Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria

If you’re frustrated by political gridlock in the US, dumb-ass tea-party idiots carrying signs that say “gun control means being able to hit your target”, then checking in on the lovely state of Nigeria might make you glad that you live here and not there, despite our problems.

In case you’re not that familiar with Nigeria, Africa’s second biggest economy, it is basically a poster-child for corruption and “the oil curse” (the idea that countries with natural resources typically suffer from horrible governments).  It also has a nasty problem in it’s oil producing region, the Niger River Delta, which is an environmental catastrophe and has a native insurgency that kidnaps western oil workers and generally wreaks havoc at will. Oh, and Nigeria also has ethnic strife, with the predominantly Muslim northerners hating on the southern Christians, and sometimes horrible internecine fighting breaks out and hundreds die.

So, the President has been ill with a variety of problems and went to Saudi Arabia in late November. Aside from a sketchy audio tape released to the BBC early last month, no one has heard from him. He might be dead, no one can say for sure. So, the Nigerian parliment finally had enough and named the vice-president Goodluck Jonathan as interim President. Gotta love it, Goodluck’s wife is named Patience. So now that the Nigerians have Goodluck and Patience, I’m sure they’ll be in great shape in no time.