Any Nigerian alive between 2010 and 2015 was a witness to history who doesn’t need Goodluck Jonathan’s new tome to understand how the former president oversaw the unravelling of the People’s Democratic Party’s (PDP) seeming vice grip on power.
People used to sneer at the then ruling party’s boast that it would remain in power for 60 years. But such was its spread and strength across the country that it was not a scenario that was too outlandish to contemplate.
Examples abound around the world showing it was possible for a political party to hold power for decades. Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) held uninterrupted power for 71 years from 1929 to 2000. Paraguay’s right wing Colorado Party ruled for 61 years non-stop until it was defeated at the polls in 2008. Equally notable in the longevity stakes is India’s Congress Party which governed without break for 49 long years.
Coming into the pre-election year of 2014, the PDP had already chalked up 15 years in power and, despite the upheavals within its ranks, still looked the most likely to be returned at the polls the next year.
At that point, the All Progressives Congress (APC) just looked like the gathering pool of the disaffected from the ruling party and veteran opposition politicians. It was an unlikely aggregation of strange bedfellows whose chances of seizing power from the PDP behemoth was akin to that of a mad scientists sending a rocket successfully to the sun.
Speaking with a well-known leader of the then fledgling opposition party a few months before its stunning electoral triumph in March 2015, he confessed that although he wasn’t too religious, he was willing to class the transformation of the APC as nothing short of a miracle. A party that was barely two years old was on the verge of toppling one that had held the reins for almost 16 years.
Only a potent mix of complacency, insensitivity, arrogance and blindness could have produced this situation. Each of these items was in abundance in the Jonathan presidency and ruling party circa 2014. Unfortunately, the former president has a different take on why he was ousted from Aso Rock.
His new book ‘My Transition Hours’ talks about some of the then ruling party governors working against him in the North. Religion and his handling of the Boko Haram, the Chibok schoolgirls’ saga, were said to have been deployed to undo him. He equally claims there was a vendetta against his family.
I don’t doubt that there’s a bit of truth in some of these claims, but the problem is with the presentation. He would rather apportion blame to others than take responsibility.
Jonathan chose not to believe the image staring back at him in the mirror. He claims he used to laugh when critics called him ‘clueless’: but the tag stuck because there was so much coming out of his administration that suggested the label was a perfect fit.
He is, once again, playing the victim. But rather than being the target of any imaginary vendetta, the former president must admit that a combination of his weakness and poor political skills in the latter days of his presidency, prepared the ground for his swift slide from power.
Only a wrecking ball of a president and party leader could have blithely watched as five governors and sundry heavyweights exited the PDP to join forces with the nascent APC. I recall that after the departure of the G-5, Jonathan said dismissively that the ruling party would become more cohesive and peaceful with exit of the ‘troublemakers’. It didn’t play out that way.
Indeed, the entry of the PDP governors into APC marked the turning point for the burgeoning opposition movement – triggering a momentum that would propel it to a stunning electoral victory several months down the line. Before the coming of the governors the new party, despite its promise, was still limited in its spread and vulnerable to accusations of being sectional as opposed to the broad-based ruling party. Had those who left remained in the PDP, I dare say the election outcome in 2015 could have mirrored what happened in 2011.
So Jonathan, then PDP chairman Bamanga Tukur and party hardliners who lacked the political savvy to negotiate compromises with the aggrieved governors, actually opened the crack for Muhammadu Buhari and the opposition hordes to get their feet in the door.
Yes, the opposition used Boko Haram and the Chibok girls kidnap to devastating effect in defining the former president as incompetent. But what did he expect? These were problems on the ground which the floundering government could not deal with. His critics were within their rights to play the issues for what they were worth in the contest for power.
Jonathan could have denied them the ammunition but instead stockpiled them by a series of inexplicable and wrongheaded moves. Mid-way into his administration he had a chance to decapitate the growing Boko Haram serpent with firm military action, but kept mouthing the apologetic nonsense about not going to war with ‘our own countrymen.’ The question he didn’t address was when the insurgents IEDs blew innocent Nigerians to smithereens, were they playing video games?
I still recall that at a point when the United States government at the instigation of then Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, sought to designate Boko Haram a terrorist organisation, the Federal Government sent a lobbying team to the State Department to counter the move. The rationale? Designating the sect a terror organisation cause innocent Nigerians to be subjected to travel delays at airports around the globe!
I recall that a delegation of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) – fed up with Boko Haram’s slaughter of Christians in the North – was in Washington DC at that same time, to press the Americans for sterner action against the sect. Imagine their shock when they met a high-powered lobby team pushing an opposite objective.
One of the things the US designation of Boko Haram as a terror group would have done was to engage closer international tracking of the sect’s finances and cut off the flow. Thanks to the efforts of the Jonathan administration, the Americans backed off and the Islamists grew by leaps and bounds.
The ex-president must have naively thought he could sweet-talk suicide bombers into changing their way of thinking. They replied with bombings in the heart of Abuja, Kano and Kaduna. By then the insurgency had become an albatross that would pull him down.
The reasons why Jonathan fell would fill an even bigger volume than that which he has written. But let’s address another of his interesting laments: that his family was a target for vendetta. Again, if some members of his family became lighting rods for public criticism it was because he let them become major performers in the political circus.
Take the erstwhile First Lady for instance. In recent Nigerian history no president’s wife has been so deeply immersed in the murky waters of politics as Patience Jonathan. As a political wife she was as much an asset as a mobiliser, as she was a liability as a loose cannon who didn’t know when to stop.
She was an unrelenting source of negative publicity for Jonathan and damaged public perceptions about him. His seeming inability to rein her in despite the havoc she was causing at different points, solidified the image of the ex-president as weak.
Who can forget her infamous run-in with former Rivers State Governor, Rotimi Amaechi, during which she gave the governor a very public tongue-lashing? Who can forget her theatrical interventions in the heat of the Chibok girls kidnap saga – an incident that presented the First Couple as unfeeling and seeking to make political capital out of a tragic situation. In the end, her cries of ‘There’s God o!’ became fodder for a thousand comic skits. Vendetta against his family? What vendetta!
There’s no doubt that Jonathan is yet to come terms with his 2015 electoral defeat. The wounds may still be fresh, but so also are our memories of why he went down. He was truly the architect of his fall from power. Instead of blaming others, he should ask himself how he managed to transform a massive electoral advantage in 2011 into a deficit in 2015.
In 2011, Jonathan polled 22,495,187 votes to Buhari’s 12,214,853 votes. But in 2015, the tables were turned with the incumbent receiving 15,424,921 votes as against his rival’s 12,853,162. How did the former president manage to blow the support of 10 million voters in the space of four years? That is why he should be researching rather than trying to spin unsuccessfully events that happened before our very eyes.
