President Jonathan and his Peoples Democratic Party clan still have not woken up to the reality of why the party lost the past elections. It makes me wonder how else a group of supposedly educated people could be hopelessly delusional and completely out of touch with reality. Officials of the party and the President’s men have continued to put the blame for the party’s loss on betrayal by some of its Governors and senior officials. They have refused to accept the truth that the party lost due to bad performance.
The party had believed in its money and power and assumed that because it sustained them for 16 years, the sustenance was going to last forever. And so good governance mattered no more to them than a needless distraction. Under their watch, poverty, pain and misery ate up the soul of Nigerians, unrestrained, while corruption threw scorn at them.
Nigeria has never earned at any point in her history as much as she earned in the past five years of the Jonathan presidency. Yet all the people have seen of the wealth is stories after stories of mass looting of the treasury and the flaunting in their faces, of the plundered wealth, by the PDP ruling class and their associates.
In the culture of PDP, the people’s votes and the expectation for good leadership are a nonentity. Public funds are up for anyone who has access to them to loot as much as they can and since the resources were in their custody, they felt a sense of exclusive entitlement to it and assumed it will so be forever.
While the party was enjoying their fortune, Nigerians were finding a way to extricate themselves from their grip. With the emergence of the All Progressives Congress and subsequently General Muhammad Buhari as the party’s presidential candidate, Nigerians had the credible alternative they needed and were learned and determined enough to teach President Jonathan and his party a lesson. They’d learnt the power of unity and the efficacy of the prescription that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. But the PDP clan did not know. They were stuck in 2011 and the world moved four years ahead of them.
On April 28, 2015, President Jonathan and his ill-fated PDP got the lesson delivered to them through decisive butt-spanking at the polls. Several weeks after, the man and his party are still to emerge from the hangover of 16 years of partying with our resources in their cage of power. The delusion that plagued their senses still has a strong hold on their capacity to see, feel and recognise reality. Unfortunately, the people of the South-South and South-East have been caught up in the mess with them.
They still think the people do not matter and their money was sufficient to give them another term in the cage. They are yet to realise that Nigeria has advanced beyond the politics of money, religion, ethnicity and intimidation. They are blaming some of their cohorts for betraying them, whereas such people only acted in the spirit of self-preservation. The party had performed abysmally, the people were consequently impoverished, angry and wiser. Those people could not go back to their communities and persuade or deceive them to vote for PDP. They were caught between Jonathan and his party and their own communities.
Did President Jonathan expect that the politicians will choose him over their own people who had made their position clear, that they did not want him as their president anymore? Did he expect that PDP politicians from the North-East will risk their lives to rig elections for him? Before his very eyes, the FCT Minister, Bala Mohammed, was stoned by PDP supporters while he was addressing them at the party’s presidential rally in Bauchi. Did the president need the betrayal of any PDP bigwig to earn him a resounding defeat in such a state? His Governors such as Gabriel Suswam, Isa Yuguda and Babangida Aliyu lost their own Senatorial contests. Is that part of the betrayal? Can’t he see that going into the elections, his party was in total disarray, without focus and destined for nothing but self-destruction? The man is so self-centered he believes everything in the world is about him. Some men couldn’t save their own necks and he is here whinning that they did not save his own toe.
I don’t pity President Jonathan for believing that the dollars he shared and the boots and guns he controlled were all he needed to secure another four years locked away in the cage with our yams. That is the much his mind can conjure. That is all he has a clue for. I guess someday, perhaps many months from May 29, when he would have completely left the vicinity of power and eventually lost the hold of its delusions, the reality of why he lost may return to him.
. elvisnigeria@yahoo.co.uk.
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