At exactly 1:15 pm United Sates eastern time (6:15 pm Nigerian time) on Tuesday, my daughter called me from Lagos with the news that President Goodluck Jonathan had just called Gen. Buhari and congratulated him on his victory in the presidential election. I have seen Nigerian elections since 1952, have taken frontline parts in many, been a candidate in some, and won some. I can’t remember another election campaign that was so contentious, and so bitter and violent in tone, as the one that ended this past Tuesday. And I can’t remember any other federal ruler of Nigeria who so willingly conceded victory to an opponent as President Jonathan has done.
In the history of Nigeria, the one or two minutes of greetings between President Jonathan and Gen. Buhari this past Tuesday is very likely to go down as President Jonathan’s finest hour as a Nigerian public official. And those one or two minutes may very well go down as the turning point in the hitherto tumultuous path of Nigeria as an independent country since 1960. If Nigeria goes on from this point to evolve into a country with a disciplined leadership, orderly management, openly democratic politics, and a dynamic modern economy, President Goodluck Jonathan could become the initiator of needed change for Nigeria. Some day in the future, our grateful descendants may erect statues to his memory.
Sure, most of us Nigerians have spent the past four years lamenting President Jonathan’s inadequacies. Because he comes from the Niger Delta, where many brave youths have arisen since 1960 to war against excessive centralization of power and resource control, and against an insensitive federal establishment, very many Nigerians naturally looked up to him to start a process of constitutional changes – changes that would give the Nigerian federation a more rational structure, and restore to our federating units much of the responsibility for development and resource management that the Federal Government has been messing around with. But, not only did he not start the needed change, he even seemed for some time to be opposed to it. And when he was finally prevailed upon to take some step and call a National Conference, he did absolutely nothing to give it any direction.
Quite rightly, therefore, when some eminent citizens in Nigeria’s most progressive region rose up during, the now concluded election campaign and urged their people to support him on the grounds that he would carry out the recommendations of the National Conference; their people were skeptical.
During the same years under President Jonathan, our country has increasingly suffered distress on account of terrorism. At least, in the course of the first years of this century, we Nigerians grew used to believing confidently, and with considerable pride, that ours was the strongest military in Africa. In various trouble spots on the African continent, and even in places beyond Africa, we earned the reputation of being a key factor in international peacekeeping ventures. When Boko Haram began to raise a challenge against our country, therefore, most Nigerians felt sure that our military were more than capable of quickly getting rid of them. But the challenge mounted and mounted, while President Jonathan seemed more and more at a loss on what to do. The crisis attracted the attention of the whole world when Boko Haram kidnapped 276 students in a girls’ boarding school and we seemed to have no meaningful response. Various foreign governments and international agencies came in to offer help, and soon, through them, we got the shocking message that our military were hopelessly inept – as a result of rampant corruption.
This national shame reached a peak when the armies of our supposedly weaker neighbours (Chad, Cameroon and Niger) intervened and began to achieve significant success against Boko Haram – success that seemed beyond the capability of our own military. From this situation concerning our military, the image of our presidency as commanding chief over corruption assumed huge proportions. In fairness to President Jonathan, it is not right to charge him with being the originator of corruption in our federal government. Corruption was already a mighty power in our public life, and our Federal Government was already a monstrously corrupt entity, and the purveyor of corruption in our land, when President Jonathan was only a boy at school. The very constitutional structure given our country in 1978- 9 was designed to facilitate corruption – and it has done so more and more blatantly since then.
But the recent stories of our military’s ineptitude due to corruption did a lot of harm to President Jonathan’s image at home and abroad – even though, on the basis of what we know about our former presidents (military and civilian), President Jonathan does not, obviously, have the audacity to do what some of our earlier presidents did in the realm of corruption.
All these tend now to pale into only little significance side by side with what President Jonathan did last Tuesday evening. From all that we Nigerians know, when President Jonathan put that call through to Gen. Buhari, exchanged a few words with him and put down the telephone, he almost certainly saved our country from a major conflagration. For many months, many of our politically influential citizens have been exchanging threats of violence and war if the outcome they desired from the presidential election did not materialize. For years, some influential citizens have been, reportedly, importing and accumulating dangerous weapons for implementing their threats. Among us ordinary Nigerians, fearsome speculations have reigned. Then with one small gesture, President Jonathan commanded the rising tide of lawlessness and anarchy to be still. Soon, we will have another man in the position of president, and it is upon him we will then have to pin our hopes for our country. If he indeed is able to start off peacefully and smoothly, we will find it impossible to forget that it was President Jonathan who did that which made such a start-off possible.
From our present situation, I have a message for our politicians. Because of my principal job as a scholar and teacher, with a significant amount of participation in the politics of my country, and with considerable contacts with politics, governance and development in many countries of the wide world, I am often horrified by the manner in which we Black African peoples conduct the politics of our countries. I mean our tendency to infuse excessively violent passions into our relationships with one another, especially in the course of election rivalries. Some of the threats of war and violence, which we have heard in Nigeria in recent months, are simply unthinkable in most countries outside Black Africa. Besides, among persons intensely working for this or that presidential candidate, I have watched people say, write, or enshrine, unbelievably vicious and hurtful things about other persons – even persons to whom they are quite close by blood and other kinds of bonds.
Where does this primitive urge to hurt and destroy our fellow men come from? How really does such savagery help our candidate? And, now that the candidates have ended this more or less amicably, how do we live with the hurt and barbarism that we so thoughtlessly generated in past weeks? Is it true that, as some say, we blacks are less human, and less capable of thought, than other races? We need to think about these things.
