The Defeat Of President Jonathan And The PDP
“Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone, his own burden, his own way” - Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Two clear choices confront President Goodluck Ebelemi Jonathan, GCFR: To fall on his sword or be voted out on 14th February, 2015! Pressured and pained by the groundswell of mass support for the presidential ambition of the All Progressives Congress, APC, candidate General Muhammadu Buhari, GCFR, President Jonathan, late 2014 admitted two cardinal truths: that he was Nigeria's most criticized president and that he will be missed when he leaves office. Some Nigerians will surely and sorely miss the president when he vacates Aso Rock and returns to his Otuoke, Bayelsa State country home on May 29, 2015.
Ahead of that event, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wisely exonerated Nigerians that will go for thanksgiving over the dismissal of President Jonathan from office. Though a gross disappointment, there is just little sympathy left for an incompetent country boy who got overthrown by feudal and corrupt barons in his Peoples Democratic Party, PDP and government. But Nigerians will not weep over his wife and First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan. History will not be kind to her.
In August 2010, Dr Reuben Abati, now President Jonathan's Chief Press Secretary wailed: “When people suddenly find themselves in such latter position {being the wife of Nigeria's no 1 citizen}, prepared or unprepared, anywhere in the world, they are taken through a crash programme in finishing and poise and made to realise that being the wife of an important man comes with serious responsibilities lest they sabotage the same person that they should be supporting.
If Dame Patience went through such re-orientation, the course was incomplete.” At the height of her battle with Rivers State Governor Rotimi Chibuike Amechi in 2013, Nobel laureate Professor Wole Soyinka advised Aso Rock: “Mrs. Jonathan cannot be a First Lady without first learning to be a lady. She is getting away with murder because she has the backing of her husband. The president should please curb the excesses of his wife. Too much is too much.
The vulgarity has become intolerable. We have now reached the bottom of obscenity and it's got to stop.” President Jonathan's attack dogs {the infamous media team of Drs Doyin Okukpe and Reuben Abati}, his octogenarian advisers {Chiefs Tony Anenih and Edwin Clark and Alhaji Bamanga Tukur}, the PDP media team that foolishly got enmeshed in hate speech and General Buhari's so called certificate saga {Chiefs Femi Fani-Kayode and Olisa Metu} and his female power broker ministers Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Mrs Diezani Allison-Madueke won't be decorated for helping him loose the election.
Ekiti State Governor, Ayo Peter Fayose will have a new political complexion when Jonathan leaves the presidency, away from the rascality that his short return has caused Ekiti people. Fayose's warning to the electorate in a national daily not to vote for General Buhari because of his age {72 years} which to this most riotous governor spells imminent death, was an abuse and gratuitous indecency.
It was completely in bad taste and culturally insensitive. Paradoxically, it brought an outpouring of sympathy and votes for the ramrod, bespectacled general it was meant to ridicule. Now an electoral liability, comedians sound like news reporters than stand-up comics when discussing a deeply flawed Fayose. It is sheer hypocrisy to expect respect from Nigerians when members of Jonathan's privy political cabinet like Fayose and Femi Fani-Kayode flaunt the norms and values most Nigerians hold sacred. They cannot behave like buffoons and then expect President Jonathan who never condemned them to be revered like Mandela or Martin Luther King.
Before President Jonathan assumed office in 2011, Nigerians chafed variously under colonialism, feudalism, injustice, military dictatorship, inequality, vested interests, corruption, banal civilian administrations, civil war, poverty, unemployment, maternal and infant mortality and hunger for close to a century. The institutions that make democracies function which Great Britain bequeathed in 1960: The courts, neutral and professional civil service, independent media, apolitical security service, armed and police forces that check government arbitrariness were purposely and systematically first weakened by politicians and then destroyed by military dictators.
It was decades of extraordinary rendition of murderous incompetence and hellish corruption. This was the cruel straitjacket orthodoxy that Jonathan met as president. As the first graduate executive president, Nigerians had high hopes about his administration correcting some of the ills it inherited. But in office, President Goodluck Jonathan is not fiscally monogamous. He became very comfortable, powerless and vulnerable in the grand party of arbitrariness, bedding the barons of corruption.
Instead of focusing on cleaner government and sounder public ethics, his government furthered the ogre and odour of official and party malfeasance. He has not been a champion of transparency and honesty, believing that all accusations of dishonesty are made by political opposition. Many of his ministers, especially women have been implicated in corrupt acts, but none charged and tried. In September 2014, South Africa grew richer when it seized two caches of cash worth over US$15 million illegally flown in from Nigeria. It has not occurred to President Jonathan to think the fiscally unthinkable.
Nigeria, the cow of corruption is still being milked to malnutrition and death by politicians, top civil servants, privileged businessmen linked to Aso Rock and piratical expatriates while Nigerian masses hustle for survival. Pretences to good governance and best practices are now considered too burdensome and inflexible by wealth grabbing buccaneers. What is routinely wired into public and private sectors operations in climes of law and order are acceptably aberrant in Nigeria.
While budgets are rationalised in other countries, they are stolen wholesale by our politicians and civil servants. Pretences to fighting Nigeria's industrial corruption are nothing but systematic incoherence! Probity is not an essential part of public office in this nation. Nationalists and whistle blowers {termed scaremongers in official circles} foolish enough to toe a different path meet a raft of official intolerance ranging from police harassment, surveillance, false imprisonment, innuendoes, denial of earnings, passport seizures, crooked security reports and blacklist from government employment and contracts.
In the few cases that the anti-corruption agency, EFCC, has brought to court in the past six years, breathtaking official hypocrisy, prosecutorial incompetence and judicial forgiveness have been the result. Embezzlement, capital flight, quotation inflation and contract abandonment are business weapons in Nigeria. This most well endowed, but grossly tortured country has surrendered to feudal barons, political prostitutes, businessmen cronies, religious jingoists and ethnic irredentists. Africa's most dysfunctional state systems are found in Africa's largest economy and this oxymoron does not anger President Jonathan and the ruling cabal. Not a few Nigerians feel that society was fairer and more equitable before amalgamation than today!
PDP RULE: WASTED, NIGHTMARISH YEARS
The executive of the modern state is just a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeois – Karl Marx
IN THE BEGINNING
The misfortune of about 170 million Nigerians is that they have not benefited from the opinion of Karl Marx in the sixteen years that the PDP have been in power. PDP administrations have not managed “the common affairs of the whole bourgeois,” but ran a committee of grand corruption that decimated “the whole bourgeois.” PDP rule is marked with painful democratic rascality and exasperation.
Under the military arbitrariness and civilian banality of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo {1999-2007}, Nigeria lost eight years that could have launched her into a new order. He squandered it on megalomania and inaninities. Most infamous for his third term agenda, Obasanjo's administration threw the nation into darkness, encased her in a corrupt cockpit, leaving her on political autopilot and religiously divided. Industry and manufacturing collapsed because of power failure.
The giant of Africa was an economic Lilliputian, despised in ECOWAS, mocked in the continent and deemed unserious before the international community. In real terms, Nigeria today needs the investments which boost current GDP and lays the productive capital for infrastructures such as roads, building, machineries, and technology products like patents, hardware and software. President Jonathan had a golden chance to evolve a new model of governance for Nigeria, but wasted it due to inability and gross corruption. If given a forensic fiscal examination, Nigeria's celebration of Africa's largest GDP status vis a visSouth Africa is opaque, evading the mono economy that we largely remain.
The prevailing low price of oil in the international market has unveiled our nakedness before the world. If due diligence in given in shifting through economic data, the rebalancing should move away from the ephemeral to job creation, actual growth and citizen well being. On many scales from economic competitiveness to security to infrastructure to social health to growth to jobs to happiness, Nigerians are still in the woods. Our economic sclerosis is at an all time high. Our budget deficit has not allowed Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Finance and Co-ordinating Minister to balance the books.
The Sovereign Wealth Fund has been tampered with and the “Mother of the Economy” cannot fully explain why the presidency developed itchy fingers in our economic cookie pot. Nigeria with just about two percent of the world's population has almost a quarter of the global out of school children and infant mortality rate. The figure of internally displaced people and the unemployed are very high. In many indices of competitiveness and welfare, Nigeria is at the rung of the ladder.
Ghana, Botswana, Tunisia, Angola and Cape Verde are some African countries that have embraced best practices in the past decade to their good and glory. If only Karl Marx's famous lampooned have been the lot of Nigerians, nobody would have minded. The political, civil service and private sector executives in Nigeria have cornered and garnered our commonwealth for their pleasures. They stole a few millions in the 1970s, greater millions in the 1980s, a few billions in the 1990s and hundreds of billions beginning from the PDP regime of President Obasanjo. Their stealing which is not by stealth have busted and banished Nigeria's nascent, emerging bourgeoisie of the 1980s.
In a presidential media chat on May 4, 2014, President Jonathan said, “some of those cases they call corruption are just people stealing!”The lingua franca of Jonathan's Aso Rock is corruption. The president not only tolerates it, encourages it for his own self-preservation. That explains why oil subsidy scam has cost Nigeria about N21.6 billion under his watch despite his pledge on 4th July, 2014, to punish wrong doers. That explains why he pardoned serial thieves like ex-Bayelsa State Governor, D.S.P. Alamesiegha and PDP deputy chairman Southwest, Chief Bode George. The African Union, AU, said in 2014 that Nigeria lost about $40.9 billion in “wrong payments.”
Ex-CBN Governor Professor Charles Soludo, said that N30 trillion naira got misplaced under the administration of President Jonathan. The forensic audit ordered by the Jonathan government after a national outcry about a purported missing $20 billion from the account of oil monopoly NNPC has just been handed to the Attorney General to make recommendations in a week. Obasanjo and Jonathan have failed as presidents to fix many dysfunctional institutions. Africa's most dysfunctional modern state ironically has its largest GDP. For condoning this anomaly, the PDP doesn't deserve our votes on February 14, 2015.
THE CORRUPT INCOMPETENCE OF PRESIDENT “MY OGA AT THE TOP” JONATHAN
It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new one – Machiavelli, “The Prince.”
The prognoses for the 2015 elections are far from balmy. While our Electoral Act stipulates that political campaigns for any office must not commence until ninety days to the election, the urchins of the commandante left Nigerians in no doubt that they were above the law. Chief among the amorphous groups that began to bay for President Jonathan's coronation in a second term was the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria, TAN. This self serving franchise ignored the law, well meaning critics and the feelings of Nigerian masses, agonising the shared values of the wounded in this pluralist nation. Thus, TAN applied the brush of spin and propaganda on the substance of President Jonathan's government.
Unfortunately, the net effect of its loud effort can only be compared to the power of one-hand clapping! President Jonathan had sworn that no one will be exiled under his watch, but the Department of State Security and the Inspector General of Police Suleiman Abba classified his re-election as national security! In the Osun State governorship poll in October 2014, hooded operatives of the Department of State Security harried, hounded and hunted opposition APC officials and supporters foolish enough to be in town. Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the APC National Publicity Secretary was detained and DSS spokeswoman Marilyn Ogar later smirked in a press conference about “men who sound tough but when brought in for questioning, they become incoherent.” She regretted that “if Jonathan is not a democratic president, many people would have been in jail.”
President Jonathan publicly declared his unwillingness to prosecute and jail corrupt ministers, but as far as the DSS is concerned, the voice of reason by opposition and well meaning Nigerians is now the voice of treason! The partisan DSS unlawfully raided the data centre of the APC, destroying computers and communication gadgets at will, arresting and torturing employees as it suited them.
To justify its unlawful arbitrariness, the DSS without evidence accused the APC of hacking into INEC database, a charge that the electoral umpire stoutly denied. It's most unprofessional for the DSS to be trying the opposition APC via the media. Thankfully, about ten days separates Nigerians from a new re-awakening when General Muhammadu Buhari is elected president of this abused and tortured country on 14th February, 2015.
Historian, freelance journalist and writer, Pastor Joseph Emeka Anumboris the author of THE INTERCOURSE OF TROUBLED THOUGHTS, a critically acclaimed discourse on homosexuality published by AuthorHouse Inc, Indiana, USA.