To everyone who follows his speeches, President Goodluck Jonathan comes across as someone who loves to speak extemporaneously. It helps him to communicate and channel his anger and frustrations in ways prepared speeches do not permit. Except you are a Barack Obama or a Bill Clinton, prepared speeches are often impure crystallisations of the disparate thoughts and sometimes sham reasoning of speech artists. Few leaders have the ability to be coherent outside their prepared speeches; they often stick to the text and hope the audience would be fascinated. Extempore remarks, the sort which mystifyingly enthrals the rather ineloquent Jonathan, must be handled with care even by gifted orators. As Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle showed, diligent preparations must accompany extempore speeches, up to the point of honing even the accompanying gestures.
On Tuesday, Jonathan once again threw caution to the wind with one of his lengthy unrehearsed speeches, complete with unfathomable logic, misrepresentation of history, university freshman’s reading of Marxism, and a poor laparotomy of the election that brought him into office. The occasion was the 52nd Independence Anniversary lecture held in Abuja, for which former Ghanaian president John Kuffour was invited to speak on the topic, Nigeria: Security Development and National Transformation. Jonathan’s remarks came after the main lecture, and it responded to Kuffour’s presentation but veered off in a different, controversial and uninspiring tangent. Quite apart from the fact that the topic was inappropriate for Kuffour, who would have done much better with a regional issue, the occasion helped give us another unflattering peep into the complicated and seething mind of our president.
Proceeding from a class analysis not borne out by history, the president argues that ordinary people find it extremely difficult to survive in times of crisis where big players often survive. Beyond his examination of class survivability in times of crisis, he drives home the point that peace is a critical ingredient of economic development. But it is in fact when he discourses upon the factors that promote peace that the president yields to his well-known nostalgic passion for monarchism. “Peace is one of the cardinal marks of a leader,” the president begins magisterially. “In the monarchy in the olden days, the king had maximum power, but for your kingdom to be stable you must have the military strength. So without stability of any state it cannot develop.” In case he has lost you in the vastness of his private historical imprecision, the president is merely saying monarchies show greater tendency to guarantee peace. He does not, however, say whether ineluctably they also guarantee greater development.
Jonathan’s pained reference to the virtue of monarchism of course shows his difficult relationship with democracy and what he sees as its insufferable insistence on checks and balances. This is not the first time he has embraced ancient forms of government and repudiated sophisticated and modern systems. Indeed, we must expect that he will continue to embrace or repudiate systems and values according to his well-known proclivities. These proclivities – his distaste for modernism, especially – will continue with him to the end of his presidency, whether that presidency terminates in one term or two.
The president also attempted a dichotomous explanation of physical and political insecurity. The first, he says, indicates the use of guns and bombs and involves the security of the individual. The second, he fails to define, but indicates its consequence to be a lack of development. You will have to read between the lines to understand why the president felt justified to draw a puzzling line between what he categorises as two types of insecurity. After all, neither conduces to development, and both are often attended by shootings and killings. In fact, however, the president was leading to the highly suspect notion that the media is guiltier than any other institution in predisposing the country to insecurity. The press is his bête noire. When he does not hate it, he distrusts it.
After ruminating on the axiom that says the pen is mightier than the sword, the president goes ahead to suggest that by reflecting “these unending political conflicts in the media, whether print, electronic or social media, it brings a lot of insecurity to the system and sometimes people begin to doubt your government.” He places at the doorstep of the media the blame for the people’s lack of confidence in his government and leadership style. In essence, he would have preferred the media to shut out political conflicts and live in denial as the government often does.
It seems all but evident that Jonathan wishes to court the media but doesn’t know how. Indeed, he naively believes that once the media embraced him, all would be well. Hear the president: “The media environment that should have helped our transformation agenda is being used negatively… The way Nigerians challenge and abuse me… yes, the president has enormous power, but if you use that enormous power to some extent you will look like a dictator.” If we disentangle his fustian on press freedom, which freedom he shockingly believes to be a privilege, from the other parts of the speech we would reach an even more disturbing false bottom in his logic about the powers of the president in a democracy. He erroneously thinks the president has enough powers vouchsafed to him by the constitution to be a dictator if he likes, but he plaintively regrets his inability to use that facility. The truth is that he does not have the powers he thinks he has, and worse, cannot even indulge himself as he wants.
In his apportionment of blame for insecurity, he refers to the problem the flawed 2007 election gave him and his predecessor, and then compares that poll with that of 2011 and concludes, with unrestrained self-glorification, that the latter was more credible. But he appears baffled that so soon after an election he gave top marks he had become deeply unpopular. According to him, “Immediately after that election, not quite six months, the kind of media hype that started hitting us made us to stop and ask where is this coming from? I said I did not just come out from the blues to contest the election, I was deputy governor for six and half years, I was a governor for one and half years, I was a vice president, and before election, I was the president up to April when the elections were conducted, people knew me. So within this period, including when I even acted, if I was that bad would people have voted for me?… But the media condemned me.”
Jonathan says the criticism he was subjected to so soon after the elections made him stop and ask where it was coming from. There is absolutely no truth in that statement. Neither he nor his aides stopped to ask where the problem was coming from. He simply concluded that some people were manipulating the situation to make his government seem incompetent, for which he now blames the ‘political’ (not the ‘professional’) media. In his opinion, the fault has to lie elsewhere, not in his lackluster style, not in his goofs and gaffes, not in his retrogressive ideas of government and governance, not in his improper grasp of economic and political issues, and not in his ordinary and uninspiring vision of a modern and progressive society. He cannot grasp the fact that between the two main candidates in the 2011 presidential poll, the electorate voted for him because he appeared safer, not better nor more cerebral nor more principled, and that barely a few months after the election the people recognised they were sold a pig in a poke, for which they have reacted very vigorously in the fashion that now confounds him.
Jonathan gives a brief of his political career, wondering whether the people did not consider these before they voted for him. The truth is that they neither knew him nor, even more mortifyingly, knew that he had apparently reached the end of his tether as governor, and that both the office of president and the virtues of democracy, not to talk of the concepts of freedom of speech, rule of law and federalism, were above his ken. The six months he speaks about is the period it took the people to discover their folly in opting for the safer rather than the better.
Jonathan exceeds himself in his extempore speech by reiterating his discredited views on the subsidy protests of January. As he put it: “Look at the demonstrations on fuel subsidy; look at the areas these demonstrations are coming from, and you begin to ask, are these the ordinary citizens that are demonstrating? Or are people pushing them to demonstrate? Take the case of Lagos, Lagos is the critical state in the nation’s economy, it controls about 53 per cent of the economy and all tribes are there. During the demonstration in Lagos, people were given bottled water that people in my village don’t have access to, and people were given expensive food that the ordinary people in Lagos cannot eat… They go and hire the best musician to come and play and the best comedian to come and entertain. Is that demonstration?”
It is no use trying to convince a deeply resentful president that he is wrong. The more you try to persuade him, the more implacable he gets. This columnist covered the January subsidy protest from beginning to the end and saw no coordinated attempt to feed the protesters or assuage their thirst. A few good Samaritans gave out tokens, but they were so insignificant that it would be sheer exaggeration to consider these orchestrated. Food hawkers were there to make money, and musicians and comedians, whom some presidency officials deprecated as clowns, jostled to get attention, and would have paid to have their moment in history. Meanwhile, the president sat paranoid in Abuja and relied on misleading reports. And because he does not read his country’s newspapers, which he believes to be manipulated by politicians, he failed to educate himself on the true position of the protests.
But much more than believing falsehood, Jonathan once again proves his long-running resentment towards Lagos, a city he sees as snobbish but which has done nothing to assist in spite of acknowledging its centrality to the Nigerian economy. How is it the fault of Lagos if the president’s village does not have access to bottled water, and why on earth must he compare the city to his village? Does he know the kind of food ordinary Lagosian eats? Shortly after he sent troops to quell the protests, he denounced Lagos elite as pampered and their children, whom he claimed rode five cars, as spoilt rotten. Who can forget also that while campaigning for votes in 2011, he attempted to instigate other ethnic groups against Lagosians using false statistics? Yet, he is surprised that he is challenged and abused, and regrets not having the powers of a monarch to do as he pleases and the ability of a propagandist to manipulate the media in his favour. He is shocked that barely six months into his presidency, his romance with the people came to an end, even though he did nothing to sustain that romance and has repaid the votes he garnered with scorn and ill will. It is no credit to his learning and office that every time he encounters challenges and repudiation, his instinctive defence mechanism is to take refuge in the values and systems of the feudal past of his longings.
Finally, and as a fitting summary of his worldview, Jonathan lets us into the secret of his fortitude and indifference. Hear him: “For me, if I see somebody is manipulating anything, I don’t listen to you; but when I see people genuinely talking about issues, I listen. I am hardly intimidated by anybody who wants to push any issue he has. I believe that that protest in Lagos was manipulated by a class in Lagos and was not from the ordinary people.” With this syllogism, the president rounds up his philosophy of governance in the most unspeakable fashion. It does not matter whether the critic is right, as long as the president thinks the troublemaker is instigated, he will not listen. How can he tell who is instigated and who is not? Again, it hardly matters; the president gets intelligence report, or perhaps he simply makes up his mind anyhow he fancies. And if the critic is wrong, as long as he is not instigated, then the president will listen. If this is not recipe for both autocracy and misrule, nothing else is.
The much we know about the president comes from his extemporaneous nuggets. There will be many more of such gems before his term ends. Every time he orates, we imagine we have reached the nadir that no human can possibly plumb. But every such time, we have been mistaken. In the months ahead that chasm will be dug deeper than we think him capable, for it is now clear that though Jonathan is gifted in many areas and speaks with the candour that is unusual in these climes, his talents are altogether suited only to ages past. Lagos had better take heart, and all critics, whom the president dismisses as calumnious, must reconcile themselves to contending with a man whose values and philosophy are hewn from the granite of a completely different era.
