When the freshly minted President Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan announced that his regime would be marked by a transformative agenda, not many compatriots believed him. Nigerians have heard too much of such promises in the past only for them to turn out a damp squib. Let them just get on with the job and forget the stirring heroics, cynical Nigerians would be heard grunting. From Shagari’s Ethical Revolution to Yar’Adua’s Servant Leadership, our people seem to have heard enough.
So it is then that a prophet is not without honour, except in his own land. But it is also in the nature of prophecies to manifest in curious and unexpected ways. Last week as the shouting match in River State finally descended into a full scale shooting war, and as illustrious scalps tumbled from the Wadata Plaza and the military redoubt, the real transition and transformation finally unfolded before our eyes. It is not about the political and economic society. It is the transition and transformation of Goodluck Jonathan from a meek and diffident political apprentice to a full blown civilian caudillo.
The interesting thing about a fascist terror machine is that it acts with impersonal rigour recognising neither its original owners nor its temporary custodians When in a moment of vengeful hubris you hand over such a torture instrument to a man weighed down by the ancestral memory of persecution and torture, a man whose cultural conditioning has not accustomed him to an automatic obeisance and deference to hierarchy and a feudal pecking order, you must be ready to reap the whirlwind.
Jonathan may well be the nemesis of the old Nigerian power coalition, just as Abacha turned out its military nemesis. In human affairs, political advantages are not designed to last forever. Somebody is bound to lose concentration at a critical point and make a stupid mistake.
The Nigerian post-colonial state and its hegemonic power brokers have had it coming for a long time. Good luck normally intervened. Now, the real Goodluck has intervened, and it is about time, too. Even political insanity has its statute of limitation. You cannot spend decades preparing for madness. Madness does not condone permanent deferral.
As readers will attest, this column is not given to hurling invectives and personal insults. When we focus on particular individuals, it is to highlight their importance in and to the impersonal process of history. For many, Jonathan may appear as an errant personality and historic misfit, but sometimes individual actors are often helpless and hapless agents of the remorseless and relentless turns of history.
In order to understand just what is going on, we must return to the nature of colonial and post-colonial transition in Nigeria and the kind of anti-developmental state and nation we have been saddled with by both our colonial and post-colonial overlords. A state and nation do not exist in vacuum. They are products of a specific political and cultural milieu and a determinate historical process.
Last week, we noted in this column how the military transition programmes often mirror the colonial transition itself in their emphasis on continuity rather than radical change, and their obsession with personnel replacement rather than a fundamental re-engineering of the structure of the state and the nation itself.
It is therefore appropriate to look at the nature of the military rule that Nigeria has had and their fixation with the status quo rather than the radical agency which would have rapidly transformed Nigeria’s political and economic fortunes. We need to understand the nature and character of the millennial incubus we are dealing with. It will then be possible to situate the Jonathan presidency within the lineage of civilian despotism. General Obasanjo who has been directly involved in two of the transition programmes both as a beneficiary and benefactor is a central figure in the historical tragedy.
Two of the military regimes did not even bother about transition programmes. In the case of General Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi, he was completely consumed with tempering and negotiating the radical momentum the military uprising of January 15 1966 had unleashed. The fallout would eventually consume him. General Mohammadu Buhari could not care a hoot. His natural disdain for Nigerian politicians coupled with the violent mood of the country against politics and the political class at the end of the Shagari regime made the climate very hostile.
After initially agreeing to a broad based transition to civilian rule programme, General Gowon suddenly changed his mind in 1974 on the grounds that the political class had not learnt their lesson. We may never know the intelligence available to the temperate and mild-mannered general who had done extremely well in healing the hideous wounds of the civil war.
But with Chief Awolowo on the prowl and the Ikenne titan acting with the majesty and assurance of a king in waiting, the odds were too unpredictable. Gowon himself would famously admit that he had rebuffed all entreaties to put Awo away. Even after the civil war, the fear of Awo was the beginning of wisdom. The following year, Gowon was swept out of office by his colleagues.
Despite all the chicanery and grand deception of the Babangida Transition Programme and the frantic war-gaming on behalf of the status quo, the dominant military faction bared its fangs as soon as it was confronted with the unpredictable outcome of the end election. They panicked and summarily annulled the election as soon as it became clear that MKO Abiola and the coalition of unaccustomed and irregular fellows were coasting to victory in a momentous landslide. For his temerity, Abiola would perish in captivity.
In the case of General Abacha, the obsession with the military, political and national status quo assumed a venomous dimension. After forcing himself on the nation even against the wishes of majority of the armed forces, Abacha came to the conclusion that only he could succeed himself.
His self-succession project had developed an unstoppable momentum when it became obvious to the protocol of power that the cost of acquiescing in his murderous siege on the nation might prove prohibitive. A sultan’s scalp was already in the blood-dripping kitty among many other illustrious apparitions, and the goggled one was beginning to eye the hilltop castle in Minna for the definitive endgame. An outstanding military terrorist, Abacha had bludgeoned the nation’s traditional power centres into submission and was on his way to becoming the country first truly maximum ruler when death intervened.
The two transition programmes involving General Obasanjo are classic examples of how to politically railroad a whole nation into compliance using the military tactics of camouflage and deception. The hapless and clueless Nigerian political class allowed themselves to be led into a well-laid political ambush before being electorally slaughtered. Only the deeply cunning can call to the deeply cunning.
As it was in 1979, so was it the case in 1999. General Abdulsalaam Abubakar, who as a colonel commanded the hand over parade by Obasanjo in 1979, appeared to have mastered the ropes very well. As usual, the obsession of the military hierarchs was with continuity and the preservation of the status quo. The political class served as ancillary and accessory to a well-oiled plot which caught them completely flatfooted.
Like its NPN forebear, the PDP was designed as a broad based national party teeming with men and women of calibre and timber who could deliver the bloc votes while guaranteeing continuity and the status quo even as they indemnify the departing military against loss of face and humiliation. An ideological blueprint for the rapid development and transformation of the country was a less urgent and pressing need in the face of antagonistic and anti-military forces of change. As usual with “non-ideological” posturing, it is based on a masked ideology of a conservative stirring of the most virulently reactionary kind..
In 1979, Obasanjo famously boasted that the best candidate do not always win elections. Twenty years later, the same man after wondering aloud about how many times Nigeria wanted to make a president of him willingly yielded to a draft “ambush” by noting that generals do not walk away from an ambush. They romp through it. Unknown to the kingmakers, the king had already been chosen somewhere else.
With the benefit of cruel hindsight, it is now very painful watching the AD chieftains hopping from one party to the other when their fate had already been sealed. Their participation in the Abubakar transition programmes served to confer legitimacy on a chicanery concocted somewhere else. But it could have been worse. The 1999 cliff hanger was more dire than 1979, the military having exhausted its political and historic possibility as an agent of change.
If one takes a long term perspective or what the French call la longue duree on this matter, it may be possible to see some good in evil and some merits in the PDP, given the balance of power at that particular point. It was a holding device put in place to work out the contradictions of military rule as the army beat a disorderly retreat back to the barracks. It did brilliantly well in that. Only men of Obasanjo’s nerve and verve, T. Y Danjuma’s steely and strategic brilliance and Aliyu Gusau’s arm twisting spooky genius could have achieved that feat of demilitarization without provoking a monumental backlash.
But eventually, a monstrosity can only beget another monstrosity. In a cruel paradox, the same road that leads to demilitarization also leads to a democratic gridlock. A holding device is just that. It is not designed to move the country forward economically and politically. We can now see the trail and the obsession with “safe” status quo that led to the emergence of Goodluck Jonathan. The PDP military-inspired hoax has lasted fifteen years. The Jonathan presidency is its defining end product.
Being politically and ideologically bereft, the PDP can neither transform itself not to talk of transforming the nation. As it is at the moment, the party is a rudderless hulk that is about to transit Nigeria into another major disaster. The Titanic is approaching its titanic iceberg. Unfortunately having overdrawn their political and professional IOUs, the old Junker generals and masters of the Wehrmacht are no longer in a position to sort things out. Unless care is taken, it is going to be an apocalyptic meltdown and a nightmare for the Black race.
