If there was any doubt that Dr Goodluck Jonathan is the loneliest former president in recent history, Ekiti State Governor Ayo Fayose removed it the other day. In many words, as is his wont, Mr Fayose said his party, the PDP, made a mistake in choosing Dr Jonathan as its candidate in last year’s election.
“We lost the election,” the governor reportedly said, “because we did not pick our candidate from the north…” He went on to add that “it was a political miscalculation.”
Now, that was tantamount to driving a double-edged sword into Dr Jonathan’s side, as hurtful as Brutus’ knife through the flesh of his friend Caesar. It does not matter that Mr Fayose laboured to create the impression that he had nothing against the former president, nor that he repeatedly called him “my former President”. Nor that he inferred that Dr Jonathan was not a bad man and that he “tried his best.”
Mr Fayose’s half-hearted compliments may indeed reveal the depth of contempt in which he and other like-minds in their party held the defeated Jonathan. It may also expose their hypocrisy and opportunism. If, and that is a mighty, big if, Dr Jonathan won the election, one way or another, the Fayoses of Nigeria would probably have invented the sweetest phrases and coinages for their man. Who would have been surprised if they dubbed him the Doctor of all Doctors or the best Goodluck ever or greatest president we ever had? The dark life to which millions of Nigerians were subjected in the Jonathan presidency would simply have continued without let. It is almost unnecessary to add here that the fraud cases quoted in billions popping up every day after Dr Jonathan’s exit would have remained covered up, the piles of ill-gotten cash cooling off in banks, foreign or local, in bedroom chests, sewage tanks, fence walls or under kitchen tiles or wherever the looters deemed fit.
I pointed out earlier in this piece that Mr Fayose’s late dismissal of the Jonathan candidacy, and in effect Dr Jonathan himself, was a wicked sword attack because at the time the Ekiti governor was speaking, Dr Jonathan was probably coming to terms with his lonely life after office. The former president was most certainly appraising life’s twists and turns afresh. For all you cared, Dr Jonathan could have been gathering his wits to pen his memoir taking time to detail the veritable lessons life has to teach, one of which that you are as good as your powers or offices last. While such powers and offices endure, many would intrude into your space, your peace and your comforts seeking diverse supports and patronage, not excluding the financial kind, of course. In many cases, the president may oblige, and his beneficiaries would sing his praises to the high heavens. But no sooner was Dr Jonathan resoundingly floored in the election and his powers and offices taken than everyone began to back off, including some who fed off him and tried to package and brand him as the best thing to happen to Nigeria, if not the black race.
Dr Jonathan would have been jotting down names of those who once stood with him and their party but then exercised their rights to keep their distance when he probably needed them most. Let’s consider a few celebrity ones, if you will. Whether on principle or otherwise, Alhaji Adamu Mua’zu resigned as the party’s national chairman as Dr Jonathan was nursing fresh wounds of electoral defeat. In October or thereabouts Chief E. K. Clark, a reported Ijaw leader who loved to describe himself as Dr Jonathan’s father, jettisoned his son, calling him weak. When his son became too weak to be associated with, the Ijaw chief did not quite make clear. Before Clark, though, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo had already made a drama of his disenchantment with both Dr Jonathan and the PDP by having someone public tear up his party membership card. Not long ago, former Senate President Ken Nnamani reportedly backed off too. These are a few of prominent PDP folks who practically left Jonathan and, for most, the party, too.
But I imagine that Dr Jonathan was already coping with the loneliness of powerlessness and abandonment when Mr Fayose reached for his knife. Why is Mr Fayose’s cut probably the deepest? He seemed to be quite prized in the party. Whether this is just because he is in something of an island in the Southwest, his other ally being Ondo’s Segun Mimiko, is hard to tell. And whether for this reason or another, Mr Fayose probably fought the hardest and dirtiest in the campaign not only to return Dr Jonathan to Aso Rock but also ridicule, insult and make Candidate Buhari untouchable, unmarketable and unelectable. He sponsored the vilest attacks on Candidate Buhari including the most morbid, playing God in some cases and prophet in others. He prophesied, wrongly, that Buhari would never be president. He suggested Buhari, if he won, might die in office. Mr Fayose mocked Candidate Buhari’s age by demonstrating how difficult, if not impossible, it was for Buhari to lift his limbs.
The result of the election, as they say, is history, but Mr Fayose has not eaten humble pie. His attacks have continued. That should be okay by President Buhari and his administration. What is puzzling, though, is that the Ekiti governor is not bemoaning his failed prophetic powers and hollow divine pretences and has now turned against his former principal for whom he made all manner of ill-advised sacrifices and took all kinds of risks.
He claimed he was not privy to the choice of Dr Jonathan for the election, and seemed to have even blamed him for running and not giving the candidacy to a Northerner.
This is bizarre. Why did Mr Fayose invest so heavily, in some cases, so unethically, in the Jonathan candidacy if the candidate was doomed to fail because of his southern nativity? On the Ekiti home front, Mr Fayose’s electoral victory may have passed the court tests but it is yet to scale the hurdle of revelations and claims that it was fixed from the top at a huge financial cost.
Until these clouds have cleared and the herculean task of governing Ekiti eased, Mr Fayose had better left Dr Jonathan to deal with his lonely life after the office without inflicting any more wounds on the former president.
