Tag: President Goodluck Jonathan

President Goodluck Jonathan’s speech at the All-Political Parties Summit in Abuja last week took Nigerian politics to an abysmal low as it blamed everyone else but himself and his party for the country’s parlous state. It is now obvious that with every speech he makes, many of them spontaneous, inappropriate and misconceived, Nigerians feel more forlorn than ever. “There are still very remorseless anti-democratic forces operating in the political system, ever ready to exploit lapses in the management of our political and electoral processes,” the president began bafflingly. And he went on to predict that some of those forces, whose lifestyle he found objectionable, could endanger “the nation’s hard-won democratic liberty.” Mercifully, he never claimed to number among those who fought for that liberty, nor has he ever in any of his speeches given indication that he recognised the philosophical underpinnings of that liberty, let alone be willing, in accordance with the oath he took on assumption of office, to defend and uphold the constitution. A pointer to his miscomprehension of the concept of democratic liberty, as he put it, is his unconscionable and “remorseless” assault on the media.

Appealing to people he called “dear compatriots”, the president spoke of his resolve and that of the country “never to allow these negative forces to prevail,” especially with the 2015 elections around the corner. But apart from the Boko Haram menace, the president does not appear to illustrate the negative forces he so glibly spoke about. Surely, he could not mean his critics, the political opposition, and the media, for these other groups have proved more resolute in defending civil rights than he and his conservative, if not entirely reactionary, aides and supporters. But the president was not done.

“The current national political outlook with regards to inter-party collaboration is less than salutary,” he said timidly. “Indeed, the conduct and utterances of leading politicians at home and abroad are rapidly creating and spreading unnecessary tension in the country. Such unguarded utterances on their part fan the embers of discord, bitterness and rancour. Such unfortunate development plays into the hands of extremist elements waging a vicious campaign of terror against the state.” It is all but clear where the military got its inspiration to assault the “democratic liberty” the president so casually referred to. He is obsessively angered by criticisms, having once described himself hyperbolically as the most abused president in the world. In his worldview, “unguarded utterances” rather than atrocious and ill-considered policies, repression, injustice etc. give fillip to insurgency and foster rancour and bitterness. It is hard to resist the temptation to throw up one’s hands in frustration.

But worse was still to come. “We must never politicise the fundamentals and core imperatives of defending the state,” argued the president pretentiously. “Doing so can only embolden the terrorists and other enemies of our republics who will seek to employ any perceived political and social division for their nefarious ends.” It is not clear where the president got the idea that his critics had politicised the imperative of defending the country against insurgency. The problem, we all know, is his government’s unresponsiveness to the insurgency, his appalling misreading of the revolt, and his general refusal to inspire both the military and the country to fight. These are the things that draw everyone’s ire.

What the president wants is a docile society upon which to build a lazy construct of governance. Neither he nor his distracted military will get that kind of society, not even if they destroy the constitution to which they have been serially unfaithful. His deadpan that “Our political parties must remain positive and constructive in their engagements as we seek to build virile and stable nation that can compete with other states in the world” is all the more inappropriate for the simple reason that in his more than four years in office, Dr Jonathan has not given us a concise description of the virile and stable nation he yearns for. We can find no such vision in his speeches and actions. All we see is a bitter and rancorous president allergic to opposition and criticism, a president determined to shred the fabric that knits the Nigerian society together and willing to deploy all security forces at his disposal to reduce the country to a groveling and pitiable giant. He can rest assured we will not oblige him.

A day after President Goodluck Jonathan lectured the media to desist from celebrating terrorists, particularly the Boko Haram sect, the military, probably reading his lips, launched an all-out offensive against the print media in ways that harked back to the worst years of military dictatorship. The president not only lectured the media, he virtually harangued them, suggesting they adopt crude forms of developmental journalism. Speaking through the Information minister, Labaran Maku, during a book launch in Abuja last week, the president enjoined the media to educate and persuade the public to join hands with his government in fighting terror. He said nothing of the astonishing inability of his government in combating the menace. He also said nothing of the chaos that accompany the military campaign in the Northeast, the overarching intelligence failure that has doomed the war, the infighting in government, and the tactical inadequacy that seems to elongate and complicate the war.

Instead, the president appears to reason that if the media could be made to conform to his wish, the anti-terror war would not be as shambolic as it has evidently become. What seemed uppermost in his mind appears to be the insults he has received globally over his poor handling of the anti-terror war, a battering he thinks was instigated and fuelled by the feistiness of the local press. He glossed over the painful realisation by many newsrooms in the country that foreign print media had trumped them in publishing some of the most damning and telling stories on the Boko Haram conflict, including brilliant human interest stories that agonisingly bring into the open the torment being experienced by the abducted Chibok girls and their longsuffering parents. Even if the local media were to foolishly cooperate with the Jonathan presidency, and wear the cloak of a propaganda consortium, how would that prevent the ubiquitous and untrammelled  social media and online publishing outfits from circulating damning details of the war in the Northeast, some of them either inaccurate or evocative of the civil war years?

During the Abuja book launch, Mr Maku, representing the president, had said: “Terrorists need publicity to be recognised and they depend on the media, but they do not deserve the type of publicity the media is giving them…The media should sensitise the public with their reports so that they can unite and fish them out thereby bringing terrorism to an end quickly. I am not saying that you shouldn’t report when there are, say, terrorists attacks on innocent citizens but we must report from the point of view of arousing society to reject their message, to unite society against what they are doing. I am still calling on all of us to be able define the thin line that exists between the urge to report and the need to protect. We need to really come to a definition of what the responsibility of the media should be to organisations and persons whose major objective is to destroy society, to incite hatred among normal people. I have said it that if we black out terrorism for a period, I am sure it will go down.”

The president is unrealistic to expect, in this era of globalisation, that the Nigerian media could on their own choose to downplay open stories, many of which the foreign media even accompany with exclusive photographs to the dismay of the local media. He is too idealistic to expect that the media would choose to black out news about Boko Haram attacks even for a moment. In fact, in one vacillating breath, he himself acknowledged the difficulty of evading the publication of open news. But he then cruelly mocked his office by suggesting that in place of effective policies and the adoption of the right military strategies, a compliant press would help deal death blow to terror.

It was in this appalling context of poor reasoning and immature handling of the security emergency in the Northeast that the military has apparently targeted a few opposition papers and marked them down for intimidation and harassment. The sweeping nature of the military harassment enacted in the past three days is unprecedented, the kind never seen before, not even in the darkest days of the Gen Sani Abacha dictatorship. The aim, it seems, is to cripple the opposition media, make their operations economically unsustainable, and hope that they could be browbeaten into submission and hamstrung as a supposed outlet of Boko Haram exploits that paint the military and government as ineffective. But even if the entire so-called adversarial press were to be obliterated, surely there must be enough officials in government who are smart enough to know that that would neither help them defeat terror nor render an ineffective government effective.

Yesterday marked Day Two of the vicious extra-legal crackdown on the local media. That measure will not only fail, as other crackdowns in the past did, it will definitely tarnish the image of the military which appears to lack the officer corps with the mettle to resist unlawful orders. Worse for Dr Jonathan, the crackdown will complicate and worsen his poor standing globally. The world did not need the Nigerian media to come to a unanimous conclusion that the Jonathan presidency was slow in responding to the Boko Haram menace, and especially the Chibok abductions. The world, including some African leaders, have criticized Dr Jonathan and dismissed him as unfit for the office he occupies. Now they will even be more merciless on him. They will wonder from which Pleistocene past we managed to unearth Dr Jonathan and inflict him on a country struggling to catch up with the rest of the world and also fit into the modern era.

It is pointless discussing the reasons given by the military for disrupting the circulation of local newspapers. No one believes their arguments that it has nothing to do with the content of the newspapers. No one believes the military was merely being proactive in preventing newspaper distribution vans from being used to transport terrorists’ explosive devices. And no one believes the military was not ordered to stifle the press and violate the constitution. By trying to strangulate the press, it is clear which direction the Jonathan presidency is travelling. It has since lost the argument in open discourses; it will lose face everywhere even more. It has now become a danger to itself and to the rest of the country. It is expected that the Jonathan government, like all previous Nigerian governments nearing the end of their tethers, would embark on more dangerous and counterproductive measures from now on. The public will be prepared for the government’s worst shenanigans. What is not clear is whether the National Assembly will recognise that this government is devoid of integrity and credibility, and is comprehensively undermining democracy and endangering the peace and stability of the country, first by its incompetent handling of the anti-terror war, and now by its attempt to castrate the critical press.

The National Assembly must recognise this massive harassment of the media as unprecedented, and an outright subversion of the constitution. From all indications, the country is well on the road to fascism. Neither the Jonathan government nor the military is above the law. They must, therefore, be reined in now. The National Assembly Committees on Intelligence and Defence must summon the military hierarchy for explanation, even if their explanations will be untenable. If the government will not relent in its open and flagrant abridgment of the right to free speech, the legislators must begin impeachment proceedings against a president that increasingly shows gross disrespect for the constitution. Boko Haram leaders, it will be recalled, also at a time attempted to muscle the local press. They were resisted. The press will also resist this disgraceful attempt by the government to castrate it.

The Jonathan government apparently no longer cares about its image. But Nigerians still care about their country’s image long sullied by the government’s helplessness in the face of the Boko Haram abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls. And for sure, the foreign governments assisting Nigeria to rescue the Chibok girls will come under pressure from their people and media to dissociate from Dr Jonathan’s extraordinary and extra-legal measures. It is also apparent that the Jonathan government, long regarded as vacuous and visionless, may have been inspired by events in Thailand and Egypt among others, where the press and democratic institutions have been castrated. But Nigeria is different. The Jonathan government may feel that some amount of intimidation might not be irreconcilable with the domesticated tenets of the Nigerian constitution. However, as previous governments have found out, Dr Jonathan will find out too late that he is grossly mistaken. He has not won the anti-terror war, and seems quite unable to find a way to even make a huge dent on it. Now he has opened another front. This new front will complicate matters for him and doom his presidency.