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.
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