We have to admit it. President Jonathan surprised everyone in Nigeria and across the world with the readiness and the grace with which he conceded defeat and called Buhari to congratulate him on his victory. Just the day before this happened, Femi Fani-Kayode, the megalomaniacal and evil-tongued Director General of the Jonathan Campaign Organization had been saying that the results being cumulatively and unofficially announced by local and international media organizations that put Buhari well ahead of Jonathan were all false. He had vigorously and falsely claimed that Jonathan and the PDP were in fact more than two to three million votes ahead of Buhari and the APC. And as if that was not enough, Fani-Kayode added that the internal figures collated by PDP field operatives showed that the party and Jonathan had won in 23 out of the 36 states in the country. Moreover, one so-called Elder Orubebe, PDP’s representative at the national election results collation centre in Abuja, had on the final day of the release of the election results and with extremely violent language, attacked the INEC Chairman, Jega for an alleged bias against his party, threatening that the PDP would not accept INEC’s figures for the results. These and other actions and words of PDP hawks gave a clear indication that Jonathan and the PDP would perhaps not accept defeat and that in all likelihood, the country was once again being deliberately set on the path of a debacle of post-election paroxysm of bloodbath and nation-wrecking mayhem.
It is against the background of such actions and words from key figures in his campaign organization that Jonathan’s speedy and gracious concession of defeat caught most people and news organizations by total surprise. And let us bear in mind also that on the day of the election, Saturday, March 28 when the electronic card reader in the polling booth at his hometown failed to authenticate his encoded biometric identity, Jonathan had asked for patience; he had asked Nigerians to recognize that the card reader hitches were just that – hitches that did not amount to an overall condemnation of the elections. Finally, still on that same day, Jonathan had urged Nigerians to accept the results of the elections regardless of who won or lost.
Those who are familiar with the extremely negative profile that this column has painted of Jonathan and his administration over the years would no doubt be surprised by the fact that I am hereby joining my voice to the voices of the great number of people that have given the President high praise for the magnanimity of his acceptance of defeat rather than following the inclinations of the fascist hawks in his party to plunge the country into chaos and bloodshed by a rejection of the will of the Nigerian people as expressed in the decisive victory they gave Buhari and the APC. So why then am I myself now singing the praise of Jonathan? Have I, like my good friend of many, many decades, Odia Ofeimun, seen the light and have come to realize that, as Odia put it, Jonathan is the very best president we have ever had in this country? Absolutely not! My reason for sincerely acknowledging and praising the generosity and maturity of Jonathan’s repudiation of the nation-wrecking desperadoes in his party and campaign organization is precisely to do just that: give the man his due and acknowledge that he will perhaps always be remembered for this extremely gracious final political or electoral act of his time in power. But there is another reason for joining the chorus of praises for the president on this one decisive act and it is the fact that I want to use that acknowledgment to raise the wider question what it cost Nigeria and Nigerians to be taken through desperation of national survival of such extremity that only Jonathan’s gracious act and nothing else could have averted great catastrophe. Moreover, I wish to raise the issue of who paid the price and will in future bear the cost of the kind of post-election trauma that we have just gone through. Is it likely to happen again? If not, what should we do to make its recurrence unlikely or perhaps even impossible? So while we all give praise to Jonathan for that act of great maturity and statesmanship, these are the sorts of issues that we must not ignore, that we must not bury under the psychic weight of relief that we all felt when Jonathan chose not take the preferred destructive path of the Fayoses, the Fani-Kayodes, the Orubebes and the Obanikoros of his party. I think it is best to explain what I have in mind here by using the analogy of what the costs are and what is at stake when a patient survives a life-threatening surgical operation for a deadly cancer.
The hope of all cancer survivors is that the survival will last and that the cancer will not come back. For this, the lucky patient must do everything possible to avoid carcinogenic agents and lifestyle habits that encourage cancer. And of course he or she must continue to take the prescribed medications. Now, it takes no great act of wisdom or perceptiveness for anyone to see that it has been a deeply and widely cancerous democracy that we have been having since the return to formal democratic governance in 1999. In the present discussion, I will limit myself to only the electoral process.
We all remember the elections held under the supervision of the previous INEC Chairman, Maurice Iwu and his boss, Olusegun Obasanjo. In that evil collaboration, there was a crucial division of labor between the two men. Obasanjo’s part was to use money and the police and the army to either buy votes or intimidate opponents and the electorate into fear or submission. For his part, Iwu’s role was to deliver the votes and deliver them big. Now let us be clear that Jonathan not only continued this party tradition of using funds from our national coffers to buy votes, but he took the practice to absolutely new and unprecedented levels. For instance, most of the 2.53 trillion naira oil subsidy mega-scam of 2011 went to the slush funds for Jonathan’s 2011 election campaign. In the current electoral cycle of 2015, it appears that the President went far beyond that already extraordinary scale of 2.53 trillion naira since dollars, not the depreciated naira, was the currency of vote buying. Now my central point here is, regardless of the praise for Jonathan for his post-election magnanimity, we MUST know how much of our money he spent this time around. For not a kobo – or cent – of that money is his father’s money; it is yours and mine and we have a right to know. In the exercise of that right, perhaps we might finally come to a constitutional ban on the use of public funds by all present and future incumbent governments to buy votes. This practice of the unrestricted use of public or state funds for election campaigns is without doubt one of the most carcinogenic agents afflicting or threatening our fledgling democracy. And the cost to the economic and social wellbeing of our peoples is incalculable.
Equally carcinogenic is the use of the police, the army and all kinds of quasi-official militias by Jonathan and the PDP to intimidate and cow both opponents and the general electorate. The scale of this abuse of incumbency for political or electoral advantage must be fully revealed. There is the specific case of Ekiti-Gate. That case must now be formally opened and brought to a conclusion that will serve to strengthen our democracy. The incoming administration must not be blackmailed by charges of witch-hunting or revenge mongering, especially when and if such charges are couched in the form of accusations of bad or mean spirited recompense for Jonathan’s act of magnanimity in that swift and decisive concession of victory to Buhari. The one does not cancel the other: yes, we must praise Jonathan for that one act; no, we cannot, we must not let any incumbent government ever again use the police and the army to pervert and distort the electoral process. Let us not forget that it is the people, in their tens of millions who bore the brunt of the state sanctioned violence that the PDP, in the years of its rule, routinely used as one of its choicest means of staying in power.
The thing that personally nauseates me the most is the use by Jonathan and his campaign hawks of hooded paramilitary operatives side by side with the regular units of the army and the police. I do not know if these spectral and sinister forces were used in the elections of last weekend, but they were widely used in the 2014 gubernatorial elections in Ekiti and Osun States. Hooded paramilitary operatives? It seemed to have come from the lowest common denominator of the melodramatic imagination of Nollywood scriptwriters and film directors. But it was real enough and it came from Jonathan’s Aso Rock.
These are all preliminary observations and reflections on the presidential elections of 2015. We are all greatly relieved that it ended well and there are no looming specters of bitter and divisive verbal and physical warfare on the horizon. In the weeks and months ahead, there will be time enough to turn our attention to the more weighty problems and challenges that the change from one ruling party to another will bring to our country and our peoples throughout the length and breadth of the land. I cannot end this piece without saying this: for me the real heroes of what happened last weekend are not Jonathan or Buhari; they are the millions of Nigerians who resisted intimidation, force, coercion and bribery to send the PDP packing. Let APC take note of this. What has been done to the PDP may or can be done to the new ruling party if no real or meaningful change takes place in the years ahead.
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
