Since former President Olusegun Obasanjo tamed the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) during his eight turbulent years in power, the party had become unrecognisable both as a party, in its fundamental sense, and as a democratic institution, in its structural and operational sense. All it required for the party to retain and nurture its new identity and continue to decay magnificently was for Chief Obasanjo’s successors to be tarred with the same imperious and imposing brush. Luckily for the party, it had a succession of equally overbearing chairmen eager to lend their talents and services, not to say their lack of critical thinking, to the presidents that succeeded Chief Obasanjo. The party thus mastered the art of motion without debate, premise without conclusion, form without substance, and silence without reflection.
This, therefore, was the ecosystem that produced President Goodluck Jonathan. When he emerged as running mate to the late President Umaru Yar’Adua for the 2007 election, Chief Obasanjo had cleared the way and silenced the opposition within the party. And when it came to the turn of Dr Jonathan to take over from President Yar’Adua as acting president, and to contest in 2011 on his own merit, he was not unmindful of his party’s new political culture. Those within his party he could not browbeat, he bribed; and those he could not bribe, he dealt with brutally. If his opponents within the party thought he was easy meat, he gave them a lesson in life and politics they would never forget. Chief Obasanjo was not always successful in dealing with opponents outside his party, for they were recalcitrant and querulous. But Jonathan too has met more than his match in the opposition, for they have not lost any of their fire and truculence.
Yet, of all the sure things in Nigerian politics today, probably the most certain is that Dr Jonathan will contest the 2015 presidential election. And given the nature and character of the PDP, it is more than certain that if anyone will contest against him, it will be merely a formality to dignify the party, raise its esteem in the eyes of the people as a democratic institution, and give the false impression that neither the party nor Dr Jonathan engages in the tyranny that has become the PDP’s sinews. Already, party chieftains and rank and file have lined up ingloriously behind Dr Jonathan for the 2015 race. They all understand on which side their breads are buttered. They are not disconcerted by the sham enthusiasm and offensiveness with which they sell the president’s candidacy. They fiercely urge him on and impress it on him that their assurances are all he needs to win.
But except Dr Jonathan is telling himself a lie and believing it, and the people around him are living in denial, they know the only chance they have of winning the 2015 race is for the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) to field an unelectable presidential ticket. A few months ago, before the insecurity problem magnified into an ogre, Dr Jonathan’s chances rested on the queer dynamics of the contest, especially the fact that he hails from a minority tribe and evokes hope in others like him tired of the tyranny of majority tribes that everyone, irrespective of state of origin, can successfully aspire to the presidency. There is also the unsettling use of religion as a tool of political mobilisation, which the president has raised into virtuoso art. Despite the dangers of elevating religion into the political arena in a country lacking in self-moderation in both politics and religion, Dr Jonathan has avidly plumbed that depth and made himself into some sort of quixotic religious champion.
From all indications, however, and in the face of the worst security challenges the country has ever had to contend with, neither religious affiliation nor area of origin will avail a politician much. The more Boko Haram terrorists inflict punishment on the country, whether in the Northeast or in the suburbs of Abuja, the more Dr Jonathan’s government demonstrate its impotence. Waves upon waves of attacks elicit from the presidency only messages of condolence and the summoning of security meetings. There are no new approaches, no inspiring and rousing talk of steely resolve in moments of national angst; and beyond cavalier wish of victory, there are no demonstrations of hope and confidence that the terror monster can indeed be defeated. As the Boko Haram attacks become more audacious and telling, so the Jonathan government has become more stupefied and feckless, sometimes even showing the violent sect sinister respect, and at other times pledging to it, out of desperation and fear, a most unnerving and counterproductive clemency.
It must be noted that Dr Jonathan seized upon the moronic tools of ethnicity and religion to anchor and give fillip to his flagging campaign because he despairs at ever finding concrete developmental achievements to parade. The economy has not yielded to his panaceas, nor has the society responded to his native charms. Even his talisman, which many tie teleologically to his name, has failed to reorder politics beyond his bucolic and innocent sermonizing. The consequence of these multiple failures is that, even without the aggravation Boko Haram’s terror was always capable of causing, the Jonathan government was doomed, to put it mildly. If these multiple failures irritate and vex the electorate, nothing rouses them into a greater rage than the poor judgement the president often exhibited whenever he confronted the mundane issues of the day.
The country has often been treated to his quaint and outrightly unsophisticated views on what should pass as the philosophical challenges of the day, and to his dour responses to the ordinary provocations of the people and especially the opposition. He dragged his feet on the Stella Oduah scandal and impatiently and infuriatingly dismissed our concerns because, as the Information minister Labaran Maku said, critics and the opposition politicised everything. Even when he sacked Ms Oduah, Dr Jonathan did it reluctantly, sullenly and bad-temperedly. The president has also ignored our irritations on the Diezani Alison-Madueke affair involving frivolously and expensively chartered jets and unremitted oil receipts, perhaps because we also ‘politicise’ the shocking disclosure of opaque public accounting and suspected sleaze in the Ministry of Petroleum Resources. And he has done absolutely nothing about the Abba Moro Immigration Service recruitment scandal, perhaps, this time, because the Internal Affairs minister is backed by the president’s arch supporter, Senate President David Mark.
By trivialising public administration and policy so abysmally, Dr Jonathan illustrates and underscores his perfunctory and emotive approach to governance. This attitude hardly conduces to electoral triumphs as much as it provokes angry rejection. And by presiding over a government that tolerates ministers who sue the legislature to stall investigations, the rot in the system, not to say in the Jonathan presidency, can’t be more complete. So, Dr Jonathan can’t run on achievements, and he can’t run on sound judgement either, for after all, nothing exhibits poor judgement as his refusal to empathise with Borno families whose teenage daughters were abducted by Boko Haram militants, possibly for sex slavery.
Indeed, Dr Jonathan is cornered, just as his supporters are irrational to still embrace a president who can’t run on his records or on his ideas, or as it is becoming apparent, given his considerable staidness and lack of grit, on his personality. He will run only on if the opposition APC makes the wrong presidential ticket choice. The APC is still in a quandary over the 2015 ticket, perhaps still consulting. The party will require the highest gift of clairvoyance to do what is right, and to, as it were, read the mind of God. If it is any consolation to them, let them consult Churchill, Nixon, JFK and De Gaulle when those statesmen had to make life-changing and life-defining decisions without the faintest idea what powerful changes the outcomes would trigger. God help the APC.
In short, in a free and fair election, Dr Jonathan and the PDP can’t win the 2015 presidential election except the APC loses it. Given the president’s string of bad decisions, bad judgement and bad and ineffective policies, and notwithstanding his constant and exasperating resort to ethnic emotionalism and religious grandstanding, the initiative is no longer in his hands; it is in the hands of those he likes to romanticise as his enemies. Let these opposition enemies, therefore, be as ruthless as Chief Obasanjo was when that wily farmer and general corners his enemies, an idiosyncrasy that took the former president repeatedly but undeservedly to heights of glory and splendour in his many tumultuous decades on earth, starting from the time his friend Major Kaduna Nzeogwu planned a coup without telling him, and his former boss General Murtala Mohammed died alone on the streets of Lagos.
