Clearly the most damning irony about the controversial Goodluck Jonathan 2015 campaign poster, which copies flooded Abuja, is its claim that “One good term deserves another”. But even the most rabid of Jonathan supporters would concede his has been a bad, nay, terrible term.
So, what does a bad term deserve? A re-sit, as Gabriel Igbinedion, the Esama of Benin, reportedly quipped in pleading the case of his son, Lucky? Lucky’s 2003 “re-sit” and the subsequent 2007 vote-fiddling meant to block positive change, only made Edo a near-total paralysis before the redemption of the Adams Oshiomhole era. Lucky for Lucky. But absolutely terrible for Edo.
Yet the Edo paralysis was nowhere near the chaos and gridlock that is the Federal Republic under Goodluck Jonathan. Yet, the good luck president ogles a second term!
If free and fair election were guaranteed, it would have been electoral suicide for President Jonathan to seek a second term; and supreme electoral folly for his party to present him.
Indeed, so sure would have been the electoral rout to come that the opposition would have flocked into churches, mosques and traditional shrines for pre-election thanksgiving, doubly assured that the sitting president was a lamb being led to the slaughter, by virtue of his woeful performance.
But alas! Nothing is assured, not the least free elections, in Nigeria’s peculiar politics. That is why a personage that logs the record of perhaps the most incompetent president Nigeria has ever had would deem to flex muscles and yearn for a second term! It is a salute to the contempt with which the ruling racket holds the Nigerian people, as well as the electoral process.
Still, to be fair to the president, he has denied authorship of those posters – fair enough.
The snag, however, is there is a feeling of déjà vu over the incident: a very vivid sense that we have seen all this dissembling before.
Under Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, the self-made “military president” would say something and his alter ego, the trinity of Dr. Aitkins, Arthur Nzeribe and Abimbola Davies’ Association for Better Nigeria (ABN) would canvass the exact opposite, with sickening patriotic piety.
Under Gen. Sani Abacha, Daniel Kanu’s phantom Youths Earnestly Ask for Abacha (YEAA!) urged a thoroughly hated iron dictator and power usurper to go ahead and transmute, prompting The Economist, the London weekly, to write, in its 23 April 1998 issue, a tongue-in-the-cheek article it entitled, “Abacha, for ever, and ever”. Only “divine intervention” put paid to the Goggled One’s inordinate dreams.
President Olusegun Obasanjo, after hiding behind a finger over a botched term elongation gambit, invoked Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God” cheeky nonsense; declaring that if he really wanted a third term, and had asked his God, his God would have given it to him. In Nigeria’s political jungle, Obasanjo had found his own variant of Maradona’s Hand of God!
And even Goodluck Jonathan, in his caretaker presidency days, was asked whether he would run for president, during the raging zoning controversy. Instead of a simple and straight answer, he lurched into a long and winding story of how he could run for president, or team up with someone as vice president, and how, in mid-sentence, he suddenly realised he was not even thinking of such things!
Can someone please compare and contrast Jonathan’s answer back then to his current refrain that he is too busy on his job right now to be messing around with 2015 posters?
Of course, the unsure caretaker president later became absolutely sure he would be real president for only one term – the one term he is making a hash of. Though now he disowns these satanic alter egos pasting Abuja with his campaign posters, he is now even more unsure whether to stop them or tell them to continue, because he is too busy with state duties! It is the making of Goodluck Jonathan as a presidential dissembler!
It is clear therefore that, despite the empty anti-corruption posturing of the Obasanjo years, little has changed in Nigeria’s sick power chamber. And President Jonathan: his might have been a shifty, parlous and near-hopeless tenure. But the president has been clear-eyed and sure-footed in the power lessons he has allowed himself to learn. To the chagrin of long suffering Nigerians, he is no different from his far-from-illustrious predecessors.
That is why Jonathan’s pre-election dissembling could well have been from a manual straight out of the Obasanjo, or Abacha or Babangida years. When IBB was swearing for the sanctity of this so-called transition programme, state money was being funnelled to his alter ego trinity to create so much chaos that, at the end of the day, a brow-beaten nation would “beg” the military president to please exchange his uniform for baba riga and continue his good work. Fortunately for Nigerians, the IBB scheme collapsed on his head.
Everyone, of course, knew state money was responsible for Kanu’s thunderous YEAA for Abacha; and also behind the cacophonous racket by the musical soldiers of fortune that were part of the gravy. Goodluck Jonathan spawned his own musical mercenaries with his Eagle Square Abuja Goodluck Nigeria concert, which has turned nothing but bad luck for Nigerians. Obasanjo, to this day, denies the alleged hefty money that changed hands for his term elongation gambit. He can tell that to the marines!
Not surprising, therefore, pre-election manoeuvring are afoot – again, straight from the IBB/Abacha/Obasanjo-era ignoble books.
Up, from nowhere, has popped a 10 million cell phone-purchase programme for farmers. Ibukun Odusote, permanent secretary, Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, disclosed N60 billion (about US $384 million) would be blown on this sweetheart deal. Akinwunmi Adesina, Agriculture minister, claimed otherwise after a public uproar.
The making of another scam? Might this sudden quixotic love for Nigerian farmers be to 2015 what the oil subsidy voodoo payment was to 2011?
Inside the PDP, a civil war has broken out – and not unconnected with 2015, even if the theatre of war is the party’s Board of Trustees (BOT). President Jonathan wants his man to head the BOT and help storm-troop delegates; and harvest nomination. Obasanjo, doomed to life-long political hustling when he could have earned post-presidency authoritative influence is, Don Quixote-wise, throwing his hat into the ring for a laughable candidate. To these party bosses, intra-party manoeuvres to skew the nomination process are even more vital than the long-suffering electorate!
And outside, the cement cartel, unfazed poster children of Nigerian crony capitalism that reached its zenith during Obasanjo’s era of transparent corruption, is staging its own civil war! Might this high-stake manoeuvre be a bid to extract concession from a government whose party would soon come, cap in hand, for election donations?
These bewildering dramas, not what the incumbent has done or not done, are why Jonathan could deign to dream of an encore, when his present tenure is nothing but disaster. But it is also left for Nigerians to counter: one bad term begets absolute electoral rejection.
But will they? The day they do, all this rascality will stop.
