The Nation Newspaper

Category: Hardball

  • Super Zee crests the globe

    Her parents named her Asisat Oshoala.  But her team mates christened her Super Zee, perhaps after the way she floats on the ball like some majestic breeze.  The world perhaps remembers her as the 18-year old who cried her eyes out, even after being adjudged the most valuable player (MVP) at 2013 FIFA U-20 Women’s World Cup.

    Now, she is the first ever BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year 2015.  That means, in the opinion of BBC’s global audience, our own Super Zee is the global football queen!  For a country that is high on dire and bad news, this is one to cheer.

    To win, Asisat brushed aside challenges from Kim Little (Seattle Reign, United States), Veronica Bosquette (FFC Frankfurt, Germany), Nadine Kessler (Wolfsburg, Germany) and Marta, the Brazilian great and former FIFA female footballer of the year — the quad, with Asisat, being the last five shortlisted for the inaugural award.

    To be sure, in 2013/2014, Asisat, as a member of Nigeria’s squad to the 2013 FIFA Women’s World Cup and the 2014 Africa Women Championship, won about everything available to win.  For starters, she emerged MVP in both championships, though she lost the U-20 World Cup to Germany, while winning the Africa Women Nations Cup for Nigeria.

    Later, she would emerge the 2014 CAF African player, a honour she annexed with her win as the best young African female football player for same year.  Later, she joined Liverpool Ladies FC in England, from her Nigerian Club, Rivers Angels — and she has wasted no time in settling down to banging in the goals for her new club.

    Super Zee is simply a metaphor of what Nigeria could be but has seldom been.  She is a bundle of raw talent, just as Nigeria is a trove of raw treasures.  Her natural technical abilities she has horned with good tutelage.  The result has been sheer explosion in sheer beauty in the female segment of the “beautiful game”, to borrow from the iconic Pele, the Brazilian great.  But not so for our country, Nigeria, which has the penchant to waste her talents and fritter her resources.

    Hardball always thought — wish Nigeria were Super Zee!  If Nigeria were Super Zee, there would be no stopping her; and she would easily have transformed from the giant of Africa Nigerians always want to crow about to a giant of the globe.  What Asisat has shown the world is that when Nigeria gets it right, no force on earth can stop her — but will she?

    That Asisat is only 20 and is already blooming in female football where maturity appears to come with age, when compared with male football, is a tribute to talent and discipline.  Nigeria has talent aplenty.  But she also has more than her fair share of indiscipline.  And that is the problem, really.

    Let no one accuse Hardball of over-dramatising a BBC listeners/viewers recognition of a Nigerian girl who has honed her natural talents with discipline and sheer professionalism.  But that is exactly what Nigeria needs, to vault over her present challenges.

    So, as Queen Asisat crest the globe in her chosen profession, let every Nigerian take a cue from her proud lead.  Super Zee, Hardball is proud of you!

  • Haba, Baba Obj!

    Love me or hate me but you cannot ignore me. This must be the credo of our self-made statesman and builder of modern Nigeria, our own Baba and former president, Chief Olusegun Okikiolu Aremu Matthew Obasanjo. He also has a long list of titles and honorifics attached to that interminable name. One of these days when Hardball is in a mischief mode, he would unleash them on you dear reader so that you would appreciate the full worth of your two-time head of state and African leader. Let us save that for another day.

    We are considering today, what has made Baba Obj tick and timeless. Since he happened upon us hapless denizens of this patched land 78 years ago, he has remained on our back like a bad hunch. His life has been source and sauce for public consumption since his conception in Owu land, Ogun State. He too had no shoes until he joined the Nigerian Army and since then, his life and ours have not been the same again.

    As an officer who embodies Nigeria’s military and political history, he is reputed to be always away (some say conveniently so) during military putsch only to surface after the fact to benefit when there was booty to be shared.

    He honorably handed over power to a civilian government in 1979 yet people who enjoy provoking him insist his knees quaked as he dropped the mantle hastily. But he must take solace in the fact that the world community continues to hail him for that singular act till date.

    Carrying on as a living legend of democracy and civil rule, he had made the government of General Sani Abacha so uncomfortable that he was slammed for coup plotting in 1995.

    He was released and pardoned in 1998 and in 1999 he allowed himself to be drafted into the presidential race after he had derided those pushing for him by asking them “how many presidents” they wanted to make of him. A man of destiny he became Nigeria’s president once again.

    He rode back to power on high hope and on huge popular acclaim. The combo of ex-head of state and ex-prisoner are never purchased from the market. But his eight years of civilian presidency is remarkable today and remembered more for his failed attempt to tinker with our constitution (as if we were a banana republic) and steal a third term in office.

    The major socio-economic burdens be-deviling the country in his time were never lifted in his eight years: Power, refineries, roads, rail, airports, just name them. He missed a great opportunity to move Nigeria forward and earn that global statesmanship he covets so much.

    Well, it seems he doesn’t have to earn it, he would confer it on himself all the same. Last Sunday, he told a group of visiting Egba women that the country had been poorly managed in the last eight years. He added: “When I came in 1999, there was no fuel and power. The situation was like this and I thought we have put that one behind us.”

    No sir Baba Obj, you did not put those ‘things’ behind us o, they have remained with us as legacies of PDP’s 16 year misrule, thanks.

  • Straight, to the undertaker

    From the latest manoeuvres, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) appears headed straight to the undertaker.  But the snag is this undertaker would appear unsympathetic!

    With the ouster of Chairman Adamu Mu’azu, hanged on the petard of a combined palace coup of the Goodluck Jonathan presidential court and Mu’azu’s own opportunistic National Working Committee (NWC), President Jonathan is reported to have seized the structures of the embattled party, still reeling from its March/April crushing electoral defeat.

    It is true as the Yoruba say: if you tarry too long in the latrine, all forms of flies, wild and tame, would drone you to shame.  That is the story of Mr. Fix it, Tony Anenih, who seems to have withdrawn into some self-fixing purgatory.  In a strange move — strange to Mr. Fix it in his heydays — Chairman Anenih virtually bolted from the PDP Board of Trustees (BOT).

    The last time the all-mighty Olusegun Obasanjo, outgoing president of the Federal Republic, all-knowing father of modern Nigeria and unrivalled PDP King Kong, elbowed Anenih from that position, the Edo chief grumbled and snorted so much at the impudence.  He bided his time till King Kong Aremu overreached himself.  And pat, the BOT dropped right back in his waiting laps.

    So, how come Mr. Fix it has relinquished that prized diadem to the gentler and more placid Jonathan?  Mr. Fix it eventually has fixed himself?

    Well, PDP court politics moves in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform!  Or how else would Hardball understand its peculiar sense of crime and punishment?

    Alhaji Mu’azu was about the sanest voice in Goodluck Jonathan’s presidential campaign ensemble.  He was the only voice warning against the path of self-destruction the party merrily trod.  Yet, he was the first the guiltiest of party cadres shooed off his office.

    Jonathan, on the other hand, was the author and finisher of PDP’s destruction.  He was the presidential do-nothing.  He was the ruler to which cluelessness was the fundamental principle of state policy.  Yet, he was the most adamant on claiming an additional term, even if the heavens would fall; and the party sink into abyss.

    Yes indeed, the heavens did fall; and PDP did sink into the abyss.  Yet, Jonathan is the very one reported to have seized the PDP structure; and given himself the sweet chore of nursing the comatose “largest political party in Africa” back into life!  How can that be?

    Recall, it was Jonathan’s crude and kindergarten (apologies to Chief Bisi Akande) projection of power that caused Alhaji Bamanga Tukur his chairmanship.  It was his inability to rein in his wife, Dame the Game, that harvested Jonathan political enemies that nailed him at the polls.  It was Jonathan’s play at hiding behind a finger that gifted Femi Fani-Kayode the reckless ill grace of coarse partisan insults, which sweet poison killed Jonathan’s presidential encore.

    Yet, it is this same Jonathan that postures as the new-found messiah to put PDP out of its self-imposed misery.  Talk of the physician that replaces a headache with yaws!

    PDP, of course, can claim its democratic right to free suicide.  And the omens are not so good, with the reported ambush its club of ex-governors are plotting against its ex-president, in the impending fight-to-finish over the party’s soul.

    But Hardball can wager: PDP, in Jonathan’s hand, is heading straight to the undertaker.  So folks, prepare for the final burial!

  • NAF rules ok!

    Hardball sure has a few things in common with Africa music legend Fela Anikulapko-Kuti. Hear, hear, you probably sneer, my dear reader but don’t we all love to associate with greatness? But if you knew Fela in his hay days and if you are a regular reader of this small strip, you would no doubt have noticed the glaring similarities in constitution, character and temperament of Fela and Hardball.

    Let’s try a shortlist: Fela was audacious in a rather rambunctious manner. He was supremely confident and self-assured in the pursuit of his convictions. It did not matter to him whether you were a military of civilian president; it did not matter the shade of colour of your uniform and indeed it bothered him not whether you were bearing a machine gun or a horse-whip.

    He loathed injustice and would not only spot it miles away but would pursue it with the single-mindedness of a train-robber just to win succor for victims. It was his life passion. So also was pulling down all the high, shiny, façade of hubris and of course roiling inept governments too. Remember it was Fela at his brilliant best who described uniform as mere cloth made by mere tailor. He also sang about “Army Arrangement”, “Unknown Soldier,” and the inimitable “Zombie,” among numerous other timeless masterpieces.

    Hardball has done some too in his own little way and on this small piece of space. He has taken on presidents both sitting and expired. He has poked his grubby nose into the affairs of all manner of compatriots, especially such affairs that are ribald and injurious to our collective well-being.

    One such is the matter at hand today which concerns men of the Nigeria Air Force (NAF). Last Sunday, a detachment of NAF at the airport in Lagos behaved in a manner we know too well. They forgot that as the great Fela said long ago, uniform na cloth made by tailors; and Hardball can add that guns are toys just any man can carry.

    Why are we saying this? A group of NAF men (described as officers, but Hardball doubt that officers would be in such a duty post) had pounced on one Muhammed Shuaibu, said to be a protocol officer of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) and beat him to a pulp. If the NAF authority had remained mute and unknowing, Hardball would have forgiven them for honestly being mute and unknowing. But in an official response to the victim’s cry for justice, NAF spokesman, described as Command Public Relations Officer, Logistics Command, NAF, named Joel Abioye told us that Shuaib was beaten (not to a coma though as he pretends) by his men for “breaking the rule” and seeking to use his position to outsmart his men.

    Dear reader, be informed that this bloody turf war happened right in front of the departure area of our international airport. A dozen and one questions beg for answer. One, what are armed Air Force officers doing around the airport directing traffic? Two, why is our idea of security always about persons in uniform bearing arms? Three, is this how other countries secure their airports? Four, are NAF officers trained to brutalize fellow citizens who break their “rule”?

    Let’s just say NAF rule ok at the airport!

  • Obj.: Who will rescue us from this ‘strongman’?

    Virility is the mark of ultimate manhood and a man who proves to be manly into his old age must be saluted especially for his good fortunes. Hardball can confirm that virility – not merely the ability to procreate and by no means discounting it – but the sheer aura of masculine wellbeing and strength, is the essence of the male gender.

    It is man at the apogee of his physical strength and charm; at the height of his fame and authority be-straddling and towering over his environment like a colossus. Some call it the Alpha male – men who drive the world around them, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. Men bursting with a flush of testosterone; men like dynamite.

    Hardball, having encountered Obj during his time in Aso Rock can attest to his sweltering virility and sod-busting manliness. After all, he is a root-chewing farmer besides being a soldier. On one occasion after an interview session that lasted into midnight, yours truly was worn and sleepy but Obj, the doughty rustic, slung a towel around his neck and headed for the squash court.

    Of course, concupiscence is the corollary of manliness and there is a rich repertoire somewhere but Hardball would leave mundane matters to the tabloids. Baba is a statesman of no mean virility even as a septuagenarian. But surely, every good thing has its offside, including a man’s glorious powers. Indeed, what is power and strength without the requisite control and circumspection?

    This, essentially, has been the trouble with Obj, the chink in his armour so to speak. After his second coming as Nigeria’s president (1999 to 2007), an era which he fluffed and debased by the very virtue of his crude masculine gruff, he has continued to reckon himself as the “father of modern Nigeria” and the foremost African statesman of the day. There is also a hint of a messianic fervor in his carriage.

    He would openly ride roughshod over luckless sitting president, Goodluck Jonathan, a neophyte he brazenly foisted on the country at the height of his megalomania. He tore his party’s membership card before a watching world to spite the man in the saddle and openly worked towards the electoral downfall of his party. Obj would have crushed this manner of ‘insurrection’ against his power and authority; he hated opposing ideas.

    A strongman not happy to be outside the ring, he recently handed to the president-elect, what he terms strategies for solving the nation’s problems. Obj’s unsolicited pieces of gem are minted from a think-tank he set up four months ago to set agenda for the incoming president. Wow, how perspicacious!

    The president-elect, General Mohammadu Buhari of course received the ‘great’ document with thanks. But Hardball can affirm that Obj would never have exhibited such grace. But more remarkably, Obj was not only stumped by these problems in his eight years, he was impregnably obdurate. And who would dare to empanel a body to advise an Obj presidency? He would be sure to shred your exertions right before you and in public glare and mock you to scorn.

    Who will rescue us from this ‘strongman’?

     

  • Odu’a help! They want to kill Gani

    Help  Odu’a, help!  They want to kill Gani Adams, help!

    That is the frantic call from Ganiyu Adams, leader of a faction of the Odu’a People’s Congress (OPC), whose pre-election sweetheart deal with President Goodluck Jonathan and his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) led to the rude and crude invasion of Lagos streets by charm-waving and weapon-threatening OPC cadre, joined by other Jonathan fair-weather friends, to press the president’s right to a compulsory second term.

    Gani says after that atavistic show in Lagos on a Monday morning, that show of equal-opportunity anarchy, he has known no peace.  He whines that his paradise is lost.  He whines even more that that paradise may never be regained.  Pity!

    Hardball, with all his soul, empathises with the embattled Gani.  Indeed, the word is empathy and not sympathy — empathy because whoever sees coming death and not shiver?  Who?

    But what “death” is Gani talking about?  If he is talking of physical death, that would amount to over-dramatisation of this present travails.  Why would anyone want to kill the living dead?

    Long live Gani, the private citizen and humble carpenter who despite his lowly nativity rose to some national prominence, in self-projected defence of his Yoruba nationality, in the ceaseless crisis of Nigerian nationhood.  Gani is a young man.  Other things being equal, he will live his life to old age.

    But Gani as a champion of Yoruba causes, no matter how misguided and how unconventional?  That one would appear dead!  Now, if that Gani is existentially dead, and his OPC, at best of times a rogue underclass group, that has now proved itself a racketeer for filthy lucre, even against the very same perceived Yoruba interest both claimed to be vanguard, is that not existential death?

    So, if Citizen Gani gripes about some threatened physical liquidation, the Police and other security agencies should urgently attend to his cry.  But he labours in vain if he feels that, by such an alarm, he can claw his way back to relevance.

    MKO, the irreplaceable Moshood Kashimawo Abiola, the late Nigerian elected president that was never inaugurated said it all — and his bank was the unceasing Yoruba well of traditional wise-cracks.  You declared yourself on a money-making trip, but on the way, you fortuitously ran into honour.  Be wise: about your trip —  even if you made money, would you not use it to acquire honour?

    This was one of MKO’s rich repertoire during his June 12 annulment odyssey.  It eventually claimed his life, but made him a martyr of Nigerian democracy, the grim honour no money — and he had loads of that — can buy!

    Ironically, it was during this titanic struggle for national voter sovereignty, turned Yoruba rights because most others chickened out, that Gani emerged with Pa Frederick Fasehun, who claimed to have founded OPC.  In the pre-election manoeuvres however, both appeared to have self-destruct: the one young and callow; the other old and not-so-wise; but both certainly throwing their lot with money and hardly with honour!  That seems to explain the so-called Jonathan sweetheart pipeline security contract, for which they risked everything!

    Now that Gani Adams and his OPC have chosen money over honour, they should live happily ever after with their choice — as the living dead!

  • With friends like Jonathan’s…

    H ardball posits that friendship is one of the most abused concepts in human relationship. And when people want to stretch this oddity, they talk about “true friendship” as if there is such a thing as ‘false’ friendship. Hardball could write a fat book on this mushy word and smarmy concept but let’s just boil it down by concluding that friendship is like religion.

    Why so, you ask hurriedly? Hardball pontificates that just as most people serve various gods not for worship sake but for ulterior motives and in selfish expectation of favours; in like manner people consummate friendship in view of all sorts of personal benefits. This is why in most friendships, as in Law firms, there are almost always senior and junior partners. What about situations of equal partners, you may ask?

    Well, this is Hardball’s show and I put it to you that equality is relative. Two partners may be equally wealthy materially but they will never be emotionally on equal keel; and of course, never are any two persons intellectually equal. In other words, one of the partners will always derive some fulfilling vicarious enjoyment from the other.

    Hardball would invest some time and space someday to render a disquisition on this interesting, if beguiling subject. For now, we have been moved (not to tears surely) by out-going President Goodluck Jonathan’s recent lament that his friends have deserted him! Friends, friends, friends, what a flighty, fleeting idea? To think that the president’s friends have already taken flight while he is still (lame-duck) president ensconced in Aso Rock, imagine what would happen in a few days’ time.

    Oh, friendship, what a slinking, slithering concept; if friendship were a living thing, I wager it would be a snake rather than a sheep or tiger. This is corroborated by the fact that it is a friend who will desert you, or betray you, break your heart or stick a knife to the side that hurts most. Of course the enemy’s stab would not hurt as much as a friend’s.

    Juju music maestro, Ebenezer Obey once sang that the, “rich would befriend the rich and the wretch would befriend the wretch, but Oyename is his friend.” Ndigbo put it even more grimly that the moment the corpse begins to ooze, that friend regarded better than a brother would vanish. Yoruba are rather laconic about friendship: “A friend could make you and he could equally break you.”

    A common English saying tells us that: show me your friend and I will tell you who you are. That may be true to some extent but one of the greatest exemplar of friendship is Jonathan, son of the first king of Israel, Saul. This is as recorded in the Bible. But his is divine friendship in which he chose to trade his father, the throne, his family and even his own life to safe his friend and soul mate, David. Let us call it Messianic friendship.

    It may seem a tiny bit ironic that Goodluck Jonathan whose namesake, (Jonathan Saul) epitomised friendship is being so wickedly betrayed by friends this early in the day. Well, let’s just close by saying that with friends like Jonathan’s, who needs enemies?

  • Metuh Agonistes

    Olisa Metuh, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) national publicity secretary and Janjaweed philosopher, is out with a new release, Metuh Agonistes.

    In it, sure a box office monster hit,  the incomparable Mr. Metuh plays Jeremiah, the lead role, and spews endless jeremiads, conjuring plots of “Armageddonian” proportions,   on how his party’s rival, the All Progressives Congress (APC) has all but made up its evil mind to seize its little electoral gains, in Rivers, Delta and Akwa Ibom states.

    But why would anyone, even the meanest and vilest partisan souls, want to further kick the stumbling and sprawling former “largest party in Africa”, now feverishly cooling its heels as, in Hardball-speak, the “largest party in Southeast and Southsouth”?

    In Metuh’s janjaweed jeremiad, served hot, fresh and smoking:  in “Delta, Rivers and Akwa Ibom states, the APC machinery is working round the clock to ensure that it upturned the victory of the PDP and the mandate freely given [italics Hardball’s] in these states.”

    But, as it happens, the results of these states, particularly Rivers and Akwa Ibom, “get K-leg”, to borrow the famous phrase of another ex-PDP great, former President Olusegun Obasanjo — and, double irony! — when, at the apex of his imperial-presidential glory, the man who was the state decreed Rotimi Amaechi’s PDP Rivers governorship nomination “don get k-leg”; and democratic-imperial version, conjured up Rotimi’s cousin, Celestine Omehia, as the new beneficiary!

    Well, Amaechi went to court, and the Supreme Court ruled that though Omehia ran for governor, the candidate in the eyes of the law was Amaechi.  Of course, those were the halcyon days of untrammelled power — glorious days, before Obasanjo gathered the faithful, to publicly shred his own PDP membership card!

    But back to the present: Metuh’s pair of electoral pearls — Rivers and Akwa Ibom — must be something special, to draw Metuh’s grave jeremiad.

    Rivers certainly must enter the Guinness Book of Records for its grisly harvest in snuffed life and severed limb, not to talk of battered psyche, on its way to delivering a jumbo mandate, freely given, the PDP-peculiar way!

    So is Akwa Ibom, the land of the colourful Godswill Obot Akpabio, the father of modern Akwa Ibom.  There, PDP harvested so much votes that though the local Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has released result for the April 11 governorship polls, it is still at sea with releasing the Akwa Ibom legislature vote, held same time, same day!

    Only God knows why Metuh included Delta in his partisan agony.  Perhaps some electoral abracadabra happened there too!  But the pair of Rivers and Akwa Ibom is obvious.  For both states, INEC has released evidence that suggests actual voters were hundreds in excess of accredited voters, which the card readers captured, in the control electronic voter roll.  That tends to suggest — horror of horrors! — a majority of the voters, that gave Metuh’s “free mandate”, could well be ghosts!  Still, only the tribunals can say; and those cases are already before them.

    Even then, before APC starts celebrating to high heavens, some sources have pointed out alleged similar disparities in Kano, during the February 28 presidential election.  The snag, however, is: whereas INEC permitted temporary suspension of card readers during the presidential poll, no such waiver was allowed during the governorship/state legislature elections.

    So, perhaps as outgoing President Jonathan wails about the inevitability of “persecution” of his ministers, even if a good number of those could meritoriously deserve prosecution, Metuh is screaming about “freely given” mandates, even if there are manifest causes to believe the so-called votes are manifest puffery.

    Well, Hardball waits, with jarring nerves, how the whole drama pans out.

  • Poor, poor Ngozi

    Call her the rich poor girl. She is in misery now; so much so she is miserable. Every day she wails in the media seeking to be heard, wanting justification and affirmation. After nearly a decade of calamitous outings as the manager of Nigeria’s purse strings, she looks back now with much anguish and pain and emptiness assails her.

    If only Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, out-going Finance Minister, would just keep mum and walk gracefully into the oblivion that awaits her, we might just overlook her woeful outing and go on to pick the pieces of our broken lives, the outcome of her poor economic management. But she would not let us be. She insists she is the best thing that happened here since 1914; and she ends up aggravating the poor populace she has effectively immiserated these past years.

    Just last weekend, Ngozi, growing increasingly sanctimonious as her misadventure comes to an end, told us that she and her clueless team mates are leaving solid economic legacies. How cruel and insensitive can a failed public official be?

    She identified some of such legacies as agriculture in which food production has increased impacting on prices; she points to what they term as National Industrial Revolution (in this i-age!) with the accompanying automotive policy as another of the Jonathan administration’s legacies. There is also, according to her, impressive rise in cement production which has made Nigeria a net exporter of the product. The creation of about 1.4 million jobs yearly out of the required 1.8 million; the creation of a mortgage market to help provide affordable housing and the launch of Development Bank of Nigeria which will support small businesses. These are solid legacies they are leaving behind.

    Hardball’s main grouse with Dr. Okonjo-Iweala is that she often talks to us as if we have eggshells for brains. She forgets that we too have eyes to see and can at least count in vernacular even if we cannot bamboozle with current World Bank and IMF’s economic slogans.

    She may live in denial but we know as a matter of fact that the agric sector under the watch of Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina is the best-managed scam of the Jonathan’s administration. Ditto for Dr. Olusegun Aganga’s Commerce and Industry Ministry. What we had from this due for four years was a well-choreographed import levy racketeering.

    Two examples will help us here. Dr. Adesina sang so loudly about Nigeria’s rice revolution and sufficiency yet he is leaving us with a N25 billion excess rice import levy palaver in just one transaction stream. How could this heavy importing be for a country that claims 40 percent sufficiency in rice production?

    Second, how could Okonjo-Iweala in good conscience brand the rushed importation and assemblage of partially knocked-down auto parts as vehicle manufacturing (“for the first time in Nigeria”) and industrial revolution? What had Peugeot, Volkswagen and Benz been doing in Nigeria rather unsuccessfully, for nearly four decades?

    We urge Ngozi to just give us a break and take a quiet exit. If an economy that has no power supply and is plagued by high exchange rate and salary backlog has not collapsed, then what is economy? So much has gone wrong madam and you need to know that the populace is in deep misery now, thank you.

     

  • From Mandela to de Klerk

    Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria’s outgoing president, is on the prowl again, on church pulpits.  The last time, he shopped for votes for a doomed second term.  But this time, he shops for pity in a looming post-power jungle.

    Before his first “pulpit tour of duty”, the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) compared Jonathan to Nelson Mandela, and a triad of other great world leaders.  But that rude supposition only inflamed the electorate and Jonathan got so TANned at the polls that his party, hitherto, the self-named “largest party in Africa”, shrivelled to largest party in Nigeria’s South East and South-South geo-political regions.

    Now, President Jonathan is likening himself to Frederik de Klerk, the last white ruler of apartheid South Africa.  In a logic peculiarly his own, the outgoing president credited himself with “hard decisions”, among which was losing an election and conceding defeat.  Was he supposed to do otherwise?

    If he suggested he would or should have, then is he saying he had the divine right to rig elections; and if that failed, he reserved the right to shunt aside the mandate of the people and impose himself?  Pray, under what form of government would that be — still democracy?  Ha!

    It is Freudian slips, like this, that expose the dirty recesses of the president’s mind, which seem to suggest a living form of the Biblical whited sepulchre, gleaming outside, but rotten and smelly within.

    For deservedly losing an election and conceding, Jonathan therefore beatified himself as Nigeria’s de Klerk. As de Klerk ruined himself by ending minority rule in South Africa, Jonathan also ruined himself by being voted out — a gracious democratic emperor ungratefully ousted by the ignorant and ungrateful rabble, perhaps?

    And as de Klerk’s wife divorced him after his wilful self-ruin, so would Dame the Game divorce Jonathan after his own wilful power suicide?  By thank God — praaaaaissseee the Loooorrrddddd, Halleluyah!!! — Herself the Dame vigorously rejected such a supposition, sending the church hall into a thunder of applause!

    But even then, the embattled president is not at all assured of post-power bliss.  His Excellency and his brave ministers would be persecuted!  “So, for minsters and aides who served with me, I sympathise with them because they will be persecuted.  They,” he insisted, “must be ready for persecution.”!

    The President even went the literary historical way by quoting the late Tai Solarin’s famous, if unconventional, New Year’s wish:  “May your road be rough, may you have a hard time this year!”  Jonathan gamely told his soon-to-be-persecuted aides and ministers: “May your ways be rough, I say to my ministers, I wish you what I wish myself.  They will have hard times, we will have hard times.  Our ways will be rough.”!

    What’s this?  The President doesn’t know the difference between persecution and prosecution?  Or he was being satanically mischievous and cynical?

    But why is Jonathan so sure?  A case of the guilty being afraid?  An infantile ploy to crave sympathy, knowing that his presidency has big queries, the way it has spectacularly collapsed the economy, even if the Breton-Woods ambassador and economic viceroy insists Nigeria couldn’t be better, economically?  Or yet another Freudian slip showing what he would have done, were he in Muhammadu Buhari’s shoes?

    By the way, Jonathan should count himself lucky, quoting Tai Solarin so glibly.  The no-nonsense Tai, who does not tolerate fools gladly, would have mercilessly pounced on Jonathan for his presidency’s unadulterated incompetence  — on the missing Chibok girls, for one!

    As May 29 draws nigh, Jonathan and his presidential cry babies should just hold their peace.  They have done enough harm already.  So, they can save the polity their gratuitous barrenness they call parting shots.