Last Wednesday, the bellicose Senior Special Assistant to the President on Public Affairs, Dr Doyin Okupe, dismissed as “diversionary,” a declaration by the Niger State Governor, Dr Muazu Babangida Aliyu, that in the run up to the 2011 elections President Goodluck Jonathan “signed” an agreement with Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governors to serve for only one term.
Governor Aliyu made the declaration the weekend before in a phone-in programme, ‘Guest of the Week’, on Liberty Radio, a Kaduna based private FM radio station. It is apparent that the governor made the declaration against the background of clear indications so far that the President will re-contest for his job in 2015, come rain or shine.
“I recall that at the time he was going to declare for the 2011 election,” the governor said, “all the PDP governors were brought together to ensure that we were all in the same frame of mind. And I recall that some of us said given the circumstance of the death of President Umaru Yar’Adua and given the PDP zoning arrangement, it was expected that the North was to produce the president for a number of years.
“I recall that at that discussion it was agreed that Jonathan would only serve for one term of four years and we all SIGNED the agreement…I think we are all gentlemen enough so when the time comes, we will all come together and see what is the right thing to do.” (Emphasis mine).
These were the remarks Okupe has since dismissed as diversionary – and a diversion which he said his principal is determined to resist with every ounce of his strength. The president, he said, is simply too pre-occupied with his commitment to transform Nigeria into a land flowing with milk and honey to allow himself to be dragged into the campaigns for the next presidential election.
“We,” Okupe said, “wish to state categorically that this is neither the time nor the season to begin electioneering campaign…and so President Goodluck Jonathan will not jump the gun. Mr President will stoutly resist any disguised or open attempt to drag him into any debates, arguments or political discussions relating to a presidential election in 2015. The President considers this an invidious attempt to sway him from his chosen pursuit of the set out constituents of the transformation agenda which form the basis upon which Nigerians overwhelmingly elected him to steer the ship of the nation in 2011.”
When the celebrated journalist and novelist, George Orwell, said in his famous essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, published in 1946, that “Political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible,” he could not, of course, have had your typical Nigerian politician in mind, much less a 21st century Nigerian presidential spokesman. But if he did, he couldn’t have been more spot-on in his dismissal of political speech as a lot of bull. “Political language,” he said in the essay, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Anyone living in Nigerian in recent times, even if he were half blind – except, of course, if he is Okupe and his likes – can see that the presidential spokesman’s attempt to rebut Governor Aliyu couldn’t have been more disingenuous. Few statements, if any, could have been worded to make barefaced lies sound truthful, murder respectable and pure wind appear solid.
To begin with, most disinterested Nigerians and close foreign observers of Nigeria know that President Jonathan was never “overwhelmingly elected” in April 2011. On the contrary, it is pretty obvious he was overwhelmingly rigged into office, beginning with the dubious PDP primaries, all the way through the manipulation of religion and ethnicity and the abuse of state’s fiscal power and its instruments of violence to square or squash dissent, to finally getting the courts to dismiss opposition rejection of the results on legal technicalities.
Second, even Okupe knows that his principal has been anything but single-minded in his pursuit of his Transformation Agenda, which, in any case, was an unaffordable shopping list rather than a set of coherent and achievable objectives. If the President has been single-minded in the pursuit of his campaign promises, incoherent and unrealistic as they were, the country would have been a lot better today than it was in April 2011.
The truth, assuming the likes of Okupe care for one, is that if anyone is guilty of diverting the president’s attention from his job, it is the man himself, certainly more than anyone else. This much is obvious from his single-minded determination last year to replace the “recalcitrant” Timipre Sylva with the loyal Seriake Dickson as the governor of his home state, Bayelsa, and hunt Sylva down into oblivion. It was also obvious from his single-minded determination to impose the loyal Alhaji Bamanga Tukur as chairman of the PDP, even after the gentleman had been roundly rejected by his immediate North-Eastern constituency to which the job had been zoned.
No less diversionary is his self-inflicted current face-off with Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State whose crime, it seems, is that, like not a few two-term governors, he is suspected of harbouring presidential ambition. At least twice last week the President tried, but failed, to remove Amaechi as the chairman of the Nigerian Governors Forum. Before then his self-appointed godfather, Chief Edwin Clark, had taken out a two-part full page adverts in several newspapers to rant and rave at the Forum for its imagined antipathy towards his godson. Chances are those adverts did not cost the old man one kobo.
What all this suggests is that the President is single-mindedly determined not to let anything or anyone whatsoever to get in the way of his second-term, some would say third-term, presidential ambition, having been sworn into the office twice already. If anything has been diverting his attention from doing his job, it is this single-minded focus on 2015.
So it is really disingenuous for Okupe to accuse Governor Aliyu, or for that matter anyone else, of trying to divert the President from carrying out his transformation agenda. The governor apparently did not lie when he said the President signed a deal with the PDP governors to serve for only one term on his own steam. The proof that Aliyu spoke the truth, at least for once, given his reputation as a public officer who talks and equivocates too much, is crystal clear from the egregious response to his claim by friends of the president which in effect says, “So what if the President signed a deal?”
Politicians everywhere do deals often with no intention to keep them. But only in Nigeria do they sign and seal deals with no intention whatsoever to honour them. Worse still, it is only in Nigeria that a politician can look you straight in the eyes and accuse you of diverting his attention from doing his job for simply reminding him that he has not kept his word.
The surprise in all this, therefore, is not that the President signed a deal apparently with no intention to honour it. It is not even that his spokesman will attempt to make a lie look truthful or make murder look respectable or give pure wind the appearance of solidity.
The surprise is that even after the President and his estranged benefactor, former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, categorically denied the zoning and power rotation deal in PDP, Governor Aliyu would still talk about the President’s word as a gentleman being his honour in spite of all the indications so far that the man would rather Nigeria breaks up than honour his word not to contest the next presidential election.
