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Tag: Dr Jonathan

  • So long, Dr. Jonathan

    So long, Dr. Jonathan

    THE came. He saw. Too bad, he failed to conquer. Certainly, he had some useful initiatives and managed to perform some symbolic acts. However, in his most important self-imposed task of transformation, the verdict of objective observers is that Dr. Jonathan failed woefully.

    President Jonathan’s failure may be due to certain contradictions within the system which he wasn’t able to resolve. It may also be due to his limited understanding of the task that he assigned himself. The lesson here is that leaders must have a thorough understanding not only of the society they lead but also of the goal they labour to achieve. In the case of Dr. Jonathan, this means an understanding of Nigeria and of the meaning and requirements of transformation.

    The dictionary meaning of transformation is “alteration, conversion, change, revolution, renovation, makeover, etc.” To transform is to alter or to change completely. To preserve, on the other hand, is its polar opposite. The object of transformation or preservation is a pre-existing condition—human, place, or thing. Transformation and its opposite are equal opportunity descriptors.

    From the foregoing, we may infer that continuity or preservation politics is the opposite of transformational politics. While the former preserves the status quo, presumably on the belief that it has worked well and no need to rock the boat, the latter opts for fundamental changes away from the status quo, and by definition, towards a better society. To transform is to achieve a better quality of the entity in question. This is what Dr. Jonathan claimed he wanted to achieve for Nigeria.

    The 2011 presidential election was a clear mandate for Dr. Goodluck Jonathan. With support from the north to the south, there wasn’t a shortage of tremendous goodwill and lots of advice from supporters, opponents, and neutral voices. As one of the neutral voices, I wrote a three part column on transformational times, transformational leadership, and transformational followership urging him to seize the moment and establish a lasting legacy.

    I suggested that we were in transformational times when fundamental changes were desirable and required. I defined fundamental changes as those that go down to the foundation and fix its rottenness and argued that cosmetic changes will not be a fitting substitute.

    I made reference to the United States which in 1787 went through a fundamental transformation after the revolutionary war. Adopting a constitution which agreed on a federal structure was a huge deal. The confederalists lost out, and that solid foundation has taken the greatest democracy on earth places ever since. With respect to that change, subsequent changes would appear less fundamental.

    Yet with regard to what they replaced, these other changes could also be fundamental and transformational. The American Civil War was fought and won by the union government to end slavery and keep the country together. It was a fundamental change to this extent. But it was to restore a value and a nation to its prior status. The Civil Rights Act in the last half of the last century belonged to the same category. It was a change to restore the national value enshrined in the constitution, a value that had been destroyed by racism. It was fundamental to the extent that it reconciled political principles and political practice.

    Get the fundamental right, and whatever desirable transformations occur should be a good fit. It is the fundamental that Nigeria has not got right, and what is needed therefore is a fundamental change to get it right. Cosmetic changes cannot do the job.

    I made reference to some items on the list of Jonathan’s priorities. Power was one of them. I observed that the reason the nation has failed after 50 years in the matter of power has to do with the wobbly limbs on which it stands. We hear of gas line saboteurs, generator importer saboteurs, etc. There are reasons why these thrive. We have not got the fundamental right. Why, for instance, do we have to insist on a central approach to powering a nation with more than 360 square miles of landmass in the first place?

    I wagered that the black gold was the mainstreamer-in-chief.  In spite of the various close-calls we’ve had recently; in spite of the warnings that we’ve received; in spite of the apocalyptic predictions; we have not moved an inch towards a genuine diversification of the economy. Nor have we used the proceeds of oil revenue for the development of our human resources or our infrastructure. Now, with dwindling oil revenue, Jonathan is leaving the treasury empty for his successor.

    I thought that we were in transformational times and that the stars were well aligned for fundamental changes in our body politic. I prayed that the political will be summoned so we can still nurse the hope for the country becoming a great nation, which is much more than being one of the advanced 20 economies in 2020. The greatness of a nation is a combination of several factors, including its system of justice, its democratic credentials, its welfare system, and its promise and practice of human rights.

    I concluded that piece by noting that it was the right time for the transformation of Nigeria with a deliberate effort at rebuilding her from the foundation up.

    The president came up with a so-called transformation agenda, one that focused not on the foundational problem of structure and its attendant alienation and moral degeneration. Rather, by transformation, Jonathan embarked on the cosmetics of economic growth, including the mechanics of procurement to prevent corruption. As Ben Nwabueze, the respected constitutional lawyer, puts it:  “National or social transformation implies the creation of a new society. The creation of such a new society would entail change of two types – a radical transformation of the material conditions of society and what has been called an “inner mutation”, i.e. a spiritual or mental transformation in the attitudes and behavoural patterns of the individual members of society. The “inner mutation” called for goes beyond transformation in mental attitudes, and must extend to radical change away from the present prevailing moral degeneracy or moral bankruptcy, as manifested in crimes involving fraud or dishonesty, like examination malpractices and certificate racketeering; corrupt practices in all its forms, including bribery and money laundering; sexual immorality; juvenile delinquency; etc, all of which, in the main, originated or become accentuated in the unbridled quest for money and the money culture it gave rise to.”

    Unfortunately, for four years Jonathan did nothing of the sort and corruption became a badge of honour with the president declaring that “stealing is not corruption.” The government itself promoted ethnic and religious bigotry with the president appealing directly to southerners and Christians for support. Impunity was at its highest and while the security of the nation was severely compromised (more than 200 school girls are still in captivity) security chiefs were in collaboration with the presidency over the shift in the date of the just concluded elections.

    Double standard prevailed and was glorified by Team Jonathan who relished the power to do evil. While they used the police to prevent democratic institutions to operate in Ekiti State, in Ondo the impeachment of the deputy governor was carried out without the police raising a finger. Now, a candidate who scored big in the 2011 elections has suffered woeful defeat in the 2015 elections. And he’s heading back to Otuoke.

    Did he learn any lessons? Unfortunately, I think not. Hiding behind the legal façade of still being in charge, Jonathan chose his last days to launch what amounts to unethical conduct, the type that caused him the presidency, firing old hands and hiring new ones to work with the new administration. Can anyone go lower than this? It just confirms the marketplace belief that what we had thought of as a heroic concession of defeat was anything but, having being forced by powers outside the nation’s boundaries.

    The Buhari/Osinbajo team must learn from this tragic outcome. Don’t gamble with Nigerians’ goodwill! Don’t take our people for granted!

    So long, Dr. Jonathan!

  • The home stretch, finally?

    The home stretch, finally?

    By the time we meet again on this page next Tuesday, the presidential election – dare we hope?–would have been won or lost

    The thrill of victory will be ringing harmoniously in one camp and across its political base, and the agony of defeat will perfuse the other camp and its base. In one camp there will be rejoicing and in the other mourning; in the one, celebration and in the other, lamentation and recrimination.

    A great deal of re-positioning, to borrow the locution careerists so readily employ to justify their fecklessness – a scramble, the like of which Nigeria has never seen, will be well under way, with elements of the losing party denouncing it with the same or even greater fervor than that with which they had supported it and defecting en masse to the winning party, which they will hasten to canonize as the only one that can “move the country forward.”

    Contemplating this latter scenario, a leading expatriate Nigerian academic whose insights and judgment I respect tells me he is substantially sure that, if the APC wins, the foul-mouthed, equal-opportunity slanderer, Femi Fani-Kayode, will dump the PDP without hesitation and without regret, and begin singing the praises of the new people with even greater fervor than he had employed as media director of the Goodluck Jonathan campaign in skewering them.

    All this is of course assuming what cannot be assumed even at this point, namely, that the election will actually take place as scheduled.

    Leading personalities across the political divide are saying they cannot vouch that an election will actually take place on March 28.  The Jonathan administration, I gather, is still shopping around for a court judge who would consider a multi-billion Naira reward worth the risk of declaring General Muhammadu Buhari ineligible for the race.  It is also shopping around, by the way, for a judge who will, for very valuable consideration, prohibit the use of electronic card readers during the election.

    The national security apparatus, Dr Jonathan’s confederates in administering Nigeria as a police state, may yet come up with another excuse to warrant yet another postponement.  Don’t forget that they had requested that the poll be pushed forward by six weeks in the first instance to allow them crush Boko Haram.

    We are still in that first instance.  And with vast tracts of Nigerian territory yet to be recaptured from the marauding insurgents, who says that there cannot be a second instance, or a third?

    Nor can it be assumed, despite Dr Jonathan’s stout denial, that the “Interim Government” option is no longer under active consideration.  The former military president and self-proclaimed “evil genius,” General Ibrahim Babangida, who was reportedly awarded the contract for the scheme, may swear by anything he holds dear, but nobody will believe him.  He lacks a crucial attribute that his unexplained billions cannot buy:  credibility.

    He has been peddling the scheme and may yet find a buyer.

    I hope they are factoring Chief Ernest Shonekan into the scheme.  As the only Nigerian who has the experience of actually running an interim government, he is eminently qualified to head the scheme.   It lasted only 83 days, I grant.  But I am sure he learned all the appropriate lessons.  So that, if summoned to national service again, he may well be able this time around to transform the interim into the interminable.

    Nor should anyone be fooled by Dr Jonathan’s frenetic pace these days as he flies to far-flung places to buy support from traditional rulers and ethnic militias.  It is almost as if he has just discovered Nigeria.  His wife, Madame Patience Faka, is criss-crossing the country seeking – no,  I take that back – demanding support for Dr Jonathan, sowing coarse and vulgar abuse and the most delicious infelicities along her route.

    It is unsafe, I insist, to conclude from all this coming and going that the presidential election will actually take place. “Betwixt the cup and the lip,” says an English proverb, “there’s many a slip.”

    Whatever happens, the election campaign will go down as the dirtiest, ugliest, and the most indecent in Nigeria’s history.  It was not entirely devoid of ideas, but the ideas were crowded out by fear-mongering, character assassination, incitement, ethnic-baiting and hateful speech on a scale beyond belief.  As the perceptive Kayode Komolafe of ThisDay remarked, some combatants carried on as if the law of defamation was on vacation.

    I would add that it was almost as if the civil law relating to invasion of privacy and the criminal law relating to incitement were also on vacation.

    There is more than enough blame to go around, but it has to be said it was the PDP’s national secretary, Wale Oladipo, who cast the first stone when he dismissed General Muhammadu Buhari as a “semi-literate jackboot.”

    Though Oladipo has the formal designation of professor of Nuclear Analytical Techniques at the Centre for Energy Research and Development (CERD) at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, his antecedents at first blush seem as dodgy as Dr Jonathan’s doctoral dissertation.

    At this writing, he does not figure on CERD’s web site.  My Internet search turned out more information about him as PDP national secretary than about his scholarship in the arcane field              of particle physics.  Even his home page, such as it is, says nothing about his education and the universities he attended.

    Perhaps Oladipo is not the type who blows his own trumpet. But settling for such a desultory identity as secretary of the PDP – even if it is still the largest political party in Africa  — when  he may well belong up there with Ernest Rutherford and Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and Max Planck  is carrying coyness too far.

    As they say here, Man, if you’ve got a trumpet, blow it; blow it hard and blow it often.  Otherwise, it will get rusty.

    To return to the election:  Mrs  Jonathan has been ordering her fellow women to vote for her husband because more than one-third of the senior officials he has appointed are women, whereas Buhari did nothing for Nigerian womanhood when he held power for 2o months some 30 years ago.

    Stop throwing stones (no pun intended) when you live in a glass house.

    Was it not under her husband’s watch that about 230 girls were plucked from their hostel in Chibok and spirited to places unknown?  For ten precious days, her husband not only failed to rouse himself to launch a rescue effort, he was actually in denial, claiming that that the whole thing was another propaganda stunt by the Opposition to discredit his administration.

    And by way of support, Mrs Jonathan personally conducted on national television an inane inquisition seen and ridiculed around the world, blaming the school authorities for what was a failure of security, a failure of anticipation, and most crucially a failure of leadership – her husband’s leadership

    Two hundred and thirty young women unaccounted for under Dr Jonathan’s watch.  That is an entire generation.  Then, there are the tens of thousands of Nigerians lost to Boko Haram violence without serious challenge until lately, under a Commander-in-Chief whose primary duty is to protect the lives and property of citizens.  Then again, there are the millions of so-called internally displaced persons, refugees in their own country.

    Dr Jonathan has not indicated what he would do differently if elected.  In six years when money was not a serious problem, he succeeded only in patching the Lugard-era Lagos-Kano railway line.  Now that money is tight, he is promising to link all 36 state capitals by rail if re-elected.

    Desperation truly knows no bounds.

    A vote for Dr Jonathan is a vote for more of the same, for Continuity.

  • Govt negotiates with ‘faceless’ Boko Haram

    Govt negotiates with ‘faceless’ Boko Haram

    It was an unusual volte-face. That is if you believe the Goodluck Jonathan presidency at any time ever had a principled or nuanced revulsion to negotiating with terrorists. The facts of the government’s approach to combating terrorism are, however, much plainer and simpler. They are now negotiating with Boko Haram over mainly the abduction of 219 Chibok, Borno State schoolgirls in a tripartite arrangement that sees representatives of the Nigerian and Chadian authorities speaking earnestly with representatives of Boko Haram or at least a faction of the terrorist group. The government was at bottom not really opposed to negotiating with the group, for it had no principles and no convictions about anything, but it was hesitant because it was not sure of a successful outcome. There was of course some disagreements between government officials over whether to negotiate or not, and the president had seemed chronically unable to make up his mind. But overall, the government recognised it lacked both the guile to rescue the girls and the muscle to defeat the terrorists. The delay in negotiating with Boko Haram is after all political.

    In fact, the Jonathan presidency’s war against terror had been undermined by impotence and vacillation. No concise or comprehensive strategy to fight terror was ever articulated by the government. As the terror group gained in prestige and territory, the government’s security agencies wilted in confusion and in-fighting. At a time, the government even began to fight the media for reporting the military’s shambolic response. After many years of confusion, the government has finally hunkered down to negotiating with Boko Haram, a terrorist group the president consistently and sneeringly described as faceless. Citizens and other intermediaries, including former president Olusegun Obasanjo, protested that if the government was sincere about negotiating, Boko Haram had a face. But Dr Jonathan stood angrily pat.

    It is not clear how the Jonathan government finally put a face to Boko Haram, or whether its volte-face had anything to do with the defection into the PDP of Senator Ali Modu Sheriff and the unusual meeting the president, the senator and Chadian President Idris Deby had in Ndjamena. No one also seems to know whether putting a face to Boko Haram and the ongoing negotiations do not have something to do with the general elections due to hold in about four months time. But whatever it was, Dr Jonathan has at last finally but belatedly recognised how Boko Haram looks like, who some of its leaders are, and that indeed the terror group can speak intelligible language. While it vociferously but without substantiation accuses the opposition for politicising the anti-terror war, it now seems clear that all along, it is the Dr Jonathan government that continues to manipulate the war, especially the rescue of the abducted Chibok girls. Surprisingly, the violation of a controversial ceasefire by Boko Haram elements has not weakened the government’s resolve to press ahead with negotiations.

    Instead, the government or its agents have shown clearer and more forceful persistence in blaming the opposition for the storm the negotiations have run into and the inability of the government to rescue the Chibok girls. There does not appear to be any logic to the accusations, but it has not prevented the government from suggesting that the presence of some All Progressives Congress (APC) members in the BringBackOurGirls (BBOG) campaign is proof the group had been infiltrated by politicians. This suggestion rests partly on the boast by an APC leader, Audu Ogeh, that his party identified with the noble cause the BBOG was fighting for. Oby Ezekwesili, a leader of the BBOG and former minister, had taken exception to Chief Ogbeh’s boast, thereby eliciting an apology from him. But another visible APC member, Hadiza Usman, a daughter of the famous historian, Dr Bala Usman, defiantly insisted she had nothing to apologise for. It was okay for her to belong to a political party, she asserted, and also fight a noble cause, irrespective of the government’s disingenuous politicisation of the cause.

    No one is certain how the Boko Haram negotiations will end, though there are talks the girls could be released tomorrow. But it is clear that the Jonathan government will do its best to salvage the discussions, bring it to some fruition because of the positive political spinoffs the release of the schoolgirls would engender for him, and try as much as it can manage to tar the opposition with responsibility for failure should the discussions end abysmally. The ruling party will also try to shift blame for letting the abductions last intolerably for more than six months, and for not having a strategy to defeat terrorism.

  • 2015: time to confront our demons

    2015: time to confront our demons

    Analysts can’t resist the temptation to award victory or defeat in the 2015 presidential poll to political parties and their candidates based mostly on geopolitical dynamics. It is not hard to see why. President Goodluck Jonathan hails from the South-South, so, he’ll probably take that zone, including perhaps Rivers State, they suggest. The Southeast has completely eschewed any reasoned discussions of the poll; therefore, according to the zone, if not Dr Jonathan, then nobody else will get the great prize. On mainly religious grounds, too, a sizable part of the Middle Belt and a fair portion of the Southwest are believed to have concluded plans to vote unthinkingly for Dr Jonathan since every other contestant, they conclude, is an agent of the devil. As for the other parts of the country, argue some of the analysts, Dr Jonathan will find it tough going.

    But basing the outcome of the 2015 presidential race on essentially technical and zonal permutations rather than on candidates’ ideas and competence, and on religion rather than on issues and candidates’ track records, is to unwittingly lay the foundation for Nigeria’s disintegration. The country is today largely divided between North and South, and between Christians and Muslims. These divisions have been exacerbated by the Jonathan presidency, by his supporters and aides whose fanatical zeal to win the presidential election has become truly numbing, and by his paranoid kinsmen who have blurred the lines between decency and indecency, between democracy and tyranny, and between sense and nonsense. Indeed, we all seem to ignore the unsettling questions about the potential of these divisions, these scorched earth policies and politics, to promote crises in the near future.

    Since the contest has appeared to us to boil down to a struggle between Christians and Muslims, and having irrationally described the opposition party as Islamic and the ruling party as Christian, we fail to ponder what the repercussions would be if the other religion we paranoiacally abhor were to win. To be sure, the exploitation of ethnic and religious sentiments predates the Jonathan presidency. Under past military regimes, religion and ethnicity played an unwelcoming and pernicious role in the formulation of national policies and the conduct of politics. Many years back, it was in fact unavoidable to conclude that rulers of northern extraction deliberately and unwisely skewed postings and promotions in key ministries and the security services in favour of northern officers, even as they thoughtlessly appeared to promote Islamic trappings in governance, such as the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC). So the excesses we are seeing today have their antecedents, with some Jonathan supporters even asserting that today’s politics and policies must be dedicated to breaking the North’s ethnic and religious stranglehold on the polity.

    There can be no doubt that past rulers, many of them so schizoid that it is difficult to gauge how messed up their moral compasses were, made too many mistakes. They had the opportunity to create a stable, fair and just society, but either because of incompetence and ignorance, or because of their fundamental disposition to fanaticism, they simply enthroned ad hocism in governance and ruled with the immature instinct of neophytes. Sadly, the consequences of years of favouritism are today manifesting in Dr Jonathan’s presidency’s reverse discrimination and favouritism. The pressing danger is that if we go into the 2015 presidential poll with these implacable divisions anchored on ethnic and religious discrimination, Nigeria’s future could become blighted. Confronting our demons is therefore the urgent need of the moment.

    Under the military, those who climbed to leadership positions were neither gifted nor really disciplined, nor yet deep or ideological. In those days, politicised officers wormed their way into national leadership. But under civilian rule, it is even more scandalous that since the time of Olusegun Obasanjo, through the reign of Umaru Yar’Adu, and now the subversive rule of Dr Jonathan, leadership recruitment has been so flawed and polluted that only the worst have been able to claim Aso Villa. Chief Obasanjo was a megalomaniac without the redeeming feature of ideological or moral conviction. Former President Yar’Adua was somewhat more honest and altruistic than his predecessor, but he was entirely lethargic, superficial and permissive. Dr Jonathan has blended in himself the worst qualities of his two predecessors. In him pedantry, egotism, superficiality and despotism reach their sublime worst.

    In 2015, Nigeria must therefore make a clean break from the past, both in terms of the quality and disposition of the president and the issues and values that shape that choice. The present trend and methods are simply untenable if the country is not to fragment. The first place to begin is to consciously and firmly redirect politics away from the ethnic and religious cocoons in which Nigerians are ensconced or are retreating. The talk of where Dr Jonathan hails from, or how the country has survived on oil from the Niger Delta to justify inflicting an unprepared and emotionally distraught president on the country, must be resisted. In fact, having recognised his limitations, and knowing full well he is unlikely to achieve any amelioration of his weaknesses any time soon, Dr Jonathan has mastered a lethal and enervating cocktail of disinformation, propaganda and tyrannical use of power to sustain his hold on power. He is succeeding because his methods and proclivities are anchored on the exploitation of elite greed.

    One of the issues that should influence the choice of who becomes president next year is the Jonathan presidency’s relentless and remorseless thirst for scandals. While his Petroleum ministry was yet to account for about $12bn the former Central Bank of Nigeria governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, accused it of squandering, and while billions of naira are filched from various pension funds, other more aggravating scandals have erupted. His government illegally hauled $9.3m cash to South Africa to, as they put it incredulously, buy arms. And among other malfeasances, enough to cause any other president to be impeached in a decent society, Dr Jonathan has actively promoted or connived at the wholesale subversion of democratic principles and practice in Nigeria. Ekiti is in turmoil, Rivers was and is still in turmoil because the president shirks his responsibility as the most potent defender of the constitution, Adamawa has been laid prostrate, Nasarawa tethers on the brink, and Osun and Edo, not to talk of Ogun and Lagos, are under his party’s radar for destabilisation and, if necessary, destruction by an army of well-funded vagrants.

    Nigerians may not be enlightened enough to appreciate that a dictator is emerging; but after acquiring confidence in his war of attrition with Chief Obasanjo, having lured the Judicial Council into surrendering its powers in the Justice Ayo Salami case, and having compromised, subjugated and tyrannised the elite everywhere, Dr Jonathan has concocted a series of stratagems to transform his party into the most potent weapon of oppression ever seen in these parts, and the country into a one-party dictatorship. The electorate must be made to understand that full-blown dictatorship will flourish once Dr Jonathan is re-elected.

    Indeed, it is an indication of the country’s moral health that all the scandals swirling around Dr Jonathan have neither bothered him nor lowered his stock among the stragglers that hoof the Niger Delta, Southeast and now surprisingly the Southwest. He fully expects to win the poll next year, partly because of the many endorsements he has received. But the politics of local elections at the local government and state levels are quite different from the politics of presidential election. And though the 2015 presidential poll has been scheduled first, with the sinister anticipation of triggering a bandwagon effect, it is expected that in a tight race, it is still possible to defeat Dr Jonathan, notwithstanding his resort to acrimonious politics, his embrace of ethnic and parochial schemes, and his promotion and exploitation of religious differences.

    The second issue that should lead the electorate to reject Dr Jonathan is the case of the Chibok schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram militants on April 14. For the past 167 days or so that the abductions have lasted, the president has handled the matter with utter incompetence and lethargy, so bad that the whole world is appalled by his seeming indifference. The world, it will be recalled, rose up in solidarity with us when the abductions created global tremors. But arriving in Nigeria, and seeing how the Jonathan presidency handled the matter, and recognising that even our troops were unwilling to fight, the foreign helpers quietly left in frustration and disgust. They are even more stupefied that the Nigerian government has tried to blackmail them with silly allegations that the West is conspiring to bar Nigeria from procuring arms. For the nearly six months that the abductions have lasted, Dr Jonathan has been unable to articulate a coherent strategy for rescuing the girls, in addition to initially doubting Boko Haram’s criminal act. Moreover, his wife, Dame Patience, outrightly scorned and derided reports of the abductions. There was therefore no strategy to negotiate the girls’ release, and there was no will to fight.

    The third issue that should influence the repudiation of Dr Jonathan is the worldwide scorn reserved for him. Many African leaders are aghast that Nigeria could tolerate him for almost six years. They would be dumbfounded if we gave him a hearing during this coming election, and would be indignant should we elect him for another four years. They would ask how four more years of Dr Jonathan would profit us. If African countries such as Zimbabwe and Uganda could snort at Dr Jonathan heartily, what of the developed democracies? While diplomatic refinements may not allow Western leaders to say what they think of Nigeria and its leaders, they have acted it and taken it out on Nigerian travellers. Once the Nigerian steps out of his country, he is held in absolute contempt. It is transferred aggression, an aggression activated by the disdain they have for our leaders. No other country’s citizens are held in so much contempt anywhere as Nigerians; not even Haitians, Colombians or Albanians; and minus ebola disease, not even Liberians or Sierra Leoneans.

    Conventional opinion indicates that the opposition would have a tough chance beating Dr Jonathan. The truth, however, is that he is vulnerable at all levels and on all fronts. Dr Jonathan and his aides recognise these vulnerabilities, and will try desperately to focus their campaign on religion, ethnicity and the North-South divide. They will do everything to bribe everyone, creating more states if necessary. If the opposition gets the right candidate and sensibly focuses their campaign on those areas where Dr Jonathan simply has no answer, he can be beaten fair and square. It would be a tragedy should he return to office for another four years, for we would be unlikely to survive the gargantuan social, political and economic damage that his re-election would entail.

     

  • Placating the Southwest

    Consequent upon Dr Jonathan’s piquant but desperate cabinet reshuffle, it has been speculated that some of the vacant positions could be ceded to the Southwest. The president has apparently just woken up to the dire electoral circumstances his impending re-election campaign may face. And there are probably enough views and voices in the zone to encourage the president’s cold and cynical calculations.

    But if the zone’s conservative leaders are taken in by Dr Jonathan’s permutations, they must be much blinkered than anyone has cared to acknowledge. Given their unreflective embrace of the national conference and their hopelessly romantic notion of its timing and utility at this point, it will not surprise anyone if they remark and applaud the president’s whimsical acknowledgement of the zone’s importance and value.

    After all, did these leaders not wail over losing the battle for the leadership of the House of Representatives? Like everywhere else, even the Southwest has become depressingly susceptible to the mercantilist calculations of values and is now generally disposed to viewing justice and other noble values through the rose-coloured glasses of ethnicity and sectional parochialisms.

  • In lieu of cassava bread and fish pepper-soup

    In lieu of cassava bread and fish pepper-soup

    As Nigeria prepares for its Independence anniversary, I was hoping that the beleaguered Jonathan Presidency would, out of the discontinuities of the year past, diligently search for a common thread around which common purpose can be constructed, to reinvigorate the Administration and move a stalled nation forward.

    A key event in the celebrations, a lecture delivered by Ghana’s former president John Kufour, offered President Goodluck Jonathan a fine opportunity to articulate this common thread and, with it, weave a narrative that can reassure and inspire his compatriots and summon them to greater endeavour.

    Even those who felt that a foreign head of state, serving or retired, was not the most appropriate person to present the lecture on such an occasion, would still have allowed that that it was as good a platform as any for the host to reach out in solidarity and renewal to his compatriots.

    But Dr Jonathan blew the opportunity big time.

    Even if Dr Jonathan is saving his National Day broadcast for precisely the kind of address, charging him with blowing the opportunity presented by the Kufour lecture hardly amounts to a rush to judgement.

    He could have confined himself to some bland remarks on the substance of the lecture and the guest speaker. He could even have drawn some praise – which he surely can use – by claiming it as an instance of the commitment of his Administration to the spirit of ECOWAS and the African Union and the African Peer Review Mechanism that it invited a former head of state from the neighbourhood to deliver the Independence Anniversary Lecture.

    Instead, Dr Jonathan chose to use the occasion to denounce and demonise Lagos residents who staged, in response to his ill-advised decision to end a phantom subsidy on petroleum products last January, one of the most stirring and ennobling protests Nigerians have witnessed in recent memory.

    Lagos, consistent with its status and history, was the epicentre of the protests that went on without loss of momentum for nine days and would have continued if Dr Jonathan had stuck to his vow that there was “no going back” on the issue. He did not go back all the way to the status quo ante, but go back he did, forced to beat a petulant retreat.

    Most parts of the country, except the South-east, were also convulsed by the protests. It is necessary to recall this fact, which Dr Jonathan seems to have conveniently forgotten or deliberately ignored. Rarely had Nigerians been so united, for so long, on a single issue, with such firm resolve.

    In his extempore recreation, the protests had nothing to do with the contentious subsidy; rather, they were a pretext for executing a plot to topple his Administration. The protesters were not actuated by genuine grievances; rather they were “manipulated” by persons intent on preserving a corruption-soaked regime of subsidy re imbursements.

    “Look at the demonstrations back home, look at these areas this demonstrations are coming from, you begin to ask, are these the ordinary citizens that are demonstrating? Or are people pushing them to demonstrate?” Dr Jonathan quipped.

    Then he zeroed in on Lagos, in the manner of someone who had been nursing a bitter grievance.

    “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, people were given expensive food that the ordinary people in Lagos cannot eat. So even going to eat free food alone attracts people. They go and hire the best musician to come and play and the best comedian to come and entertain, is that demonstration? Are you telling me that that is a demonstration from ordinary masses in Nigeria who want to communicate something to government?”

    Yes, Dr Jonathan; that demonstration was “from ordinary masses in Nigeria” who wanted “to communicate something to government.”

    And what these “ordinary masses” who had put aside the divisions of class and creed and tongue wanted to communicate was this: that they are tired of being victims of serial misrule, of policies that subvert rather than advance public well-being, of cluelessness and lack of vision in high places, of having their names taken in vain, without corresponding adherence to their interests and values.

    This was the same message that rang out loud and clear wherever the protesters staged their rallies.

    Thanks to that N1 billion annual feeding allowance from the public purse, Dr Jonathan was probably too busy eating fresh-baked cassava bread and fish pepper-soup and any victuals under the sun or even beyond it that presidential plate may fancy – to hear what the protesters were saying or see what was really going on.

    But did he not read the “security reports” sent daily to his office by “security agents”?

    If those reports are of any value, they would have recorded that one Friday afternoon at the height of the protests, demonstrators formed a protective ring around their Muslim brethren to enable them say their Jumat prayers in relative peace without constituting a target of opportunity for religious fanatics or agents provocateurs.

    That is the kind of solidarity Dr Jonathan should seek to build upon, not demonise; solidarity born out of common purpose, and of the realisation that we all are keepers of one another.

    The security agents would have told him that no serious crimes were reported while the protests lasted. Their reports would have related that the bottled water that seems to have moved Dr Jonathan to such high dudgeon was provided by some of the civil society organisations that coordinated the protests, and that no “packaged meals” were on offer.

    Perhaps they would have remarked the woman in the Lagos suburb of Agege who ordinarily fried and sold akara by the roadside but gave away her entire ware for one day to the protesters as a mark of her support

    This was the spirit that animated the protests.

    It is therefore an egregious misreading of the events of last January to portray the protesters as the unthinking dupes of unpatriotic manipulators bent on extracting unearned subsidy reimbursements from the treasury even if that meant plunging the country into bankruptcy.

    It is worse: It is a libel, and a gratuitous one at that.

    Now, it is incontestable that the Presidency has the most formidable instruments of manipulation at its disposal – NTA and FRCN, to mention only two. So why didn’t it deploy them to manipulate Pastor Tunde Bakare and Owei Lakemfa?

    If the protesters could not eat fresh-baked cassava bread and other delicacies flowing from the state-of-the-art grill at the Presidential Villa, why can’t they eat akara without being slandered? If they cannot afford the pleasure of downing cocktail after choice cocktail, why begrudge them bottled water?

    Even it they were served “packaged meals,” when did that qualify as conduct deserving presidential censure? When did “packaged meals” become the preserve of the Presidency?

    If residents of Dr Jonathan’s village cannot afford bottled water, whose fault is it? What did he do to empower them to afford bottled water when he was a director of the development agency for the oil-producing areas, OMPADEC, later as deputy governor, and subsequently as governor of Bayelsa?

    Can it be that, as President, he caused a university to be sited in the village with federal funds and corralled a government contractor to “donate” a church to the community but didn’t give a damn about providing something as basic as water for his people?

    If there is any redeeming grace in all this, it is in the revealing glimpse the Jonathan we still don’t know provides into the presidential mind. We now know that he is not in the least intimidated by those seeking to join issues with him, or for that matter by manipulators.

    “For me,” he said at the Independence Anniversary lecture, “if I see somebody is manipulating anything I don’t listen to you but when I see people genuinely talking about issues I listen.”

    So, there you have it.