By Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò
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 artitle 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 CAN 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.