he insisted that those in leadership positions must bear the same brunt of hardship through self-denial and setting edifying examples. He had said in the same Inaugural Address:”Finally whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you”.
The long and short of it is that you cannot ask others to live a frugal existence while you keep a prodigal lifestyle. You cannot live in indecent opulence while your citizens live in abject penury. It is not only obscene, it is wicked. And such obscene behavior has consequences.
Once upon a time, Queen Marie Antoinette of France was profligate and hubristic. Today we are witnessing democratic reversals in Central and West Africa. And these reversals are occasioned largely by bad governance and the haughtiness of the ruling elite. Do these instruct us? Are we prepared to learn lessons?
A hollow call to sacrifice, by Nick Dazang
