There is no end to some people’s malevolence.
If they could not give Dr Goodluck Jonathan another jet plane to add to the burgeoning Presidential Fleet, or a cassava plantation to supply the raw material for his favourite breakfast loaf, or a pond for breeding fish for the gourmet pepper soup that is the best accompaniment for cassava bread, or a shipload of his accustomed beverage, couldn’t they at least have said a perfunctory “Happy New Year” to him and carried on with their lives of desperation?
Or, since he is scholar and an intellectual, they could have presented him with a basket of books carefully selected from the best-seller lists of the leading trade journals.
Instead, in the dead of night as 2012 faded into history and 2013 was emerging from the womb time, they slunk out of their malignant dens and painted the entire Abuja, government buildings not excepted, with election campaign posters warning those who might be thinking of challenging Dr Jonathan in the 2015 presidential race to perish the thought.
“2015: No vacancy in Aso Rock in 2015,” the posters, bearing a portrait of a half amazed and half bemused Dr Jonathan in his trademark fedora, proclaim sententiously.
Anticipating the querulous who might be led to ask why there would be no vacancy in Aso Rock, the poster declares: “One good term deserves another.”
A grand distraction – in fact, I am almost prepared to call it the Mother of all Distractions – this malevolent, cantankerous, and unpatriotic NewYear present to Dr Jonathan.
Dr Jonathan is of course no stranger to distraction. In fact, distraction has been his constant companion since he took office. Well before he could spell out the details of his much anticipated Transformation Agenda, Boko Haram launched a campaign of indiscriminate murder, its object being to destabilise the Administration as a first step to setting up an Islamic Republic in Nigeria.
When the Transformation Agenda finally got under way, it quickly fell victim to the mass protests that broke out across the nation, following termination of gasoline subsidies that had virtually paralysed the economy. The protesters and their manipulators could not see that only a few privileged persons were profiting from the pernicious subsidy, and that ending it was in the public’s best interest.
For the nine days the protests lasted, Dr Jonathan was so distracted that he lost track of the Transformation Agenda altogether.
Then followed yet another distraction, from Dr Jonathan’s village, of all places. The Italian contractor Gitto Construziani, I gather, had refurbished the old village church in Otuoke from its own abundance and in the finest tradition of social responsibility and corporate good citizenship.
But Dr Jonathan’s political adversaries claimed that he had knowingly solicited a gift from a contractor doing business with the Federal Government, and that at the very least, the whole thing was shot through and through with conflict of interest, if not actual sleaze. Some have even gone so far as to demand his impeachment or resignation, or both.
Even the elements conspired to add to the distraction. Raging floods swept away tracks laid for the nation’s first bullet train, paralysed newly commissioned power plants, washed away vast farmlands bursting with the first fruit of the agricultural revolution Dr Jonathan had initiated, and destroyed thousands of silos chockfull of grain and other produce
What Dr Jonathan has now been confronted with, however, has got to be, as I was saying, the Mother of all Distractions.
Instead of focusing with his accustomed laser intensity on the plans and programmes and projects he has drawn up to make 2013 our annus mirabilis, he has to waste precious time and resources disowning the election posters and dissociating himself from a project that is not even a part of his iconic Transformation Agenda.
The people behind the posters do not wish Dr Jonathan and Nigeria well. They fear that if he is allowed free rein to transform Nigeria, they will cease to have any political relevance. For they cannot say they are coming to transform what has already been transformed.
Hence their strategy: Keep him so busy denying that 2015 is on his mind that he will not be able to pursue the Transformation Agenda with vigour. Then seize on that failure to pre-empt his candidacy, and thus send him packing out of Aso Rock…
Some gullible people whom we shall always have among us seem to believe that Dr Jonathan had fore-knowledge of this diabolical scheme and might even have endorsed it.
If they need indissoluble proof that Dr Jonathan did not have and could not have had anything to do with it, however remotely, they need look no farther than the contemptuous manner in which some of the posters were displayed.
A good many of them were wrapped around refuse bins or posted on dumpsters. Are the malevolent elements behind the campaign not thereby saying that any ambition Dr Jonathan might be nursing for 2015 is destined to end up in dust bin?
Assuming – just for the sake of argument – that Dr Jonathan is interested in running for re-election in 2015, can it be supposed that he would denigrate his own aspiration in this manner? Not even his most implacable critics have ever accused him of masochism.
The Jonathan we know is a sportsman in the pristine sense of that term.He loves genuine competition, and he is so secure in his person that losing means nothing to him. When he plays squash, he tells his opponents at every opportunity: “Don’t be coy. Defeat me if you can.”
Contrast this, if you will, with your typical president whose unspoken message to the fellow across the net is: “You think you are smart? Defeat me if you dare.”
Is the Dr Jonathan we know the kind of leader, then, to resort to a tawdry poster campaign to pre-empt a challenge in a race that will not even come up until 2015?
Proxies of the agents of distraction have been going round asking why Dr Jonathan has not unleashed the forces of national security to smoke out those behind the poster campaign if it is true that he knows nothing about it and if he is genuinely distressed by it.
The more despicable among them are asking whether it is mere coincidence that Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State has been buying acres of space in the newspapers to proclaim, just when the “No Vacancy” posters surfaced in Abuja, that he does not intend to seek the office of President, has never harboured such an intention, and never will harbor it.
Persons of this diabolical cast of mind forger that Nigeria is now a constitutional democracy where freedom of speech and of press is guaranteed in equal measure to the ambitious and the unambitious, and even to agents of distraction. They forget that the days of authoritarian rule, of government by decree, are gone forever. They want to goad Dr Jonathan into playing Goliath.
They will do well to remember that he did not become President and has not remained in that exalted office by submitting to blackmail of any stripe.
The distraction must stop forthwith… Collectively, we must say to them, with the utmost indignation: Enough. Let President Jonathan be. Leave him alone so that he can devote all his energies to accomplishing the urgent task of National Transformation.
Correction
The historian Segun Osoba has written that he was not present at the 1989 Guardian Lecture I referred to in my December 18, 2012,column (“Omoruyi: A scholar’s lament”), and could not therefore have reacted in the manner I described.
I and a Guardian staffer monitoring the audience must have mistaken a look-alike for him.
My regrets.
