Each time I listen to President Goodluck Jonathan, I get a sense of a man in search of sympathy. A man with an obsessive and compulsive need to be pitied by his audience. I don’t know if he deliberately sets out to want to evoke sympathy in much the same way as other world leaders set out wanting to inspire their followers, or if it just comes to him rather naturally. Personally, I’m willing to bet on the former and what follows are examples (off the top of my head) to illustrate why.
THE MOST CRITICIZED PRESIDENT : The President declared recently at the AGM of the Nigerian Bar Association that he is the most criticized President in the world. It was a classic “poor me” statement. Its purpose was simply to evoke as much sympathy as possible by projecting the image of victimhood. The image of a man who has been unfairly judged. A man whose administration has been plagued by unfounded criticisms propagated by individuals determined to get at him personally. Otherwise, why would the president make such a statement especially since there really was no way for him to know if he was the most criticized President without first conducting a survey to determine how much criticism other Presidents receive.
REUBEN ABATI'S ARTICLE: As the chief spokesman of the President, everything Abati says or writes could be considered as coming from the President himself. In the said piece titled “The Jonathan they don’t know”, Abati hinted that many people oppose the President simply because he was from a minority tribe. Here Abati was clearly trying to evoke sympathy on behalf of the President because what he in effect was saying was that, here was a man that was being ferociously attacked not for anything wrong that he has done, but for simply being Ijaw.
At another point in the article, he tried to show how critics of the President were so petty as to criticize even what the President ate. And he went on to explain how Mr. President loves yam and cassava bread, how he fasts during Lent and Ramadan (blah blah blah). Here again he was trying to project the image of a simple and down to earth man who was being unnecessarily attacked by pseudo-critics even though he knows very well that it is the budgetary allocation for feeding at Aso Rock that was being criticized and not what the President actually eats. But his aim was to get people to say “eyyaaa” and I’m sure many did.
DAVID VERSUS GOLIATH SPEECH: The speech was given sometime last year in which the President declared that he was not a general….he was not a lion….he was not even David yet he has to face several goliaths. Here too the idea was to project the image of a lone good guy, like a school boy standing up against a big, bad, and ruthless bully. One’s heart naturally goes out to a guy like that. You feel all sorts of emotions towards him and sympathy is one of them.
BOKO HARAM IN HIS CABINET: At the heat of the Boko Haram insurgency last year, the President declared for all Nigerians to hear that the sect had somehow infiltrated his cabinet to the extent that he could be eating with one of them and not realize it. At the time this statement was made, the insecurity situation in the country was at an all time high and because the President didn’t really know what to do about it, he needed a huge dose of sympathy from the people in order to hide his cluelessness and hence this ridiculous statement. The idea was to give the impression of a man who had been ambushed and cornered by the enemy and hence his inability to secure the lives of Nigerians.
INCESSANT REFERENCES TO A POWERFUL CABAL: The Cabal are so powerful they can do whatever they want including cornering 50% of the nation’s budget under the guise of subsidy payments. Even though their names are known nobody dares to call them by name perhaps because the word CABAL carries more mystery and can easily be made to seem like a very big sinister organization that is determined to see the President fail and of course that feeds well into the President’s sympathy addiction. So each time he talks about a cabal holding the nation to ransom, your heart goes out to him because you think he is struggling against this evil behemoth on your behalf. What they never tell you is that many of the so-called cabal are not only close to the government, they have been awarded with national honours.
DECADES OF NEGLECT: Often the President talks about how his government inherited decades of neglect of the country’s infrastructure from previous administrations. The idea here is to in one fell swoop provide an excuse for non-performance and to win the sympathy of the people for having the misfortune of being the one to deal with the negligence of all past administrations.
I HAVE NO SHOES: This is my clear favorite. It was floated during the 2011 campaigns and it worked to great measure. The idea was to tell a classic rags to riches story and who doesn’t love a rags to riches story. A boy who started out in life walking to school barefoot is bound to melt any heart that is not made of stone. (Sniff…sniff)
The examples are many. There is hardly any speech the President gives in which he talks about his administration without one of those. If he is not complaining about how he’s being “abused” on social media, he’s whining about some vested interests trying to make the country ungovernable.
But do people really get addicted to sympathy? And why? I went to google in search of answers and one of the entries I got said its people that are totally lacking in self confidence that suffer from sympathy addiction. Another link says that everybody needs sympathy at some level but that there are those who thrive on it and hence get addicted to it. The sympathies feel good to them because it hides their inadequacies and so the more they get it the more they want it. In chronic cases they may even prefer their doses of sympathy than actual solutions to their problems. Because without problems such people will no longer have excuses for their shortcomings and would have no one to use as a scapegoat for their failures.
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