By Idowu Akinlotan
When ex-president Goodluck Jonathan last Friday received supporters urging him to run for president in 2023, the media reported him as being tentative about the prospect. Where they got their tentativeness is unclear. Though he declared that he was still consulting, and that the process, whatever that process is, is ongoing, it was abundantly clear that up to that point he had made up his mind to run. Whether the All Progressives Congress (APC) coaxing him to enter the race is ready for him is a different thing altogether. Typical of the exuberant caution of Dr Jonathan, he wants full assurance he will get the nomination. That assurance will not come, given the calibre of those also eyeing the same nomination. There will be no consensus, and even the indirect primary the party is adopting in electing a standard-bearer cannot be casually executed.
What remains for Dr Jonathan to fully enter the race is whether he can get enough assurance. Last year, caretaker committee members of the APC sold themselves the boondoggle of drafting the former president into the race. In their presumption, they were convinced that should the North, as monolithically conceived in their imagination, be compelled to relinquish power in 2023, it would be ideal to find a man constitutionally barred from seeking reelection in 2027. Dr Jonathan, they suppose, fits the bill. Ambitious, immoral, conspiratorial, and indifferent to the calamity they had predisposed the country to by their incompetence and lack of vision, the interim APC leaders led by their former caretaker chairman, Mai Mala Buni, embarked on exploratory discussions with the ex-president at his home in Bayelsa State and met him at his ingratiating best. What began as a casual exercise in political chicanery soon blossomed into full-scale conspiracy to leash the presidency to the apron strings of the North.
Dr Jonathan is sold on the idea of retaking the presidency after having chalked six uneventful and ruthful years occupying the office. He is not consulting, and there is no ongoing process; he is only waiting for the green light from those in and outside the corridors of power who inspired the conspiracy and have promised him the office, and are pulling all stops to sell the idea of getting the North to make the self-seeking sacrifice of letting go of the presidency for a little while. It is not that they liked the former president, or thought highly of his leadership skills, despite their blandishments, or believe that in the unlikely event of his return, he would reset the country he and his unworthy successors had damaged almost beyond belief. They simply visualise him as a simple and willing tool in their noxious and self-serving power game.
Consider Dr Jonathan’s response to his supporters who thronged his office in Abuja on Friday, and see whether there was anything subtle or philosophical about it. They had assailed him with their simplistic interpretation of the consumer price index, and had accompanied their analysis with an apology couched deprecatingly against the ruling party, yes, the same APC they accused of destroying the country. Finally they encouraged him to enter the race. But he can only enter the race on the APC platform, for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had taken the measure of him and found him to be wanting on all scores. The APC leaders, caretaker and elected alike, many now believe, may have inveigled the presidency to go along with the conspiracy, for there is a lot of vacuity in the corridors of power.
Aware of this conspiracy, eager to submit to the lure of office, and desirous of returning to the monarchical Nigerian presidency of his infatuation, Dr Jonathan made a few facetious remarks and ended up betraying his ultimate intentions. Said he: “Yes, you are calling me to come and declare for the next election. I cannot tell you I’m declaring; the political process is ongoing. Just watch out. But the key role you (youths) must play is to pray that Nigeria gets somebody that carries the young people along and somebody that can also work very hard to see that some of the problems we see are dealt with by the government, and I believe that collectively we will work together.” Clearly, the somebody he asked his supporters to pray for is of course his humble self. And when he declared summarily that ‘we will work together’, it signposted not only what he had in the dark recesses of his mind but also his readiness to be involved. It will be defamatory to conclude that he has no programme or fresh ideas to run the country, but like many other aspiring leaders who pay researchers and policy wonks to cobble together a workable paper by which to govern, he will easily mask his lack of preparedness, or more ominously his idiosyncratic lack of conviction about anything, with meaningless spade work.
Dr Jonathan holds a PhD, and it is assumed he can think. He may not have the character to prevent himself from being led by the nose, but he at least knows when he is being used. He is going along with the Governor Buni-inspired plot because should they deliver on their promise to return him to the State House, it would salve the wound he sustained when he was rejected ignominiously in 2015, in the same manner his successor hankered after the presidency just to obliterate the shame of the 1985 coup. Neither he nor his successor has fundamental programmes or plans to remake the country, and both are daydreamers with no capacity to fathom or shape the rubric of their dreams. Reassuringly for both, the plot to return the former president to the office from which he was disgraced seven years ago has nothing to do with programmes or plans, with competence or character, or with substance or any fealty to party or country.
It took about 18 months to get the scheming caretaker committee of the APC to midwife a reluctant convention; no one knows how former governor Abdullahi Adamu, the 75-year-old new party chairman foisted on the party through a disingenuous consensus, would fare. Like his predecessors, he will be at the beck and call of the presidency; but since the presidency is amorphous, reflecting the interest and worldview of whomever in the cabal has the upper hand at any time, Mr Adamu’s brief will be an inconsistent portraiture of the push and pull that have undermined the Buhari presidency and unnerved the country as a whole. In one of his self-deprecating remarks when asked whom he would back as his successor, President Buhari blithely said that he would play his cards close to his chest lest political vultures gather to destroy his choice. Take that remark with a pinch of salt. It wasn’t until the last four weeks of the race for the APC chairmanship that the president was sold on the candidacy of Mr Adamu. The jury is still out on whom the president will back for the presidency. He is opened to deft and Machiavellian persuasion.
The factors that will influence the president’s support are much more nuanced. Given his political trajectory, especially how vulnerable and exposed he became after his former chief of staff Abba Kyari died, and how often vacillating, sometimes simplistic and alarmingly insular his administration’s policies are, Nigerians should not expect any substantialness to the ideas that would shape his choice. The choice would be whimsical, probably coloured by ethnic and religious factors, and definitely not liberal, philosophical or inspiring. The APC caretaker committee and governors ceded to the president the right to produce the party’s chairman on March 26, and his choice was not elevating; but they will not cede the right to nominate the party’s presidential standard-bearer to him this time. There is nothing to suggest they will make the right choice, but they will at least retain that right.
In sanctioning the ongoing manipulations in the party to produce their nominee, the APC appears to take for granted that since they are the dominant party, all 40m-strong hypothetically, winning the next presidential poll is as good as their candidate. They are grossly mistaken. The PDP is still a potent rival, waiting in the wings to cause a lot of havoc. Disaffection, as the PDP itself proved in 2014-2015, has a corrosive effect on a party’s chances. The presidency may also have a blank mind, which they interpret to be open and democratic, towards the whole process, but there is no excuse for not infusing noble foundations and considerations into how the next presidential candidate is produced, and who that candidate is. If, as some say, everything is pointing to the fact that the North is unprepared to relinquish power, it is without precedent and shorn of morality and nobility. In 2007, neither the outgoing president Olusegun Obasanjo nor the then ruling party needed to consult anyone regarding power rotation given the delicate nature of Nigerian unity and politics. If it is taking so much persuasion to get the APC to behave rationally, it is an indication that the party is plotting to qualify that surrender with a one-term president, and also a blot on the reputation of the president that he has neither tried to shape the ideas that would guide that choice, nor insist on a wholesome, democratic process.
The mere thought of visualising Dr Jonathan’s return to the presidency in 2023, as the self-centred Mr Buni and his accomplices in Aso Villa had contemplated to everyone’s chagrin, portrays APC leaders and the presidency as unpatriotic. The former president was rejected at the polls in 2015 for the obvious reasons of incompetence, despite his administration’s self-gratifying recalibration of the economy, indecisiveness, corruption, lethargy, and divisiveness. That his successor has been less inspiring, to put it mildly, does not legitimise that objectionable period and the six retrogressive years that prompted the battle cry of ‘anyone but Jonathan’. Money was plentiful in the Jonathan years, and the domestic and global environments were more clement than today. Now, Nigeria is effectively in debt peonage, to which the Buhari administration has no answer but to seek more loans, and the country is in the throes of collapse buffeted by insecurity and chaos on all fronts. Dr Jonathan’s response to less complex national problems was uninspiring, slow and befuddling. He will perform even more catastrophically in the event of a return to the presidency.
Overall, the Jonathan draft will blow up in the party’s face. It will not gain traction. The assurance he wants will not come, not from a party chary of making grosser mistakes than it had already made, and not from a president whose vacillations have thrown the party into a quandary, a president whose mind is wearied by national problems and the manipulations and scheming around him. Dr Jonathan was scorned for his superficiality and lack of firmness; the mere thought by him of returning to the office he humiliated with inadequate leadership years ago shows that the poor impression many have of him is probably an overestimation. Worse, it is shocking that having taken the throne as elected PDP president, a fact that does not seem to stir or trouble his conscience, it is even more troubling and nauseous that APC leaders in the party and Aso Villa do not feel a sense of outrage that they are propping a former PDP president to become APC president.
