No, dear reader, you are not seeing double. The title is correct and it is not a reprise of an earlier piece bearing a similar title on Muhammadu Buhari. And,
no, this article has not been prompted by any need I felt to balance my
take and pretend to be even-handed in my approach to what seem like the
principal candidates for the office of president of Nigeria in 2015.
Should I find that one candidate is superior to another in my considered judgment, I would not fail to point that out. Neither
have I been motivated nor goaded into writing by the hackneyed
responses of some Buhari supporters who barely or inattentively read the
earlier piece which made clear that the royal road to a second term for
Goodluck Jonathan would be a Buhari or even an Atiku candidacy in the
presidential elections next year.
I would like to start with a declaration. Jonathan
will get a second term as president not because he deserves one but
because the All Progressives Congress (APC) is so politically inept and
morally bankrupt, not to talk of its being devoid of a vision, that it
is proving incapable of offering Nigerians a real alternative to both
Jonathan and his party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).
To locate the case that I wish to make, we need to go back to 2010. The then Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) was about to settle on Nuhu Ribadu for its presidential ticket. My worries then about Ribadu will be articulated in a future piece on him and his so-called defection. I
shared with friends back then that I thought that the 2011 elections
were going to be a watershed event in Nigeria’s political history,
especially at the federal level. I said then that the 2011 presidential election was an open one with absolutely no favourite candidate. It
was an election that the CAN could win with Ribadu atop its ticket
given his pedigree, at that time, despite what I considered his lack of
principles demonstrated after his initial removal as head of the
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
What
was crucial was that he was clean, had what we would call extremely high
favourableness and extremely low negativity ratings across the country. What
is more, he would be running against a twice-accidental public
servant—first as state governor and, later, as president—with no
personality and barely in control of his party machinery. Of course, there was an important caveat. Of
greater importance was whether or not the sponsoring party and its
powers that be were willing to fun and execute a full-fledged
presidential campaign. As
all who follow politics in Nigeria know too well, not only did the ACN
not run a decent campaign; it did not run a campaign at all!
It beggared its candidate and was busy negotiating an ugly power-sharing pact with another party. It
ended up with an unprincipled directive to its supporters to split
their ticket voting ACN locally and a different party at the
presidential level. Thus was
lost the possibility of a campaign and a candidacy that would, at least
on paper, have rattled the cages of the PDP and positioned the ACN as a
genuine government-in-waiting. The
party lost that opportunity and the same mentality or maybe I should
say that its realization that that opportunity once lost has entirely
escaped its group led it to the sterile merger with the Congress for
Progressive Change (CPC) and the remnants of a handful of no-name
parties to form the APC.
Let us get back to Jonathan. Here
was an accidental president who first had to do battle as Vice
President with the cabal around his terminally ill boss and to require
the support of nonpartisan others to step into his
constitutionally-sanctioned role as successor to his principal. He became president by default. He has been there now for six years having won his own mandate for the last four in 2011. Although
the latter-day Youths Earnestly Ask for Goodluck Jonathan [Remember
Abacha?] otherwise known as Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN)
as well as hacks like Chika Okpala now are a ubiquitous presence on
Channels Television joyfully trying to sell us on the out-of-this-world
transformation wrought in the country by Jonathan’s administration, I
think it is fair to say that the evidence may not be there for
nonpartisan observers like me to see.
When he took over, power was the problem in Nigeria. Six years later, power—its generation and distribution—is still the problem in Nigeria. Maybe
the signal transformation that Jonathan has wrought is the undeniable
fact that we are a certified “stand-by power” economy! By
contrast, whatever people hated about Olusegun Obasanjo, everybody
talks about his signal achievement in the telecommunications sector. Even
if he had needed to do a selling when he was in office, no amount of
shilling by any number of spokesperson and “transformation ambassadors”
would have succeeded in pulling wool over Nigerians’ eyes seven years on
had it been a false transformation. I
am not sure but it appears that the reason Jonathan needs so many
snake-oil salespersons around him is precisely that the so-called
transformation agenda is a certified dud!
Yet, I do not
think that the failure of the “transformation agenda” is enough to say
that Jonathan does not belong in our future. Obasanjo wasted his first term ensconced in the suffocating embrace of some of the dregs of Nigerian politics. His second was his term of redemption. Jonathan’s
people, I am sure, would want to argue that he needs his second term to
secure his legacy and correct the mistakes of his first term. I
am even willing to go along with the position that finishing Umar
Yar’Adua’s term should not count given some of the opposition to his
accession to office within his own party.
No doubt,
Jonathan would not be the first in the annals of the presidential system
borrowed from the United States to ask for second term after a
not-so-distinguished first term. That is the nature of the beast. If
I may use a boxing analogy, however poorly a champion fights in a title
defence, the challenger must beat him comprehensively, preferably,
knock him out, in order to come out as the new champion. In the present case, Jonathan must have chalked up some failure or failures that literally make him unfit to continue in office. It
is this signal failure that, I argue, must disqualify Jonathan from
being a part of Nigeria’s future in the office of president.
Here is the case. When
all is said and done, whatever the form of the state, in all of
civilized history, no state has or deserves to have legitimacy that is
not able to protect its subjects or citizens. In
other words, the ultimate function of government, the very reason for
its institution is to guarantee the governed a reasonable expectation
that their lives, poor, rich or merely okay, would unfold under
reasonably secure conditions procured by their governors, the basis of
their legitimacy, without the governed having to revert to self-help and
its attendant limitations and conundrums. When
a government fails spectacularly at this most basic duty, its
legitimacy fount dries up quickly and if it does not voluntarily leave
office, it usually does not want for challenges to its tenure.
Jonathan’s
signal failure lies in its absolutely horrendous record when it comes
to securing Nigerians in the leading of their lives, howsoever miserable
those lives are for the teeming majority of Nigerians. The
undisputable monument to shame for the Jonathan administration in this
regard is its utter ineptitude in its handling of the Boko Haram
insurgency. When Jonathan took over from Yar’Adua, the insurgency did not have a single square kilometre of territory under its control. Six
years later, almost the entire northeast region of Nigeria is under
occupation by forces that are not those of the Nigerian state.
Unfortunately, ours is not a decent society. Were
we a decent society, the government that has presided over such loss of
territory would be put on its back heels and scrambling to justify its
continuation in office. What
makes our situation worse is that the worst impact of the insurgency is
being borne by those who cannot even resort to self-help, e.g., forming
vigilante groups: children. The
kidnap of the Chibok girls is much more than a symbol: it is the
ultimate indictment of a government that has absolutely no sense of its
responsibility or is too thick to know when it has failed woefully.
Given
that the president is the head of the political arm as well as the head
of the military arm—he is not called the Commander-in-Chief for
nothing—if there is any meaning to those titles, it must include taking
responsibility. It is not enough for the president to keep changing his national security team as if its members were diapers. If he keeps picking the wrong people to run his national security team, he is responsible. If he appoints the right people but does not inspire them to perform or under-equips them, he is responsible. The
funny thing about being responsible is that it sometimes requires
leaving office when the failure is repeated in a pattern or is
particularly catastrophic. Both conditions are met in the saga of the Chibok girls.
As
I said earlier, the Chibok girls’ case is the ultimate monument to the
shame of a government that is simply incapable of protecting its
citizens, especially its most vulnerable citizens—its children—who, by
the way, must be nurtured and protected at all costs if the polity is going to have a future at all. And the girls are not alone. As
I write this, news just broke of another attack on a high school in
Potiskum, Yobe State, involving the deaths of another 49 young lives and
scores injured. Meanwhile,
the PDP candidate for office of governor of Zamfara State, Ibrahim
Gusau, and his supporters are dancing shameless on Channels Television
at the launch of his campaign at the same time that the world is being fed news of the carnage in Potiskum! Why bother about a slaughter of kids in school when the important task of launching a campaign for office is on queue!
No, the girls are not alone. Before
them, 43 boys were murdered in their sleep at another school and the
president, just like his party representative in Zamfara State at the
moment, and the time-servers that wait on him hand and foot did not see
anything wrong with hosting a party in celebration of a dubious
centenary of the fleecing of our agency as a people in the constitution
of our de-formed polity. There have been other kidnaps of other children and women since Chibok. None of these matters to our president who is preoccupied with securing a second-term that, I dare say, he has not earned.
Notice
that I have not dwelt on other security failures—bombings across the
entire northern Nigeria region; pipeline vandalisation and oil bunkering
and the privatisation of security in these sphere to erstwhile bandits
of the Niger delta region; the fact that not even the Nigerian
government dare operate in the public square of its own capital for fear
of a repetition of a previous Independence Day bombing a few years
back. National day is now celebrated in the President’s living room. No matter, just let me have a second term, says the president and his verandah boys and girls. I don’t need to remind Nigerians of the government’s failures and their gory details.
All that matters is the second term. It
is almost as if the president’s minions know their s has been a
disastrous term, almost mirroring Obasanjo’s first term in its sterility
in the area of notable achievements. Their
obsession as well as that of their principal with a second term puts
the lie to their claim of transformation effected by this government. Were this president secure in his much-trumpeted achievements, his place in our history should be more than assured. I am convinced that his handlers know that there is not much legacy to bequeath. That explains their maniacal determination to wring a second term out of the Nigerian electorate.
One of the verandah boys came out the other day to say that no president resigns in the midst of a war. Really? A proper education would have told him that Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) quit while the Vietnam War was still raging. He
could have soldiered on believing, as I think our president probably
does, that he had a divine mandate to continue the war and win it in his
second term. His greatness consisted in part in his realisation that
if did not already have a legacy at home, given what it would take for
him to continue in office in a second term, even if could win one, he
threw in the towel and refused to present himself for re-election.
The latter issue is where the historical similarities between Johnson and Jonathan are most instructive. Nigeria, right now, is a country riven by severe divisions. Ironically, that division is Jonathan’s ticket to a second term and he is busy stoking it, especially the religious one. What
with a ‘pilgrimmage’ to Jerusalem prior to declaring his second-term
ambition and his resident “chaplain” in the person of the Christian
Association of Nigeria (CAN) president trying to pass him off as the
elect of God and defender of Christians against Boko Haram!
Why would Jonathan not think of resigning or not seeking a second term? Ordinarily,
in addition to the self-serving lies and proclamations about service to
the people that are standard fare for politicians, we may think of ego
as a justification for clinging to office. But, and this is the rub,
Jonathan, like other public office holders in our country, has no ego worthy of the name. I
am positive that Jonathan does not wake up any morning and worry about
his place in history, his contributions to humanity, how the world was
before he came into it and how it would, pace his own contributions,
when will have left it. In
short, as I have written elsewhere, I do not see any evidence of a sense
of self, of an individuality that would be hurt by failure and
discomfited by the fate, unknown but most likely horrific, of 217 Chibok
girls, or the fate of the other school children that have been killed,
maimed—physically and psychologically—for life, or displaced by the Boko
Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria while this sad presidency has
lasted.
No it is not him or his personality that is at stake. After all, he is not in office as Goodluck Jonathan, simpliciter. He
is in office rather as “the minority areas president”, “the
south-south-in-chief”, “the first Ijaw-at-the-head-of-the-trough”, and
any thought of resigning would not be in terms of Goodluck Jonathan the
person but of removing the retinue of hangers-on in whose name he claims
the presidency. This is the
ultimate tragedy of an unthinking collectivist ethos and primordial
even if antiquarian communalism that is the bane of our political
discourse and practice today.
To admit that he has
failed is not a personal thing: it is a collective failure tarnishing
all respective collectivities just iterated. Additionally,
the direct presence of the feeding trough, at the head of the table on
which sits the “national cake”, will all be in jeopardy for those who
feel entitled. Such is the
mess that we call Nigerian politics today that even nonpartisans like me
are not doing due diligence by putting on the table the question of the
president’ current tenure and his worthiness for another term.
Is Jonathan going to get a second term? No thanks to the peculiarities of Nigerian politics and the criminal incompetence of his main opposition, Yes. Does he deserve one? Hell, NO! Here
is a man who has no ideas, stands for nothing, has no vision and, yet,
he is and will be president of what supposedly is the most important
country of peoples of African descent on earth. What a people!
Táíwò teaches at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A.
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