As a student of Government Secondary School, Zaria City, Barometer had for four years watched as one house prefect after another delivered their valedictory speeches, usually in the form of dreadful mea culpas. At such humbling and often melodramatic moments, once highly venerated and unassailably powerful prefects climbed down from their high horses, ate crow, and in sombre, gentle voices proceeded to salve their tortured consciences with soothing, plaintive words. Students, in those innocent days, could not judge the sincerity of the prefects: whether they were being true to their innermost feelings, or they were just going through the motions of what they themselves had come to accept as a subculture. As House Captain of Galadima House in the 1970s, Barometer found himself unavoidably organising one such valedictory, of course under a haze of the prefectural subculture aforesaid.
After acknowledging the cooperation of his assistant prefects and members of the dormitory, Barometer simply launched into other issues, staunchly refusing to apologise for any hurt done anyone. He rebelled against the useless culture of mea culpas, believing genuinely that the prestige of prefectship, especially that of a House Captain, was too important, too weighty, and too honourable to be dragged through the mud of maudlin rituals. Whether house members thought him arrogant or just plain iconoclastic, Barometer was never able to find out. But he had pleased himself mightily, and, well, got away with it. He was not stoned, nor was he derided as he left the school for the last time a day later.
Until President Goodluck Jonathan last Sunday reminded us of the college culture of our youthful, unquestioning and sentimental past, we had nearly forgotten about it completely. While it is true no one is perfect, as the president put it boyishly during the farewell service held in his honour at the Aso Villa Chapel in Abuja last Sunday, and everyone capable of hindsight always knew one thing or the other he would have done differently, surely we remember that no Nigerian president, living or dead, gave such apologies save in memoirs many years after leaving office, and even then in muted and graceful regrets. Most of them, by the way, whether in Nigeria or elsewhere, have after leaving office stuck dishonourably to their lies and failings, even attempting to rationalise them.
But hear President Jonathan: “Nothing is perfect; if you wait for perfection, you cannot achieve anything. No system is perfect. Every human system has an element of imperfection. So, for the eight years that I have been here as Vice-President, acting President and President, I can say that no one is perfect. We have done certain things that probably we shouldn’t have done, but we didn’t do them deliberately. So, for those that we offended, it was not deliberate; it was as a result of the exigencies of the office.” How did this humble pie taste in the mouth of the president?
It’s all morally and sentimentally great to apologise, for after all, it is true no one is perfect, and we are often wise after the event. And for President Jonathan, given his considerable lack of administrative suavity and acumen, there are hundreds of things needing absolution. Though he prides himself a pacesetter, for example, as the first president to concede election defeat, it is doubtful whether his dramatic apologies pass for the kind of iconoclasm Nigerians hope would ennoble the highest office in the land. Had President Jonathan availed himself the biographies of his predecessors, which are admittedly not inspiring, or appreciated the highly nuanced and metaphysical accoutrements of power, he would have recognised its stately dignity, its imponderable gravitas, its sweepingly ramifying essence, bordering on the ethereal.
During the same farewell service last Sunday at the Villa Chapel, a young girl, Juliette Ishola, reading from 1 Timothy 6:6-7, insinuated grander nobility and motives into President Jonathan’s concession of election defeat. In a dramatic fashion, obviously a reflection of what she was tutored to do, Juliette, according to a newspaper report, turned to the president and remarked his understanding of the lesson in that provoking Bible passage. Her performance relieved not only the tedium of that all-important last service at the Villa Chapel, it was probably the highpoint of that great occasion. Whoever tutored Juliette doubtless recognised the meaning and temper of that last service far more than the president’s excursion into college subculture suggested. As prefects knew in those days, those hurt by their actions would not forgive them simply because they asked for forgiveness. Surely, the president can’t feign ignorance.
