Category: Segun Ayobolu

Even our most insightful columnists, public affairs analysts and perceptive intellectuals are utterly perplexed at the political scenario playing out in the rocky state of Ekiti especially since the re-emergence of Mr Ayodele Fayose as governor in the June 21, 2014, governorship election. It is difficult to understand or properly digest how the irascible, tempestuous and temperamental, impulsive and often self-destructively spontaneous Fayose has risen on the wave of popular acclaim back to the apex of political authority in Ekiti. It seems that neither Fayose’s sordid past on his first tour of duty as governor nor the dishonourable theatrics that have characterised his current tenure thus far are able to dissolve the holy matrimony between the proud architect of the profound philosophy of ‘stomach infrastructure’ and the people of Ekiti.

Indeed, many analysts have, directly or indirectly, questioned the fidelity of the Ekiti people to those principles and values for which they were once so highly regarded. These include industry, discipline, an ascetic disposition, honour, dignity, courage, courteousness and an unrivalled commitment to knowledge and scholarship. It is baffling to comprehend how the people of Ekiti could have abandoned a man like Dr Kayode Fayemi, who seems to embody all the qualities of the quintessential Ekiti man and, above all is a man of high scholastic attainment and opt for a rambunctious, cynical and absolutely unreliable Fayose. It seems just like the irate Jewish mob demanding the release of the notorious thief and murderer, Barrabas, and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in his place.

But does the Ekiti people’s embrace of Fayose mean that they have abandoned the age old cherished values and beliefs inherited from their worthy forbears? Is it that a state fabled as having produced at least one doctorate degree holder per household now disdains education so much that an intellectually shallow Fayose would be preferred to a stochastically accomplished Fayemi? I must confess that I have thought and written along these lines in the past. This point of view is completely misplaced and misleading as well as overly simplistic.

It should be appreciated that Fayose did not just jump down magically from the sky to hypnotise and commandeer the support of Ekiti people. In 1999, Ekiti state had voted massively for the then Alliance for Democracy (AD) just like other states in the South-West. However, by 2003, Ekiti was one of the states swept away by the General Obasanjo instigated Tsunami, which led to the loss of five South-West states to the PDP with Lagos as the only AD redoubt standing. The OBJ obliteration of the AD in the South-West has been attributed to large scale fraud on the part of the PDP-controlled Federal Government. There is a large dose of truth in this allegation. But the less palatable truth is that the complacency, sheer mediocrity and arrogance as well as underperformance of many of the AD governors facilitated the success of the wily OBJ’s scheme to overrun the South-West politically.

Ekiti state under the urbane and unassuming leadership of Otunba Niyi Adebayo was one example of how stupendous non-performance significantly enabled the electoral triumph of Ayo Fayose in 2003. The Niyi Adebayo government was so inept that it was Fayose as a private citizen that rented private water tankers to distribute water to residents of Ado Ekiti and other towns and villages in the state. This aside from his all too natural earthiness was one of the factors that endeared Fayose to his people and ensured his meteoric political ascendancy.

It was only after he got into office that the Ekiti people saw the other side of Fayose – his utter lack of seriousness and discipline to confront the onerous challenge of governance and the moral vacuity that characterised his politics. Even though his performance as governor in his first coming pales into insignificance compared to Fayemi’s record, Fayose completely outclassed the immediate past administration of Niyi Adebayo in terms of service delivery to the populace. But for the largely self-inflicted violence, garrulousness and infantile tantrums that distracted his administration, Fayose would have recorded a decent performance in office before his impeachment, an exercise now described as a legal nullity by the apex court of the land.

By 2007, the Ekiti people had become completely fed up with both Fayose and his politics. They had tasted of the much touted ‘mainstream’ broth and it left a bitter after effect in the mouth. They voted massively for Fayemi on the platform of the defunct ACN.  The election was scandalously rigged by the PDP and Fayemi reclaimed his stolen mandate only after legal adjudication as well as a keenly and bitterly fought complementary election in a number of Local Governments. It is instructive that during this period Fayemi and the ACN received unequivocal support from Fayose. I can still picture in my mind Fayose sitting atop an Okada motor bike sporting a ‘Vote for Fayemi’ tee shirt. Of course Fayemi won the re-run election and was subsequently voted into office as governor. After that, was Fayose able to reach Fayemi anymore? Were the promises made to Fayose in the event of a Fayemi victory kept? The answers can only be in the negative. It would thus appear that lack of fidelity to principles and sheer opportunism are not the monopoly of any party or individual!

When Fayose contested the Ekiti Central Senatorial District seat on the platform of the Labour Party (LP), he lost comprehensively to the APC candidate. The electorates were still very much in love with Fayemi and the progressives. Fayose is thus not a super magician who cast a spell on Ekiti with his supernatural wand. His resurgence to power after his disastrous first outing was due, as I have consistently maintained in this space, to the atrocious political incompetence and vindictiveness of Dr Fayemi.

Yes, no one can fault Fayemi’s sterling record of performance. But for some inexplicable reason, his government was aloof and disconnected not just from the grassroots base of his party but from the general populace of Ekiti State. This was partly why damaging but unsubstantiated claims of primitive accumulation was levelled against the governor by his opponents and no doubt believed by a section of the electorate despite Fayemi’s vehement disavowals. That was why a performing incumbent governor with control of the state House of Assembly and Local Government structures in the state could have lost in all 16 Local Government councils of the state and to a despicable character like Fayose for that matter.

The March 28 and April 12 presidential and governorship elections offered a unique opportunity for the leaders of the APC in Ekiti, particularly ex- Governor Fayemi, to prove that Fayose’s victory in the June 21 governorship election was a fluke. They should have demonstrated the APC’s electoral strength on the ground to lend credence to their allegation that Fayose’s earlier electoral triumph was rigged through a strange and seemingly fictive creature called ‘monochromic’ ballot or the meddlesomeness of Fayose, Musliu Obanikoro, the Minister of State for Defence and the Minister of Police Affairs, Jelili Adesiyun, who were heard on an audio tape that has gone viral ordering a General of the Nigerian Army to facilitate the rigging of the election in favour of Fayose. I am strongly of the view that none of these factors, including the heavy militarisation of the state before and during the election, could have swayed victory in PDP’s favour – at least not on the difficult to imagine scale witnessed in Ekiti if the party’s grassroots cadres had been effectively mobilised to support the candidate at the polls.

The unfortunate thing is that rather than concentrate on rebuilding the party in Ekiti, its leaders particularly Dr Fayemi are engaged in a rat race to achieve dominance at the national level to the detriment of the APC in Ekiti. In the final analysis, however, all politics is local. To seek relevance in national politics on behalf of Ekiti even when Ekiti’s APC leaders lack any electoral base at home is akin to building something on nothing. It is absurd and laughable.

The APC national leadership should ask all feuding Ekiti leaders of the party to go back home, mend fences and begin the hard and back-breaking task of re-building the party in the state. These include Kayode Fayemi, Opeyemi Bamidele and Femi Ojudu to name a few. To offer any of them Ekiti’s ministerial slot will only lead to deepening of the unhealthy rivalries among them to the detriment of the APC in Ekiti.  The state’s slot in the Federal Executive Council should go to a brilliant technocrat who is also a an astute and seasoned politician; a person who is detached from the current intra-APC politics of intrigues in Ekiti and can thus offer the requisite leadership to unite, rediscover and rejuvenate the party in Ekiti.

Thus, my surmise is that Fayose is not really to blame in the on-going Ekiti fiasco.  He is only reaping from the unpardonable lapses of the APC in the state. Yes, he has committed impeachable offences, which make him legally liable. But then, the stunning performance of the PDP in the presidential and State Houses of Assembly affirm Fayose’s firm electoral support base and places a huge moral burden on the group of 19 APC legislators strenuously attempting to impeach him. What we have in Ekiti is a battle between morality and legality.

To emerge as President of Nigeria, a candidate must fulfil the constitutional requirement of scoring not just the highest number of total votes cast in the election but he must also score not less than 25% of the votes cast in each of at least two-thirds of the 36 states in the federation. Given the extant configuration of states in Nigeria today, a presidential candidate must score the highest number of votes as well as record 25% of votes in at least 24 states of the federation.

This provision, particularly the requirement for geographical spread rather than mere numerical superiority, is in consonance with the deliberate design of the Nigerian presidency to be a symbol of national unity and cohesion. The President, given the spread of his electoral base is thus the custodian of a national mandate who is expected to rise above primordial sentiments and sectional fragmentation in the discharge of his onerous functions.

It is thus impossible for anybody to emerge as President of Nigeria simply on the basis of narrow ethnic, regional or religious bloc votes. A winning candidate or party must be willing to appeal to, negotiate and build bridges of understanding with diverse ethno-regional and other interest groups across the country to forge a viable base that can ensure electoral triumph. The beauty of it is that no geo-political region or zone of the country can unilaterally lord it over others or decide who will be President of Nigeria.

This fact was obviously lost on people like Chief Edwin Clark, Asari-Dokubo or Government Tompolo when, before the March 28, presidential election, they threatened fire and brimstone if their Ijaw kinsman, President Goodluck Jonathan, was not re-elected for a second term. Of course, Dr Jonathan suffered an emphatic defeat at the polls, conceded victory to General Muhammadu Buhari, the new President-elect, with philosophical equanimity and the rest is now history. Incidentally, this was also the same mistake made by key elements of the northern political elite when they stridently and vehemently opposed Jonathan contesting the 2011 election and called for a return of the presidency and, by implication, political power to the north in that year’s polls. This indeed elicited considerable sympathy and support for Jonathan and cost Buhari votes he badly needed in the South and predominantly Christian areas of the northern middle belt.

The victory of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and its candidate, General Muhammadu Buhari, is no doubt a function of the successful handshake for the first time in the country’s history between the North and the South West. Interestingly, some commentators and analysts particularly from the South-South and South East claim that the outcome of the March 28th polls was the result of a ‘gang up’ by the North West, North East, North Central and South West against the South-South and South-East, which are veritable political strongholds of the PDP. This is a curious contention indeed.

For one, as has been severally noted, President Jonathan won a decisive victory in 2011. He was elected President largely on the basis of votes he garnered from the South-South, South-East and North-Central states with a smattering of support from the North-West and the North-East. Could the outcome of the 2011 presidential elections be attributed then to a gang up between the Southern electorate and Christian elements of the North to deny Buhari of victory at the polls? I do not think so.

Despite its appalling performance at the last polls, considering the party’s access to humongous resources, its longevity in power since 1999 and its brazen manipulation of institutions of state for pernicious partisan purposes, the PDP is far from being dead. Even though the PDP lost the presidency and several states hitherto under its control, the party won at least 25% of the votes cast in most of the South-West and the northern states. This was unlike the South-South and South-East where the APC could not garner 25% of votes cast except for Edo and Imo states.

Thus, voter behaviour in the north and South-West could be attributed to a combination of factors including ethno-regional and religious considerations, merit and a desire for change. In the South-South and South-East, however, ethno-regional affiliation seems to have been the key determinant of voter behaviour. The important thing was to vote for a ‘son of the soil’ notwithstanding his record of performance in office. It is exactly this kind of one-sided ethno-regional bloc voting that can be described as a gang up against the rest of the country.

The elections of March 28 and April 11 signify two key changes in elite alliance or coalition formation in Nigeria. For one, it marked a significant political divorce between the hegemonic factions of the South-South and northern political elite. In both the first and second republics, the South-South consistently cast their lot with the politically dominant Hausa/Fulani political class. And this was despite the fact that Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Action Group and Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) had consistently championed pro minority political causes such as creation of more states to cater for the county’s ethnic minorities as well as revenue allocation based on derivation, which would have immensely benefitted the oil producing states of the Niger Delta.

This is why all the strident strictures of prominent South-South indigenes against so-called northern domination in the run up to the last election sounded so hollow and hypocritical. The truth of the matter is that the South-South political elite have always been complicit since independence in the despoliation of their land and the exploitation of their people. It is instructive that after six years at the apex of political authority in Nigeria, an Ijaw man is leaving the Niger Delta as poverty-stricken and environmentally ravaged as ever.

Beyond this, Jonathan has left intact the over-centralised and excessively bureaucratised political structure responsible for the pitiable plight of millions of Nigerians both within the Niger Delta and throughout the country. This only reinforces the fact that what matters is not necessarily the ethno-regional origins of a President but the quality of his vision, the rigour of his ideological convictions and his competence and will to transform vision into reality.

The other key change in the Nigerian polity signified by the last general elections is the new partnership between the northern and south-west political classes. Even though he has been rightly pilloried in history because of the criminal impunity that characterised his attempt to stay put in office as Premier of the Western Region, even against the will of the people, Chief SLA Akintola must still be given the credit for being politically prescient enough to see the imperative of a north/South-West working alliance. On the basis of his superlative performance as Premier of the West, Awolowo sought to sell himself and his party’s programmes directly to the electorate of the north and the eastern regions believing that any rational voter would want him to replicate at the national level what he had done in the west to worldwide acclaim.

Unfortunately, Awo could not have been more mistaken. Akintola had a better grasp of the political complexities of a sprawling plural society like Nigeria with its intricate mosaic of competing ethno-cultural and religious entities. He thus advocated an alliance of the South-West political elite with their northern and eastern counterparts to partake of the bounteous feast at the centre. This was what the late Chief S.M. Afolabi had in mind decades later when he chided Chief Bola Ige for not appreciating the opportunity given to him by the PDP to ‘come and eat’ as a Minister of the Federal Republic. Unfortunately, advocates of participation in ‘mainstream’ politics have, since Akintola, been actuated with a desire to share in the cake at the centre and less with the onerous challenges of crisis and underdevelopment confronting Nigeria.

Awolowo had the intellectual depth, self -discipline and ideological clarity needed to liberate and actualize the potentials of Nigeria. However, he lacked the tactical and strategic skills to convert his regional acceptability in the west to achieve a pan-Nigerian acceptance. Akintola was endowed with astute political pragmatism and flexibility but was deficient in organisational discipline, programmatic vision or ideological coherence. In Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, national leader of the APC and a key architect of Nigeria’s emergent new order, we find a combination of Awolowo’s political idealism and Akintola’s strategic realism.

These qualities have contributed significantly to Tinubu’s unrivalled ability to help forge the new North/South-West political consensus responsible for Buhari’s electoral triumph. But how can the new North/South West partnership help in leading Nigeria out of the darkness of underdevelopment into the liberating light of accelerated national transformation? That is the million dollar question.

Ordinarily, the emergence of three non-Yoruba citizens to represent Lagos in the House of Representatives in the March 28th National Assembly elections ought to be celebrated as signifying the strengthening of Nigeria’s democracy and the deepening of federalism in the country. For, one of the cardinal goals of political development in Nigeria should be the ability of residents anywhere in the country, irrespective of their ethno-regional origins or religious persuasion, to contest and win elections for public office wherever they reside, earn a living and pay their taxes. This is a condition for and measure of the degree of the country’s transition from mere artificial statehood to genuine and more enduring nationhood.

Unfortunately, the victory of  Mr Oghene Egoh, Mr Tony Nwalu and Rita Orji to represent Amuwo Odofin, Oshodi/Isolo and Ajeromi/Ifelodun federal constituencies of Lagos in the House of Representatives on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) seem to have very little to do with the ideals of democracy, true federalism or common nationhood. Rather, the trio’s electoral triumph was a function of bloc voting by their non-Yoruba kinsmen in enclaves where they constitute a numerical majority in Lagos state. The victory of three other PDP House of Representatives candidates of Yoruba extraction at the polls was also a product more of non-Yoruba anti-APC bloc voting rather than their individual merit or that of their party platform. What was at play was, therefore, not necessarily a commitment to meritocratic democratic competition particularly on the part of the Igbos in Lagos but a manifestation of crude ethnic expansionist and hegemonic tendencies.

The unrestrained and provocative triumphalism of Igbos in Lagos in the aftermath of their historic electoral breakthrough in the last national legislative elections in the state suggests, unfortunately, that their electoral behaviour was informed by sinister motives. They had, no doubt fallen for President Goodluck Jonathan and the PDP’s relentless divisive campaign since 2011 that non-indigenes constitute a numerical majority in Lagos, which they should exploit to exercise electoral dominance in the country’s commercial capital, financial hub and industrial nerve centre. Yes, the majority of South-south electorates resident in Lagos must naturally have voted for their ‘son’, President Jonathan and his party. Yet, the latter have not attracted any irritation or hostility because they have not exhibited the ambition to contest ownership of the political space with their indigenous hosts.

It is indisputable that the Igbo constitute one of the most dynamic, creative, energetic and industrious ethnic groups in Africa. It is not for nothing that many perceive them as the ‘Jews of Africa’. Their technological and military feats during the Nigerian civil war – manufacture of guns, bombs, tanks, aircraft and refining of petroleum among others – remain legendary accomplishments. Unfortunately, post- civil war Nigeria has not harnessed the immense potentials of the Igbo towards achieving the country’s quest for technological liberation. Of course, the Igbo leadership has not helped matters by an undue dependency on the centre and addiction to ‘mainstream politics’ that has blunted the creative edge of the people and hindered the kind of autochthonous development in the region witnessed during the civil war.

Unfortunately, the many positive attributes of the Igbo have not often been complemented by the kind of political wisdom and sobriety needed to succeed and thrive in a multi-ethnic and culturally complex polity like Nigeria. For instance, in the first republic, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe’s National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) wielded effective political control in Lagos and much of the South West. Yet, despite his political astuteness and assiduity, the great Zik could not see that it was simply not feasible for him to emerge as Premier of the Western Region at a time when the premiers of the northern and eastern regions were indigenes of their respective regions. Had Zik thrown his considerable weight behind any of his accomplished Yoruba loyalists in the NCNC such as Adeleke Adedoyin or Adegoke Adelabu to be Premier of the West, Awolowo would not have so successfully outflanked him to become Premier and ultimately establish political dominance in the region.

No one has written as eloquently as the late Chinua Achebe on those sterling qualities of industry, high achievement motivation, competitive spirit and disdain for constricting tradition responsible for the remarkable strides of the Igbo in virtually every sphere of human endeavour. But the renowned novelist also admitted that this success could also breed “a deadly penalty: the danger of hubris, overweening pride and thoughtlessness which invites envy and hatred; or even worse, which can obsess the mind with material success and dispose it to all kinds of crude showiness”. These are exactly some of the disagreeable traits of the Igbo responsible for the ethnic disharmony brewing in Lagos and which has in the past created problems for the Igbo in other parts of the country.

For instance, during the week, a group of Igbo investors in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) demanded that in the incoming General Muhammadu Buhari administration, the position of Minister of the FCT should be conceded to the Igbo. According to their spokesman, Elder Friday Ugoala, Chairman of Zaudan Pazeri Property Owners Association, “Abuja has major stakeholders, not just those residing in the city. It is on record that Igbo have not less than 70 per cent in terms of property, merchandise and hospitality industries. So, we have invested heavily in Abuja, and we are demanding that the ministerial slots should be shared with Igbo who are major stakeholders in the FCT. We have reasons to demand for the slot of Minister of the FCT, because he will be sure that our investments are protected”. Even if there is some merit in this demand, is this the wisest way to achieve the objective? Will this kind of demand not sensitise most residents of the FCT just like those of Lagos after the last election of the danger posed by the seeming hegemonic aspirations of the Igbo elite?

It appears to me that not many Igbos have read the very profound lecture titled ‘The Igboman in the Political Economy of the Fourth Republic’ delivered in May 1999 under the auspices of the Anambra Towns Development Association and the Imo Forum by the distinguished Igbo scholar, Professor Green O. Nwankwo. The illustrious professor of Finance, business and management who retired from the University of Lagos in 1998 identifies 12 traits of the Igbo both positive and negative. Among the positive traits are a dogged determination to survive, energy, hard work and adroitness; the Igbo-spread and visibility throughout the nooks and corners of the country as well as Igbo domination of the informal sector of the nation’s economy. Of the latter, he however warns that Igbos still “operate in the periphery rather than the mainstay of the economy” as “Very few, if any, Igboman’s business is quoted on the stock exchange… Even where the business is a limited liability company, it nonetheless invariably is sole proprietorship/family business”.

Professor Nwankwo decries what he describes as the lack of perspicuity on the part of the Igbo, the absence of a solid home base economy in Igboland, the Igboman’s ‘anarchic individualism gone berserk’, his extreme republicanism manifesting in ‘Igbo EnweEze – the Igbo has no king – and by implication no restraining influence as well as what he calls his hyper-materialism and money mania.

Professor Nwankwo draws a number of implications from his analysis of the Igboman that still resonate poignantly today. He contends that “(1) As long as he has no solid economic base in his home state, so long will he continue to migrate to look for life chances outside his home state. (2) As long as he continues to migrate, settle and invest massively to develop his resident state without bothering, seeking or asking for reciprocal deals from residents of other states, so long will the Igbo man’s home state remain undeveloped and unattractive for settlement and investment. (3) As long as he does not really invest to develop his home state and as long as he fails to attract federal presence in his home state, so long will foreigners shun investments in the home states, and so long will real development continue to elude the Igbo in his home state”.

I think the brutally frank Professor’s message is simple: The adventurous, enterprising spirit of the Igbo is good and indispensable to nation building. However, the Igbos cannot realistically want to invest and create wealth outside Igboland while erecting barriers against reciprocal investment by outsiders in their home land. This is particularly so as the Igbo, no matter how fecund, are unlikely to achieve outside Igboland the numerical supremacy necessary for the kind of political domination they seek in Lagos, Abuja and other parts of the country where they have invested heavily. For the Igbo, therefore, charity must begin at home.

It is all too Nigerian. I refer to the way Nigerians have been falling over themselves to heap encomiums on President Goodluck Jonathan for conceding defeat in the March 28 presidential election. In particular many have been impressed by his calling General Muhammadu Buhari on phone and congratulating him on his victory. Of course, the gesture is laudable. But there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about it. It is what is expected in any decent and honourable society.  That the whole world has joined us in celebrating Dr Jonathan for doing what is right, normal and sane only shows how far we have degenerated morally and deviated from the path of sanity as a people. And this applies not only to Nigeria but the entire black race even though a number of African countries are becoming models of democratic and decent conduct.

President Jonathan must be quite dizzy from the flurry of laudatory adjectives hurled at him. He has been described as a national hero, a nationalist, a patriot, the saviour of our democracy among others for accepting defeat. Someone even suggested that he should be a candidate for the Nobel peace prize! It is very ridiculous. A cartoon in The Punch of Wednesday put the point cogently. The cartoon depicted four world heroes – George Washington, Mao Zedong, Nelson Mandela and Goodluck Jonathan. According to the cartoonist, Washington led the American people in the fight for independence from Britain. Mao launched an agrarian revolution to make China feed its over a billion people. Mandela suffered years of imprisonment for the sake of his people. And Jonathan? The cheeky cartoonist said “He conceded defeat in an election he lost”! That is what it takes to be a hero in Nigeria. It is very funny.

Did we expect our humble President to claim victory in an election he so glaringly lost? If he did, would the Nigerian people have accepted any such insolence helplessly? Have we come to think and expect so little of ourselves? Why is everybody sounding as if Dr Jonathan has done us a favour by doing what he is expected to do? Have we forgotten that this is the first doctorate degree holder to be President of Nigeria? Should we expect any less in ethical and moral standards from a man of intellect and culture?

Not even the victorious All Progressives Congress (APC) could restrain itself from joining the Jonathan as hero orchestra. The party said by that concessionary phone call, Jonathan had ‘snatched victory from the jaws of defeat’ and ‘catapulted himself to a statesman’. Given his uninhibited desperation to win re-election for a second term including deliberately and cynically dividing Nigerians along ethno-regional and religious lines and unconstitutionally manipulating the institutions of state to gain undue advantage, Jonathan’s post-election gesture is not enough to redeem his record. He has left the nation in a moral cess pit from which it will be exceedingly difficult to extricate her. The impunity of his administration has been unprecedented in this and previous civilian dispensations.

Even the respected General Theophilus Danjuma claims that Jonathan averted civil war in Nigeria by conceding defeat. Not a few Nigerians also believe so. They thus feel a sense of gratitude to Jonathan for respecting the will of the people. This is absolute hogwash. The truth is that there is a divine finger in the affairs of Nigeria. Not many countries could have survived the civil war as one like Nigeria did. Not many countries could have survived the June 12 annulment trauma without descent to war. That Jonathan could have plunged Nigeria into war for the selfish reason of wanting to remain in power against the will of the people in a free, fair and credible? Perish the thought. The glory for the achievement of June 12 belongs to God and the entire Nigerian people, Jonathan not excluded.

In any case, Dr Jonathan bears the greatest responsibility for the tension and fear of violence that gripped the country before, during and after the elections. He did absolutely nothing to call people like AsariDokubo, Tompolo and other Niger Delta militants as well as elders like Chief Edwin Clark to order when they threatened civil war if Jonathan did not win the election.He empowered and indulged an organisation like the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC), which just before the election staged a rowdy demonstration in Lagos openly brandishing sophisticated weapons and threatening violence if Jonathan lost the election. Even a supposedly cultured person like Jimi Agbaje, the Lagos State PDP gubernatorial candidate in today’s election hinted darkly in London that the Niger Delta would shut down the country’s economy if Jonathan lost at the polls!

Jonathan further heightened the level of tension in the country by the unwarranted degree of militarisation of the polls and the bad precedent set inthis regard by his administration in previous elections in Ekiti and Osun states. We have to be grateful to the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Attahiru Jega, and most of his Resident Electoral Commissioners (REC) for their tenacity and resolution to utilise the Permanent Voters Cards (PVC) and electronic card readers for the polls despite the fierce opposition of the PDP. Even then, the sheer electoral brigandage displayed in most parts of the South-South and South-East on March 28 is incredible.

The military and compromised electoral officials were recklessly used to manipulate the election in favour of the PDP. Results announced in most parts of the two regions were entirely fictitious. Yes, Jonathan would still have won in the two regions in free and fair elections but certainly not by the figures and margins announced. Rivers and Akwa Ibom states provide the most glaring examples. Jega’s silence on such brazen cases of electoral armed robbery is baffling. If Jonathan had been proclaimed winner of the election on the basis of such manufactured figures, in defiance of the popular will, we would be telling a different story today.

In the same way, Jonathan himself is to blame for the widespread belief that he would not accept the result of the election if he lost and that he would enjoy the support of the compromised top military hierarchy in continuing in office against the will of majority of Nigerians. For instance, he had colluded with his service chiefs to achieve an unwarranted six-week postponement of the polls for his personal advantage with adverse financial and psychological costs to the nation.

Again, simply because he does not like Governor Rotimi Amaechi’s face, he refused to accept the result of the Nigeria Governor’s Forum election (NGF). He recognised a minority of 16 governors as numerically superior to 19 and left the NGF comatose till date. Most people naturally believed he would exhibit the same attitude to the outcome of the March 28 election.Dr Jonathan cannot eat his cake and have it. He cannot deliberately create a problem and at the same time receive credit for acting to avert its consequences.

Some others say that both Jonathan and the President-elect, Buhari, are heroes of the March 28 election and our democracy. I do not agree. Winning or losing an election is not what makes a hero. Yes, General Buhari deserves plaudits for his tenacity, determination and faith in contesting the presidency for a fourth time despite three previous failed attempts. Yes, he had deservedly achieved heroic status for his sterling integrity and incorruptibility, which make him a star amidst a thoroughly perverse and odious political class. But winning an election only means that the majority of the electorate have accepted your electoral agenda and given you a mandate to fulfil your promises. You can only become a hero when, at the end of the day, you have succeeded to a reasonable extent in fulfilling your part of the social contract. The President-elect, his deputy, Professor Yemi Osinbajo and their party have a herculean challenge ahead. It is not yet celebration time.

The impression must not be created that the achievement of March 28 was a gift to Nigerians by President Jonathan’s undoubtedly gracious concession of defeat. It was a function of the determination, persistence and fierce resolve of Nigerians to vote and make their vote count. The sick in hospitals, the aged, youth and women across the country trooped out in their numbers to exercise their rights as citizens. This is perhaps the meaning of what Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu has called the ‘common sense revolution’.

Voters stood in line for hours, many from morning till late at night to make their votes count. They bore the pains of INEC’s logistical problems with patience and patriotism. They were determined to make a statement. Nigeria cannot be the same again after March 28. Never again, will any incumbent government take the electorate for granted. That day marked the emancipation of the Nigerian electorate. An era has ended in Nigeria’s march to democracy and a new one begins.