By Odia Ofeimun
One remarkable paradox about the 2015 General Election is that it ought to be a referendum on whether President Goodluck Jonathan has done well in Agriculture, Aviation, Road construction, Education, Health and especially Ebola, Railways, Electricity, and whether he achieved the purpose of putting constitutional reforms on the agenda of the Nigerian state as most Nigerians have been asking for since the beginning of the Fourth Republic.
It is simply true, and provable, that in these areas, Jonathan has done exceedingly better than his illustrious predecessor, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, a very remarkable under-achiever, who has been needling him on all grounds and coking the mythology that Goodluck Jonathan has no clue. It is also quite true that President Jonathan’s achievements have been made possible in spite of the devious antics of stalwarts of his political party, the People’s Democratic Party; a party on the verge of earning a National merit award for looting the treasury, a malfeasance for which so many of its former executives are in court awaiting the kind of long trials that give a stinking name to the judiciary. It happens to be a political party mis-constructed by Obasanjo in his days as his own two-term oil Minister, to function with cabals that President Jonathan once had to alert the country about on discovering that he could not take any serious steps without being checkmated by those who assumedly made him a President.
Trying to unriddle his way off the hold of the cabals has earned Goodluck Jonathan a permanent needling for cluelessness that has been joined by a protest movement which has not cared to face the cabals, because protests in the country are partly sponsored by cabals, but has since merged with a very vibrant opposition, clever at brickbats and hyper-inflating about how poorly Jonathan is doing, without having the ideological savvy to set a new agenda for Nigeria. Indeed, the hard part and what rankles is that, without showing evidence of a clue as to how an opposition, given Obafemi Awolowo’s enduring example, marshals a strong sense of policies and programmes to lift a country up, the party of opposition has acquired the reprehensible features of the PDP and is confronting the country with a mirror image of that other party in the name of an electoral choice.
The crucial point here is that, in the face of the menace of Boko Haram, the Islamic religious sect pursuing a propaganda of arms and suicide bombers against /*Christians, Muslims of other sects, and against western education, of which its prime minders are evident beneficiaries, it is needless to ask why President Jonathan’s better performance, above Obasanjo’s, is not getting a fair hearing and an objective appraisal. It so happened that Boko Haram was pampered from a foetal stage into grand terrorism by Olusegun Obasanjo’s government with the help of all the Governors of the Northern states who gave a subvention to the sect until President Umaru Yar’adua stopped it.
After the extra-judicial killing of Yusuf, the leader of Boko Haram during Yar’adua’s term, the sect went nuclear in search of external aid that has still not been fairly distinguished from domestic sponsorship. In the face of the kidnap of the Chibok school girls, the bombing of markets and public places by the sect, and successful compromising of the territorial integrity of the country, whoever was President of Nigeria ran the risk of never getting fairness of judgement unless he found a means of ending the terrorism. The truly intriguing part is that President Jonathan needed to do his job as chief security officer of the Nigerian state in the face of many Northern leaders who saw anti-terrorism as a war on the North, while seeing Boko Haram itself as a fit response of the North to Niger Delta militancy. A President of Niger Delta extraction caught in the web of such presumptions was bound to suffer distraction of a kind that required him either to let his government be controlled by the antics of the terrorists or to learn to steer his course irrespective of the distractions that are designed to put his resolve off balance.
Learning to steer his course has had the implication of sometimes making him look uncaring about the massacres and pogroms being committed across a wide swipe of the North East and North West of the country by suicide bombers and stray gun-totters. But, clearly, he has owed a responsibility that he could only discharge by standing with the military and other security forces that have been ritually under-equipped and under-supplied for decades. This has also meant standing at the centre of the political class in disgrace when school girls and others are abducted by terrorists and the country’s territorial integrity is assaulted with impunity.