BETWEEN JONATHAN AND CHRISTOPHER KOLADE BY AKIN OSUNTOKUN

President Jonathan

A while ago, President Goodluck Jonathan inferred that there is an undeclared contest (among all who have served as President of this country) on who is the winner of the trophy of being the most vilified President in the history of Nigeria; and without waiting for the verdict of any umpire he declared himself the winner-by a wide margin.
Time has a way of healing wounds and soothing the memory, but I am not now sure whether those of us in the proximity of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s presidency did not feel the same way at some point of his incumbency.
In contextualising the very raw deal Jonathan is getting, cognisance has to be taken of a number of

Christopher Kolade

intervening variables. First is that Nigerians are generally alienated from their country and this alienation gets channelled and externalised as transferred aggression to whoever is unlucky enough to be the incumbent personification of the deep rooted source of their angst.
There is a generally established pattern of over the top criticism and demonisation of the Nigeria nation-often bordering on political misanthropy-of, which the parallel condemnation of the leaders is a mere extension (epiphenomenon). Writing in his Punch column a while ago, Ayo Olukotun observes as much………. ‘To hear Nigerians complain one would think that moral perfidy, even corruption is a peculiarly Nigerian contribution to politics.
“Where it becomes disturbing, however, is when it comes close to saying that Nigerians or their political class are an especially bad congregation set apart from the rest of mankind. In other words, a theory of Nigerian exceptionalism is advanced with the predictable conclusion that there is no hope for the country or that only a radical authoritarian solution can address the accumulating mess.”
“It is disquieting that this wave of Nigeria bashing, which ignores edifying developments, shares boundaries with what two decades was known as Afro-pessimism. Listening to our intellectuals these days, one gets the impression that this wave has hit Nigeria with a vengeance. It is important therefore to take a look around the globe and emphasise that Nigerian problems and pathology find application in several parts of the globe including those that are cited as exemplars’. Indeed cynicism reigns supreme in the land and gets routinely expressed in such lines, as ‘Nigeria is not worth dying for’.
Second is that it is the rule and nary the exception that incumbents seeking re-election invite the definition of their aspiration as a referendum on their first term stewardship. Invariably almost all of them fall short of expectations and the more a society is defined by want, poverty and cleavages, the greater the hurdle that needs be scaled to meet these expectations.
Of course the platform of rival presidential aspirants feel obliged to frame the incumbent as a good for nothing leader, who, as a matter of deep regret, has taken the country backwards and set to deal the final death blow in the unthinkable event he gets re-elected. Generally speaking, Nigeria and much of Africa are trapped in a renewed cycle of revolution of rising expectations provoking the revolution of rising frustrations.
Corruption and waste notwithstanding, there is still a huge resource gap in efforts directed at catapulting Nigeria to functional economic stability. The scandalous estimation of what it takes for Nigeria to attain energy sufficiency (alone) is an indication. Unbearable aggravation becomes the case when the little we have tended to end up in the deep pockets of unconscionable and thieving governance elite and the unmitigated drainage of institutional wastage.
There is the barely recognised fact that Jonathan and the power bloc that leveraged his incumbency are newcomers to the national stage of governance and power politics. As far as the Niger Delta Region goes, there is a near complete lack of national governance institutional memory, capacity and self-confidence-relative to the swagger of the WAZOBIA peer group.
You may recall the three typologies of the sources of power identified as legal—rational; charismatic and traditional—the authority of the eternal yesterday. On this account, the likelihood is that those Nigerians, who originate from the dominant majorities, are aptly more comfortable and secure in the use and exercise of political power.
And in a manner of speaking it is the lot of Jonathan that significant segments of the two most dominant sub-Nigerian powers of the Muslim north and South-west have found common purpose in adversity to his government and opposition to his re-election. Against this backdrop the recessive personality of Jonathan himself cumulatively creates a situation of double jeopardy-further complicated by the incipient paranoia to which all incumbents seeking re-election are prone.
He then has to grapple with an adversarial press, fostered, in the first instance, by Nigeria’s history of a media-based anti-colonial nationalist agitation and the protracted dispensation of military dictatorship. The latter, in particular, has spawned a tradition of adversarial press-elevating itself to the status of institutional opposition to the government. Reinforcing this trend is the (critical mass induced) civil society organisation partnership.
But by far, the most destabilising albatross of the president is the unresolved problematic of power rotation-of which he is both victim and beneficiary. By any definition of equity and fairness in the milieu of Nigeria’s political history it would be untenable to require of his region to spend any less than eight years in the seat of the presidency.
It is a region that was never in the reckoning for the top political position yet it is the life support reservoir of Nigeria’s economy. The argument that the Nigeria-life sustaining crude oil resource lies there in the Niger-Delta swamps in situ begs the question of what productive value other Nigerians add to the economy.
The reverse side of the power rotation argument is the delay (not denial) to the alternate ‘North’ zone claim-to, which Jonathan’s tenure was originally assigned. There is also the additional one and half years’ bonus he garnered from the unexpired one term tenure of President Umaru Yaradua. It is however a measure of PDP’s dominance that the regulative adopted by a political party seems to have attained to the status of national political convention.
This sense of deprivation is without doubt the biggest animus driving the nihilistic criticism of the president. And then there is the allied Boko-Haram insurgency crisis-to, which there is the undeniable aspect of being the rogue manifestation of this power deprivation syndrome.
The blind self-destructive fury of the insurgents challenges the logic of being labelled a covert regional agent of orchestrated political destabilisation yet no less persuasive is the cause-effect linkage of the prior threats of making Nigeria ungovernable (by ranking members of the disaffected regional political elite) to the manifestation of the rampant Boko-Haram campaign of terror.
Let us now move from the general to the particular. One of my favourite prayer lines is that God should order my steps as he orders the steps of the righteous. I wanted to conclude this column on Tuesday night but I was not certain how I was going to go about it and so I left it hanging. The only thing certain for me about the proposed conclusion was that Dr Christopher Kolade was going to feature prominently therein.
Earlier in the day, I had received a request to come and pontificate at the Channels Television early the following morning other things. And off to Channels I went at dawn on Wednesday-and to my utmost pleasant surprise—who should I meet at the TV station? You guessed right, it was Dr. Kolade! And even though I had really not made more than a casual acquaintance of him-both of us went a long way back-ask my dad.
‘Sir you were really angry with the president!’ I said this in reference to the rather harsh words he had for Jonathan at the sixth Christopher Kolade annual lecture. Without equivocation and exaggeration, it can be rightly said of Kolade that as public service Icon, statesman and integrity and credibility personified go, they don’t come any better than him.
When people like him talk, I listen very attentively. And when he was quoted as saying ‘Nigeria was at any other time better than now’-I was aghast and provoked at the grossness of this assertion-especially for those of us who kept the vigil during the long night of the late General Sani Abacha dispensation and in the memory of the martyrs who lost their lives to it. In the words of Andre Gide, Lucifer once lived in heaven and those who have not met him will not recognise an angel when they see one.
I felt great pity for Jonathan, which a highly respected man like Kolade could be so roused to deal him such a cruel and unfair blow. At Channels, Dr Kolade was more restrained and philosophical in the appraisal of present day Nigeria. More important, he revealed that he was provoked by the nerve grating cacophony of sycophantic hangers-on who have made a growth industry of the business of decking the president in ill-fitting superlative attire.
If Jonathan is not the worst vicissitude to have visited Nigeria, many will it incredulous to be told that Nigeria has never had it as good as now. What seems to be at play here is the stipulation (of the law of motion and relativity) that action and reaction are equal and opposite; and that of its dialectics counterpart-which argues that every tendency generates its own contradiction.
It is a safe bet that by now the offices of the Transparency International, (TI) would be flooded with petitions from Nigerians rebuking the corruption watchdog agency for ranking Nigeria under Jonathan any higher than the dubious distinction of first or second place on the global corruption perception ladder index, let alone the 38th position.
Personally I am much interested in the parameters and the performance indicators that were employed in arriving at this rating. I think it will tell us a lot about ourselves especially our penchant for the glorification of sensation and style over substance; and our fundamentally corrosive perception-reality gap in the manner in which we assign heroes and villains. I think the president is a work in progress and if his good fortune sees him through to a second term in office he may yet positively surprise his legion of critics-those who criticise him in good faith.



Source: THISDAY