Recently, I stumbled on the speech by Atiku Abubakar during the last Peoples Democratic Party presidential election primaries and I was shocked by the predictions he made about how President Goodluck Jonathan would run the country if he won the presidency. Atiku, as we know him, is not a prophet. He is not even a soothsayer. But how he was able to explain the futuristic of the Jonathan’s presidency is particularly enthralling.
Before the day the PDP conducted its so-called primaries, President Jonathan had been in charge for 18 months following the death of late President Umaru Yar’Adua. In the period that Jonathan held office in the stead for Yar’Adua, only one thing was in motion. And that was how President Jonathan would get elected for a fresh four-year tenure as president.
So, when Atiku said that Jonathan stood for nothing, and that “he sees being the president as an end,” he might have said so in the context that Jonathan reneged on the zoning principle of the PDP. But more tellingly, the comment makes a reflection into the worldview of President Jonathan – a worldview that sees politics as the only business of the emperor.
Since the ascendance of the Jonathan presidency, there has been so much ennui in the economic life of the nation. The common Nigerian still lacks access to good health care, the purchasing power of the Naira is on a spiral decline and the scourge of violence all over the country has reduced the worth of a Nigerian life. In short, the president has failed Nigerians on the high expectations placed on him as a president who would bring change to Aso Rock.
Although the administration mouths a transformation mantra, but Nigerians are yet to see the effect of a positive transformation in their daily livelihood.
The Jonathan government – much as a result of its own behaviour – has brought a new lexicon to Nigeria’s security challenges. Terrorism. Rather than go straight into the business for which it was elected, the government doesn’t even pretend about it that it has more taste for politics than building the economy – and that partly explains why there is so much toxic politics everywhere in the country.
Much as many Nigerians who voted for President Jonathan en-mass in the 2011 presidential election did so in order to bring about a change in the way government does its business; what has rather changed is the way government plays its politics. The Jonathan Administration lives in a world of entitlement, and that is why it plays the politics of division anytime it fails to get its way through.
It is bad that the Jonathan administration is not making enough effort to build the economy in a way that makes sense to the lives of ordinary Nigerians; it is worse enough that the politics it chooses to play it does so in the wrong direction.
This is an administration that on the heels of public protests against the removal of fuel subsidy in 2011 deployed soldiers to the streets of Lagos – and that is where he lost it with the South-west section of the country. This is also an administration that in spite of the enormous votes it got from the main opposition party in the country ACN in the 2011 election, could not have a vision of extending one or two ministerial positions to that opposition party. This is an administration that created, by its own hands, a dividing line between it and state governors when it was time to take ownership of the decision to remove the oil subsidy. This is also a President who lost the confidence of state governors who are in the same party with him when it was time to make a compromise on the governorship election in Bayelsa State. This is a president that has failed to find a middle ground between Akwa Ibom State and Cross River State over the oil well dispute
between the two states. This is also a president who is quick to run behind his Ijaw godfather, Chief Edwin Clark, anytime Nigerians rise to ask him questions about their security and economic well-being.
Chief Clark is a respectable old man, who has paid his dues in the making of the Nigerian state. And that is the reason why the president has to be wary of him. Because like every old folk, he doesn’t care whose ox is gored when he talks.
Just recently, the Independent National Electoral Commission made a statement discouraging any form of political campaign. And curiously, the following day, Chief Clark came out advocating support for the re-election of Jonathan in 2015. That is a clear case of contempt against the electoral umpire and I am not sure the president will like to be associated with that kind of behaviour.
Unfortunately, nobody cares which section of the country the president comes from. People rather ask questions about the quality of their lives, and these are questions that the Jonathan presidency has not provided suitable answers to in the past two years.
Just as Atiku also rightly predicted, the PDP is now an entity standing feebly by the edge of the cliff – no thanks to the speculated ambition of President Jonathan to contest the 2015 presidential election. An ambition that appears not to enjoy popular endorsement among stakeholders of the party.
And, much as badly divided the PDP is, the Nigeria Governors’ Forum – a political pressure group comprising state governors in the country has also been bitterly balkanized.
For a president whose first executive bill to the National Assembly is a bill proposing a six-year single term for sitting presidents and state governors, President Jonathan has not made any pretense about it that politics is his preoccupation in government. Not altruistic politics; it is politics of personal acquisition of power.
Unfortunately, Nigeria isn’t in need of such a president with a compulsive fixation on politics. What we need is a president who has the zeal to introduce ground breaking reforms in the country’s economy. Reforms that will modernize our political economy away from the current rentier economy.
Benson Okohue wrote in from Surulere, Lagos State.
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