DID JONATHAN REALLY WORK FOR HIS OWN RE-ELECTION?

I guess this will be considered a funny or curious heading for an opinion piece given the fact that many saw Jonathan, the soon to be ex president campaigning across the country. But in reality, Jonathan didn’t really advance his own reelection prospects in any positive or meaningful way. He clearly as I will show shortly, sabotaged himself every step of the way!

Fortune made me a participant and put me in a place from where I had direct interface with the goings on and processes that took place in the course of the campaigns and the elections! This is unlike many of Gejiets and Jonathanians who had no clue to the goings on behind the scenes either because they were far from the scene or because they were new to the operations!

It is the view of this writer that Jonathan simply defeated himself. In other words, he scored  several own goals against himself.

Right from the emergence of the splinter New PDP group, Jonathan showed a real lack of capacity of leadership, as such he  could not prevail on all those aggrieved governors to remain in the PDP. Being an old hand, I knew many of the individuals who left with the new PDP to APC, and i can tell you that PDP lost a lot of strategists to that movement.

Then there was the crisis of leadership in the PDP arising from the crowning of Alhaji Bamanga Tukur as PDP chairman despite the fact that he lost in the NE zonal election for that post. This was clearly the basis and foundation of the leadership crisis that rocked the PDP to the point of shattering the party. This persisted until Jonathan had no choice but to ask Alhaji Tukur to resign. One would have expected Jonathan to change tack, instead he immediately annionted Muazu, despite the fact that Gambo Lawan was indeed the choice of most stakeholders of NE, the region to which the post had been zoned.

And on and on PDP reeled from one crisis to another! Despite efforts made at various levels of leadership and followership to point out these obvious short comings,  the President and his inner circle paid no heed. We wrote position papers to no avail. And then came the disaster called TAN! Virtually everyone who mattered in PDP objected to the TAN usurpation of core party activities. Again the President would not listen.  He only listened to Anyim Pius who was indeed the real power behind TAN. We wrote papers that showed ckearly the consequences of using the TAN model, but no one listened. The situation was rather worsened by the ranking idiocy of most TAN adverts and jingles.  Now, remember that TAN was a movement that received billions of Naira for its activities a fact that indicated that they were sponsored from the highest levels!

Then you had again the disaster that was called the Presidential Campaign Organisation. Pundits rejected the appointment of FFK and Ahmed Ali but the President stuck his guns. Again we wrote and circulated a scholarly paper that showed that FFK was unsuitable because his pro Jonathan message was thoroughly diluted by his previous well documented rants against Jonathan.  Again the President would not budge. Add to that; the fact that the negative message was sustained throughout the campaigns while the PDP secretariat remained largely silent and disconnected,  an indication of the disquiet and anger at WADATA Plaza.

Despite all these which we collated and circulated, President Jonathan did not change tactics! Instead he embarked on the ill conceived dollar jamborees into the South West to the annoyance of both his home South South and critical North Central zones. Indeed he ignored these areas and went ahead to appoint Liyel Imoke, a dispised Gov to run the south south PDP campaigns. For the south dough,  he should have appointed Akpabio who is undoubtedly a star performer, but he did not  He compounded this errir by also appointing Suswan to run North Central.  This is in spite of the fact that Suswan was clearly a liability to the PDP even in his home state of Benue!

Now add the election postponement palaver. Recall the lies told about the reason for the postponement and the anger in the north when Buhari’s certificate was hidden as a ploy to disqualify the man. At each step of the way, there were voices including yours truly that warned of the dire consequences of this faulty strategy, yet the Oga would not budge.

Now the rest is history,  but every step in this loss by pdp,  you can find Jonathan commiting unforced errors and scoring own goals. And that is why I can stand on a roof top and declare that Jonathan consciously or unconsciously sabotaged his on reelection.  Maybe because he himself knew that he had committed himself before man and God to only one term.

And no one can controvert the facts here writ. If anyone has better details, let’s have them.

Written by Ray Morphy.