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In his article titled 'In Losing Power, Goodluck Jonathan Finally Finds Himself', chairman of the editorial
board, Thisday Newspapers & former Special Adviser on Communications
to late President Yar'Adua, Segun Adeniyi subbed Obasanjo and praised Jonathan for putting Nigeria first. He wrote;
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"The fact most people ignore is that given the objection of his party to
the use of the card reader, if the president had stormed out of the
polling unit at Otuoke when three card readers failed him, that probably
would have been the end of the election. And by now, Nigeria would be
on the boil. Fortunately for all of us, Jonathan chose not to travel
that familiar road often trudged by African leaders and history will
forever be kind to him for it." Read the full article after the cut...
Goodbye Ebele Jonathan - by Segun Adeniyi as published on Thisday
It remains for me the most memorable moment in the movie. The captain
was informing the ship owner (who had bought into the lie that no force
on earth or in heaven could sink the Titanic) that the ship had hit an
iceberg. “From this moment, no matter what we do, the Titanic will
founder,” he said. Having put so much faith in his own propaganda, the
ship owner retorted: “But this ship cannot sink.” Without missing a
beat, the captain responded: “She is made of iron, Sir. I assure you she
can. And she will. It is a mathematical certainty.”
Because those who survive on rent in our country are adept at marketing
their greed, they always succeed in selling to whoever occupies the
number one office in Nigeria at any period that he is not only above the
law, he is so powerful that he can never be defeated in an election.
But with the current defeat of Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan by Major
General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd), it is now very clear that the president
of Nigeria is human, afterall and he can be ousted by the same people
whose votes put him in power. That message has been most eloquently
passed and our country will never remain the same again. It is a new
day!
For sure, the president of Nigeria has enormous financial resources he
can mobilise at any given time while the security agencies and critical
institutions of state work at his pleasure regardless of what is written
in the Constitution. And he is forever surrounded by clowns and jobbers
of all sorts—I was privileged to have seen many of them at work in the
Villa—who sing the mantra that, as “President and commander-in-chief of
the armed forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria”—a title that is so
needlessly repeated for his pleasure almost as if it is a line in the
national anthem—he has such unlimited power that he can even turn a man
into a woman. Now we know better.
Having never bought into the scam that a president of Nigeria cannot be
defeated, I have since about four months ago been telling some people
very close to President Jonathan that he was electorally vulnerable. But
they never took me serious. In my personal encounter with the president
in his office on July 23 last year (he sent for me), I particularly
explained to him that he was increasingly being perceived as
“anti-North” and that it could hurt him at the general election. I
recall the president interjected by saying “but Segun, you know me…” to
which I replied that it was not my view but a perception challenge he
should deal with. If he made efforts in that direction, they were either
too little or too late, going by the results of the presidential
election across the entire Northern zone where Buhari won outright in 16
out of 19 States. Details of that private encounter I had with the
president will come in my coming book on the 2015 general elections in
Nigeria that should be out before the end of the year.
Needless to say, I am not one of the people surprised by the outcome of
the presidential election. In the fourth instalment of my 2015 election
series, “A Time to Choose”, on 29 January this year, I wrote: “as the
incumbent, Jonathan will run on his record which unfortunately would
include not only his performance in office (which is not as bad as being
projected) but also mismanaged relationships that may have been more
costly in terms of the eroded support base. We may never know how much
political damage the president inflicted on himself by his failed bid to
install a Speaker for the House of Representatives in June 2011 and the
refusal to accept defeat gracefully thereafter; the futile attempt to
oust Rotimi Amaechi as the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) Chairman and
how that eventually led to the split within the ruling party; the
ill-feelings from aggrieved party members who lost out at the recent PDP
primaries; the unfortunate Chibok ‘Waka-Come’ theatrics at the Villa by
the president’s wife that went viral internationally; the saga of the
‘unaccounted for billions of Dollars’ in oil receipts that is yet to be
conclusively resolved and the accompanying drama with Sanusi Lamido
Sanusi that played out from the CBN Governorship office in Abuja to the
Emir’s palace in Kano; the presidential redefinition of corruption as
being different from--and perhaps more tolerable than—stealing; the
evident contradictions inherent in the fact that those who once ran a
vicious media campaign against Jonathan, baptizing him with the moniker,
‘clueless president’ are now the ones speaking for him etc. The thing
about elections is that choices are usually made by most voters on the
basis of sentiments (and emotions) such as the foregoing and that is why
the incumbent is often disadvantaged, especially when the public mood
is as fouled as it is in Nigeria today...”
I wrote that three months ago and I have been proved to be correct.
However, despite the bitterness that characterised the 2015 presidential
election campaigns, President Jonathan redeemed himself when it
mattered most not only by the way he gracefully accepted defeat and
congratulated Buhari even before the collation of results was concluded
on Tuesday but also by the manner in which he rose to the occasion last
Saturday.
Despite the discomfort of having to stand in the heat, Jonathan
comported himself very well as the president, not a partisan, as we all
watched on national television how three card readers failed to read his
biometrics and accredit him for voting at his home town, Otueke,
Bayelsa State. At a time television camera could project very clearly
that his wife was already boiling with anger, the president said he was
prepared to wait for as long as it would take for it to work before he
was eventually accredited manually. Calm in disposition and measured in
his utterances, Jonathan refused to be goaded by the reporters who were
asking him leading questions about the use of card reader, knowing where
he stood on the issue. “President Jonathan is just one person, so if we
have problem with one person, as far as the election is going on well
nationally, I am not worried. There might be a delay, my interest is
that we conduct a credible election,” he said.
At the end, even if he lost the election, President Jonathan has turned
out to be a man of his word. The fact most people ignore is that given
the objection of his party to the use of the card reader, if the
president had stormed out of the polling unit at Otuoke when three card
readers failed him, that probably would have been the end of the
election. And by now, Nigeria would be on the boil. Fortunately for all
of us, Jonathan chose not to travel that familiar road often trudged by
African leaders and history will forever be kind to him for it.
That Nigerians are today proud of Jonathan is not in doubt and it is a
shame that it would take a defeat for him to approximate to the
president many had wanted to see in recent years. But in the days and
weeks to come when he begins the self-introspection as to how he lost
the presidency, Jonathan should look no farther than his immediate
environment. From his overbearing wife who used the campaign podium to
preach hate, forgetting that there indeed is a God in heaven who
promised in the Bible to “overturn, overturn, overturn... until he come
whose right it is; and I will give it him” regardless of whether such a
person is “analogue” or “brain dead” to people like Godsday Orubebe who
made a disgraceful public show of himself on Tuesday not to mention
Chief Edwin Clarke and confederates who, forgetting that politics is a
game of addition, imagined they could abuse and blackmail the whole of
Nigeria into re-electing their Ijaw kinsman.
How and why Jonathan lost will be a subject of interrogation in my
coming book but it is a pity that his handlers paid scant attention to
my warning of 19 January 2012, in a piece titled “Their Son, Our
President”, which rankled Aso Rock and for which someone procured the
services of hacks to attack me. I hope that Jonathan’s people will go
back to read (http://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/their-son-our-president/107435/)
and reflect on what might have been had they taken counsel in the
Yoruba adage that when your tuber of yam is growing too big, you use
your hand to cover it.
For an election that had been predicted to be the end of our country,
Nigerians have every right to be happy about the turn of events but
there are just too many heroes and the first to be commended is the
ordinary voter who stood under the sun and in the rain to exercise
his/her franchise. And then the much-maligned chairman of the
Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Attahiru Jega.
Calm under pressure, mature in his approach to issues, serene in the
face of provocation yet so firm and resolute in his conviction, Jega has
written his name into the history books by delivering when it mattered
most. With any other person, it is doubtful if we would be where we are
today as a nation. And of course we must commend our president-elect,
Buhari, not only for his tenacity of purpose (having lost three previous
times) but also for the maturity with which he handled the campaign
irritations from some PDP bigwigs and the president’s wife.
Finally, the biggest accolades go to the president who conceded defeat
so that his nation can move on. By that simple but important gesture of
patriotism, honour and nobility, Jonathan has earned the status that one
old man imagined he could confer on himself just by the theatrics of
tearing his party card before television camera. I just hope that the
leaders of the victorious APC would have the decency to treat the
president with respect in the remaining period of his tenure and after
he leaves office. He deserves it.
I will be a bloody hypocrite to say that I was praying for Jonathan to
win the presidential election. To be honest, I felt the country could do
with some Change (even if I still don’t know its content) because of
the way Jonathan mismanaged a couple of serious national issues,
especially the Boko Haram insurgency in the North-east. There was also
this academic interest about whether the proposition in my May 2011
research paper 'Divided Opposition as Boon to African Incumbents'
on factors shaping incumbent elections in Africa with special focus on
Nigeria, would prove to be correct. Now that my thesis has been
validated, I enjoy no real satisfaction that Jonathan is leaving office
this way because, despite my misgivings about some of the people around
him or his mixed stewardship, I still have a strong affection for the
president who I consider a very good man.
If the president needed any validation that he acted wisely, it is by
the outpouring of congratulations to him from all over the world and the
way he has practically repositioned our country for business. Perhaps
nobody has captured the situation as succinctly as Mr. Mo Ibrahim, one
of Africa’s wealthiest men and philanthropist, who said yesterday: “The
news from Nigeria today is wonderful. Africa’s largest country has
concluded a peaceful election process. Furthermore, the incumbent has
already gracefully conceded and congratulated his successor – a first
for Nigeria and a benchmark for other African countries to follow.
Today, we Africans are all proud of Nigeria and President Jonathan.
Thank you Mr. President. If you are seeking a legacy, you have
definitely achieved it.”
Last Saturday in my hotel room in Lagos, my friend and research
assistant, Dipo Akinkugbe, with whom I was watching on television the
drama of Jonathan and the Card Reader as the election accreditation
exercise unfolded, said after the president had fielded questions from
reporters and left: “This is a rare display of statesmanship that I have
not seen in President Jonathan for a long time.”
That, I told him, is the essential Jonathan whose Ijaw handlers and a
few power mongers from other parts of the country did not allow to
blossom. But in falling from power through the electoral process,
Jonathan has risen in the estimation of Nigerians for his statesmanlike
concession to General Buhari.
Perhaps, in this final moment of loneliness, the President finally
acted as Jonathan, unencumbered by the hidden motives of the army of
power merchants and ethnic salesmen who have held him hostage all these
years. Perhaps it is this last act of selfless submission to the will of
the people that will eternally redeem Jonathan in Nigerian history.
This end, then, could justify the murky path of this humble man from
Otuoke who started life without shoes but has risen to great power and
now to the honour roll of great Nigerians.
The message from the foregoing is profound yet so simple: In losing power, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan has finally found himself.
