On the day President Goodluck Jonathan was endorsed as the sole candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for next year’s presidential election, party heavyweights behaved so surreally it was difficult to tell what we were witnessing: a tragedy, a comedy, or a tragicomedy. The party has a right to adopt whomever they wish, and in whatever fashion that tickles their fancy. As expected, and in spite of the rigmarole of the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) — that raucous assemblage of merrymakers — the party has let the other shoe fall. In the eyes of the PDP, Dr Jonathan is incomparable, irreplaceable and indefatigable. He is their messiah, their magician, their avatar. So surreal were their statements and actions during the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting in Abuja last Thursday that some observers half expected that by a metaphysical sleight of hand, they were poised to get the rest of us — other political parties, the millions uncommitted, and the naysayers — to endorse the president. Certainly, PDP leaders looked like they would have been delighted to make Dr Jonathan the first democratically elected Nigerian president to be unanimously adopted by all of us as the sole candidate.
The ridiculousness of their actions did not strike them. By the last count, the party’s TAN rallies had collected over eight million signatures asking Dr Jonathan to contest, with the fecund South-South indescribably coming up with over four million of those signatures. But while rallies were yet to hold in the Northwest and the restive Northeast, party leaders impatiently ramped up the play. First was the party’s Governors Forum led by Dr Jonathan’s hatchet man, Governor Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom State, who announced excitedly last Tuesday that the governors had adopted the president as sole candidate. Hard on his heels was the party’s National Working Committee (NWC), which animatedly followed suit. And then came the ageless terracotta warriors of the party’s Board of Trustees (BoT), whose fevered brows had been burrowed by years of apostasy and betrayal, also concurring. The icing on the cake was the said NEC endorsement which was solid enough to draw the president out of his shell in contrived amusement and feigned bewilderment.
Governor Babangida Aliyu of Niger State was spectacular on that day. Having been called upon to speak on behalf of PDP governors by the remorseless Olisa Metuh, the party’s publicity secretary who could defend any side of an argument with equal and detached plausibility, the didactic Dr Aliyu ribbed his comrade-in-squirming, Jigawa State governor, Sule Lamido, to signify his presence and apparent concurrence. He seemed to be saying that if the upstart Mr metuh would put him (as a governor) on the spot, he was determined not to be left on the hot stove alone with unshod feet. A nuanced game was on; but it was not immediately clear the president and others at the meeting appreciated its delicate shades of joke and mischief. Recall that shortly before some PDP governors defected to the All Progressives Congress (APC) in November last year, Dr Aliyu was the leader of the subversives, and the polemicist and theorist, Alhaji Lamido, manned the ideological rampart. But on the day the rebellion matured, both Dr Aliyu and Alhaji Lamido cited some extenuating circumstances and abandoned their defecting PDP comrades at the barricades.
Last Thursday, both men were put on the spot, and they had the distinguished honour, not to say anguish, of assenting Dr Jonathan’s endorsement, the former by his comic overkill, and the latter by his discomfiting silence. But by any colour, apostasy is apostasy. PDP BoT’s Chief Anenih, perhaps the most unprincipled politician in the country, a man for whom party and ideological differentiation is nothing but rank stupidity, was there to fix his cadaverous gaze on the PDP top brass, as if whipping them into servitude and rebellion. Reporters wrote that the PDP convention in December would be expected to confirm these endorsements. That is an understatement. The convention will confirm the endorsements, not be expected to. No one who loves his life in the PDP will attempt to oppose Dr Jonathan, either as a practical democratic joke or out of conviction. He will be crushed. And even if Dr Jonathan were to ask someone to pretend to oppose him in order to give a semblance of internal democracy in the party, the hapless fellow would still resist the temptation, for he would not be sure he was not been set up for destruction.
Were the endorsements to be limited to the PDP, we could take consolation in the fact that the party really never had a soul, nor that even if it did, it still could not call it its own. The Southeast, as if the zone had inhaled some kind of esoteric gas, has chorused their loud endorsement. Indeed, an uproarious celebration is on in that region of forbidden republicanism to validate Dr Jonathan. Surprisingly too, a large but quite misguided section of the Yoruba elite has also endorsed Dr Jonathan, citing their distrust for and distaste of northern feudalism, and a fear of the invasion of religious dervishes from the North. The Yoruba have a talent for projecting their internal struggles onto the national plane, even as some of them, for economic reasons, such as pipeline protection contracts, are prepared to sell their souls to the devil. In the few months before the great plebiscite, there will be many more endorsements and betrayals, for it seems as if the country has lost its mind.
The Dr Jonathan endorsement and the way it has been procured reflect a dispiriting and unnerving fact about his government and Nigerian politics. The culture had been building since the unethical and anti-intellectual years of the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency. The processes are now maturing. No one, not even Chief Obasanjo, has compromised the political elite as adeptly and with much devilry as Dr Jonathan. The Southeast is tamed and disembowelled by economic and bureaucratic baits. The South-South has reached the apogee of selfishness and errantry, with the region a virtually lawless economic ‘free trade’ zone of stolen oil worth some $8bn annually. The Southwest is laid prostrate by greed and powermongering, its long-lasting culture of race suicide reactivated. And a large swathe of the North tired of the rot, having itself promoted humungous rot during their ascendancy, have begun to sell their consciences.
As the country under Dr Jonathan takes firm and deliberate steps towards tyranny, what we see in the mirror is a reflection of the president’s mental picture of what kind of country he prefers to govern, and a mental picture of himself. To him, and under him, Nigeria has become an eclectic pastiche with no purpose, drive or direction. And he himself has become, whether deliberately or accidentally, a dangerous, budding dictator determined to herd the country into one suffocating pen — a country speaking with one voice, looking in the same direction, thinking the same way, regimented, devoid of soul, and unable to savour the modern joys and accomplishments of life. Between the Governors Forum, TAN rallies, PDP endorsement, and the national conference, among others, the betrayal of the country appears complete. Now, more than at any time in our history, we need a miracle to make Nigeria snap out of its self-induced stupor.
