WHY
GOODLUCK JONATHAN DOES NOT BELONG IN OUR FUTURE
No, dear reader, you are not
seeing double. The title is correct and
it is not a reprise of an earlier piece bearing a similar title on Muhammadu
Buhari. And, no, this artitle has not
been prompted by any need I felt to balance my take and pretend to be
even-handed in my approach to what seem like the principal candidates for the
office of president of Nigeria in 2015.
Should I find that one candidate is superior to another in my considered
judgment, I would not fail to point that out.
Neither have I been motivated nor goaded into writing by the hackneyed
responses of some Buhari supporters who barely or inattentively read the
earlier piece which made clear that the royal road to a second term for
Goodluck Jonathan would be a Buhari or even an Atiku candidacy in the
presidential elections next year.
I would like to start with a
declaration. Jonathan will get a second
term as president not because he deserves one but because the All Progressives
Congress (APC) is so politically inept and morally bankrupt, not to talk of its
being devoid of a vision, that it is proving incapable of offering Nigerians a
real alternative to both Jonathan and his party, the People’s Democratic Party
(PDP).
To locate the case that I wish
to make, we need to go back to 2010. The
then Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) was about to settle on Nuhu Ribadu for
its presidential ticket. My worries then
about Ribadu will be articulated in a future piece on him and his so-called
defection. I shared with friends back
then that I thought that the 2011 elections were going to be a watershed event
in Nigeria’s political history, especially at the federal level. I said then that the 2011 presidential
election was an open one with absolutely no favourite candidate. It was an election that the CAN could win
with Ribadu atop its ticket given his pedigree, at that time, despite what I
considered his lack of principles demonstrated after his initial removal as
head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
What was crucial was that he
was clean, had what we would call extremely high favourableness and extremely
low negativity ratings across the country.
What is more, he would be running against a twice-accidental public
servant—first as state governor and, later, as president—with no personality
and barely in control of his party machinery.
Of course, there was an important caveat. Of greater importance was whether or not the
sponsoring party and its powers that be were willing to fun and execute a
full-fledged presidential campaign. As
all who follow politics in Nigeria know too well, not only did the CAN not run
a decent campaign; it did not run a campaign at all!
It beggared its candidate and
was busy negotiating an ugly power-sharing pact with another party. It ended up with an unprincipled directive to
its supporters to split their ticket voting ACN locally and a different party
at the presidential level. Thus was lost
the possibility of a campaign and a candidacy that would, at least on paper,
have rattled the cages of the PDP and positioned the ACN as a genuine
government-in-waiting. The party lost
that opportunity and the same mentality or maybe I should say that its
realization that that opportunity once lost has entirely escaped its group led
it to the sterile merger with the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and the
remnants of a handful of no-name parties to form the APC.
Let us get back to
Jonathan. Here was an accidental
president who first had to do battle as Vice President with the cabal around
his terminally ill boss and to require the support of nonpartisan others to
step into his constitutionally-sanctioned role as successor to his
principal. He became president by
default. He has been there now for six
years having won his own mandate for the last four in 2011. Although the latter-day Youths Earnestly Ask
for Goodluck Jonathan [Remember Abacha?] otherwise known as Transformation
Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) as well as hacks like Chika Okpala now are a
ubiquitous presence on Channels Television joyfully trying to sell us on the
out-of-this-world transformation wrought in the country by Jonathan’s
administration, I think it is fair to say that the evidence may not be there
for nonpartisan observers like me to see.
When he took over, power was
the problem in Nigeria. Six years later,
power—its generation and distribution—is still the problem in Nigeria. Maybe the signal transformation that Jonathan
has wrought is the undeniable fact that we are a certified “stand-by power”
economy! By contrast, whatever people
hated about Olusegun Obasanjo, everybody talks about his signal achievement in
the telecommunications sector. Even if
he had needed to do a selling when he was in office, no amount of shilling by
any number of spokesperson and “transformation ambassadors” would have
succeeded in pulling wool over Nigerians’ eyes seven years on had it been a
false transformation. I am not sure but
it appears that the reason Jonathan needs so many snake-oil salespersons around
him is precisely that the so-called transformation agenda is a certified dud!
Yet, I do not think that the
failure of the “transformation agenda” is enough to say that Jonathan does not
belong in our future. Obasanjo wasted
his first term ensconced in the suffocating embrace of some of the dregs of
Nigerian politics. His second was his
term of redemption. Jonathan’s people, I
am sure, would want to argue that he needs his second term to secure his legacy
and correct the mistakes of his first term.
I am even willing to go along with the position that finishing Umar Yar’Adua’s
term should not count given some of the opposition to his accession to office
within his own party.
No doubt, Jonathan would not be
the first in the annals of the presidential system borrowed from the United
States to ask for second term after a not-so-distinguished first term. That is the nature of the beast. If I may use a boxing analogy, however poorly
a champion fights in a title defence, the challenger must beat him
comprehensively, preferably, knock him out, in order to come out as the new
champion. In the present case, Jonathan
must have chalked up some failure or failures that literally make him unfit to
continue in office. It is this signal
failure that, I argue, must disqualify Jonathan from being a part of Nigeria’s
future in the office of president.
Here is the case. When all is said and done, whatever the form
of the state, in all of civilized history, no state has or deserves to have
legitimacy that is not able to protect its subjects or citizens. In other words, the ultimate function of
government, the very reason for its institution is to guarantee the governed a
reasonable expectation that their lives, poor, rich or merely okay, would
unfold under reasonably secure conditions procured by their governors, the
basis of their legitimacy, without the governed having to revert to self-help
and its attendant limitations and conundrums.
When a government fails spectacularly at this most basic duty, its
legitimacy fount dries up quickly and if it does not voluntarily leave office,
it usually does not want for challenges to its tenure.
Jonathan’s signal failure lies
in its absolutely horrendous record when it comes to securing Nigerians in the
leading of their lives, howsoever miserable those lives are for the teeming
majority of Nigerians. The undisputable
monument to shame for the Jonathan administration in this regard is its utter
ineptitude in its handling of the Boko Haram insurgency. When Jonathan took over from Yar’Adua, the
insurgency did not have a single square kilometre of territory under its
control. Six years later, almost the
entire northeast region of Nigeria is under occupation by forces that are not
those of the Nigerian state.
Unfortunately, ours is not a
decent society. Were we a decent
society, the government that has presided over such loss of territory would be
put on its back heels and scrambling to justify its continuation in
office. What makes our situation worse
is that the worst impact of the insurgency is being borne by those who cannot
even resort to self-help, e.g., forming vigilante groups: children. The kidnap of the
Chibok girls is much more than a symbol: it is the ultimate indictment of a
government that has absolutely no sense of its responsibility or is too thick
to know when it has failed woefully.
Given that the president is the
head of the political arm as well as the head of the military arm—he is not
called the Commander-in-Chief for nothing—if there is any meaning to those
titles, it must include taking responsibility.
It is not enough for the president to keep changing his national
security team as if its members were diapers.
If he keeps picking the wrong people to run his national security team,
he is responsible. If he appoints the
right people but does not inspire them to perform or under-equips them, he is
responsible. The funny thing about being
responsible is that it sometimes requires leaving office when the failure is
repeated in a pattern or is particularly catastrophic. Both conditions are met in the saga of the
Chibok girls.
As I said earlier, the Chibok girls’ case is the
ultimate monument to the shame of a government that is simply incapable of
protecting its citizens, especially its most vulnerable citizens—its
children—who, by the way, must be nurtured and protected at all costs if
the polity is going to have a future at all.
And the girls are not alone. As I
write this, news just broke of another attack on a high school in Potiskum,
Yobe State, involving the deaths of another 49 young lives and scores
injured. Meanwhile, the PDP candidate
for office of governor of Zamfara State, Ibrahim Gusau, and his supporters are
dancing shameless on Channels Television at the launch of his campaign at the same time that the world is
being fed news of the carnage in Potiskum!
Why bother about a slaughter of kids in school when the important task
of launching a campaign for office is on queue!
No, the girls are not alone. Before them, 43 boys were murdered in their
sleep at another school and the president, just like his party representative
in Zamfara State at the moment, and the time-servers that wait on him hand and
foot did not see anything wrong with hosting a party in celebration of a
dubious centenary of the fleecing of our agency as a people in the constitution
of our de-formed polity. There have been
other kidnaps of other children and women since Chibok. None of these matters to our president who is
preoccupied with securing a second-term that, I dare say, he has not earned.
Notice that I have not dwelt on other security
failures—bombings across the entire northern Nigeria region; pipeline
vandalisation and oil bunkering and the privatisation of security in these
sphere to erstwhile bandits of the Niger delta region; the fact that not even
the Nigerian government dare operate in the public square of its own capital
for fear of a repetition of a previous Independence Day bombing a few years
back. National day is now celebrated in
the President’s living room. No matter,
just let me have a second term, says the president and his verandah boys and
girls. I don’t need to remind Nigerians
of the government’s failures and their gory details.
All that matters is the second term. It is almost as if the president’s minions
know their s has been a disastrous term, almost mirroring Obasanjo’s first term
in its sterility in the area of notable achievements. Their obsession as well as that of their
principal with a second term puts the lie to their claim of transformation
effected by this government. Were this
president secure in his much-trumpeted achievements, his place in our history
should be more than assured. I am
convinced that his handlers know that there is not much legacy to bequeath. That explains their maniacal determination to
wring a second term out of the Nigerian electorate.
One of the verandah boys came out the other day
to say that no president resigns in the midst of a war. Really?
A proper education would have told him that Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ)
quit while the Vietnam War was still raging.
He could have soldiered on believing, as I think our president probably
does, that he had a divine mandate to continue the war and win it in his second
term. His greatness consisted in part in
his realisation that if did not already
have a legacy at home, given what it would take for him to continue in office
in a second term, even if could win one, he threw in the towel and refused to
present himself for re-election.
The latter issue is where the
historical similarities between Johnson and Jonathan are most instructive. Nigeria, right now, is a country riven by
severe divisions. Ironically, that
division is Jonathan’s ticket to a second term and he is busy stoking it,
especially the religious one. What with
a ‘pilgrimmage’ to Jerusalem prior to declaring his second-term ambition and
his resident “chaplain” in the person of the Christian Association of Nigeria
(CAN) president trying to pass him off as the elect of God and defender of
Christians against Boko Haram!
Why would Jonathan not think of
resigning or not seeking a second term?
Ordinarily, in addition to the self-serving lies and proclamations about
service to the people that are standard fare for politicians, we may think of
ego as a justification for clinging to office.
But, and this is the rub, Jonathan, like other public office holders in
our country, has no ego worthy of the name.
I am positive that Jonathan does not wake up any morning and worry about
his place in history, his contributions to humanity, how the world was before
he came into it and how it would, pace his own contributions, when will have
left it. In short, as I have written elsewhere,
I do not see any evidence of a sense of self, of an individuality that would be
hurt by failure and discomfited by the fate, unknown but most likely horrific,
of 217 Chibok girls, or the fate of the other school children that have been
killed, maimed—physically and psychologically—for life, or displaced by the
Boko Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria while this sad presidency has
lasted.
No it is not him or his
personality that is at stake. After all,
he is not in office as Goodluck Jonathan, simpliciter. He is in office rather as “the minority areas
president”, “the south-south-in-chief”, “the first
Ijaw-at-the-head-of-the-trough”, and any thought of resigning would not be in
terms of Goodluck Jonathan the person but of removing the retinue of hangers-on
in whose name he claims the presidency.
This is the ultimate tragedy of an unthinking collectivist ethos and
primordial even if antiquarian communalism that is the bane of our political
discourse and practice today.
To admit that he has failed is
not a personal thing: it is a collective failure tarnishing all respective
collectivities just iterated.
Additionally, the direct presence of the feeding trough, at the head of
the table on which sits the “national cake”, will all be in jeopardy for those
who feel entitled. Such is the mess that
we call Nigerian politics today that even nonpartisans like me are not doing
due diligence by putting on the table the question of the president’ current
tenure and his worthiness for another term.
Is Jonathan going to get a
second term? No thanks to the
peculiarities of Nigerian politics and the criminal incompetence of his main
opposition, Yes. Does he deserve one? Hell, NO!
Here is a man who has no ideas, stands for nothing, has no vision and,
yet, he is and will be president of what supposedly is the most important
country of peoples of African descent on earth.
What a people!
Published versions: http://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2014/11/11/why-goodluck-jonathan-does-not-belong-in-our-future/
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