February 9, 2010
Now that Good Luck Jonathan has officially, if controversially, assumed executive powers as president, he should be warned that any temptation on his part to exacerbate societal schisms through a misguided embrace of the divisive politics of the discredited ancien régime cannot be said to be in the national interest. Any flirtation or re-alignment with the elements of the “born-again” misrule who for eight wasted years had imposed a delusional and primitive kleptocracy based on lawlessness and anti-social conduct should be considered as an unacceptable assault on our collective psyche. If such abdication were to happen, Jonathan and his acolytes must be prepared to face the wrath of the people.
As acting president, Goodluck Jonathan must never lose sight of the peculiar circumstances of his ascendancy. The recent grandstanding by all manner of opportunists and pretenders around the notion of constitutionality notwithstanding, Jonathan remains a key beneficiary of a stolen mandate. As a willing partner in the 2007 electoral heist that brought both him and Yar’Adua to power, he lacks both political and electoral legitimacy. What this means is that the government headed by himself and his boss is barely tolerated by fellow citizens. The reality of a Yar’Adua/Jonathan imposition has thus created a special burden for the PDP duo: They must transparently demonstrate that they have cut off any umbilical lien that still unites them with the reckless impunity of the former despot and his henchmen in the likes of Mallam el-Rufai, Nuhu Ribadu and Femi-Fani Kayode whose irredentist designs have been on display in the media for some time now. And this is a rather charitable way of looking at the situation in which Jonathan has found himself.
Who doesn’t know that during much of the current Yar’Adua/Jonathan presidency, disgruntled elements of the last Obasanjo tyranny, including their principal, have sought to denigrate, cast aspersions and basically diabolize Yar’Adua due mainly to selfish concerns having to do with a byzantine struggle within the PDP? The self-serving squabbles for power by Obasanjo and his allies have taken a new twist, transforming into a pseudo-pro-democracy advocacy that preaches what is tantamount to the status quo. In that unwholesome enterprise, they seem to have found ready allies in the likes of Wole Soyinka, a troubling enigma of contradiction and hypocrisy.
In my very first essay on the post-Obasanjo era entitled “The Illusion of A Yar’Adua Presidency” ( NVS, June 12, 2007 ), I did posit that his illegitimacy notwithstanding and precisely on account of it, Yar’Adua and his administration would do well to make a clean break with the policies and ways of the regime immediately preceding them. Here is what I noted, inter alia: “There should be a deliberate policy on the part of Yar’Adua – assuming that he truly wants to make amends to the Nigerian people – to neutralize and clear our national political spaces of the likes of Obasanjo …Singly or together, Obasanjo and his associates …have inflicted more damage on our collective unconscious than what the military did to the national psyche in the past three decades of authoritarian rule. The political emasculation of these harmful characters is long overdue. But one has to realize that Yar’Adua will not do it alone. He will need the support of the political class across the ideological divide and critically, that of Nigerians in general…”. I concluded that undoing the damage left by the ex-tyrant and his criminal ways is not going to be easy and that it is “a task that Nigerians must be prepared to undertake as a matter of priority, with or without the support of Yar’Adua. Only then can we realistically begin to think of laying the basis for genuine democracy in our country”. We cannot over-emphasize the urgency of those words considering the state of the nation today.
A special mention should be made regarding that class of individuals referred to as Corporate Nigeria and whose members benefited tremendously from government patronage and in return provided much of the financial clout that actively aided and abetted the rigging of elections in 2003 and 2007 in particular. The recent bank sector reforms under the intrepid Sanusi Lamido Sanusi have exposed the greed, profligacy as well as the profoundly selfish character of these men and women. But worse than that, one is confronted with the worrisome determination on the part of these individuals and their allies to maintain their predatory stranglehold on our socio-economic spaces by mounting a rear-guard campaign of calumny and denigration against what they perceive as constituting a threat to their nefarious activities. Surely, Jonathan cannot afford to be seen as succumbing to the dictates of these “nouveaux-riches”. Rather, he should continue to give the transparent support of the administration to the efforts by both the CBN and the EFCC aimed at sanitizing the banking sector. There is a strong belief out there that much of the anti-Yar’Adua cacophony these days is being sponsored by shady groups with ties to some of the corporate tin gods whose fiscal banditry has been responsible for a lot of the distress the country’s banks are experiencing nowadays. The corporate ‘gangsters’ would seem to have of late, not surprisingly, found a common enemy in Yar’Adua. Jonathan, beware! These ‘oligarchs’ who held sway during the previous misrule of Olusegun Obasanjo when the nation’s most priced assets in the likes of NITEL, refineries and strategic real estate, just to mention a few, were recklessly expropriated by them and their allies in (and out of ) government in the name of a very corrupt privatization process are conceivably fantasizing about the ‘good old days’ under Goodluck Jonathan. The acting president must prove them wrong, in words and in deeds. One of the things the Yar’Adua administration has done right is to have reversed the wholesale stripping of our collective patrimony that was associated with the past privatization bazaar.
Jonathan should continue what he has been doing since Yar’Adua took ill and was flown to Saudi Arabia about two and a half months ago. His first priority should be the dousing of the contrived hysteria the country has witnessed in the last few weeks. He can do that by keeping at bay the various opportunistic elements who have sought to capitalize on the health-related issues around Yar’Adua to stake a claim for anticipated spoils. Also on the priority list of dossiers requiring urgent attention are the energy, employment, education, health, and roads sectors. These and other issues should keep the acting president busy and thus reduce to the barest minimum the temptation to engage in conduct that is unbecoming.
On a rather personal note, whether he likes it or not, there will be some mischief makers or opportunists who would urge Acting President Jonathan to be his own man, to assert himself, for the wrong reasons, especially vis-à-vis Yar’Adua. Already, sectional and irredentist voices of reaction have been whipping up primordial sentiments by a needless ‘tribalization’ of the debate around Yar’Adua’s absence from the land. For instance, intellectually lazy and immoral arguments have been advanced by ethnic jingoists and cranks alike to say that it is the North’s ( meaning ‘Hausa-Fulanis’ ) soi-disant hegemonic agenda that did prevent Yar’Adua from officially delegating all executive powers to his vice. The obtuse stereotyping and ‘scape-goating’ that are implicit in that line of reasoning must be dismissed as both egregious and pedestrian.
But there may be other personal considerations that could act as emotional triggers prompting Acting President Good Luck Jonathan to feel the need to assert himself. Nobody is saying that Jonathan should be a drab wall flower at Aso Rock but in the exercise of his newly acquired executive authority, he should avoid what I’d like to call, for want of a better expression, the Paul Biya Syndrome (PBS).
A self-effacing figure prior to the retirement, on November 4, 1982, of his master and president of Cameroon, Ahmadu Ahidjo, the man whom the late Cameroonian writer, Mongo Beti, described as having "une voix chevrotante" due to his effeminate, if quavering declamations, was a polished bureaucrat who had studied in one of France’s elite schools before joining his country's governing party, the Cameroon National Union ( CNU ) in which a dominant Northern establishment led by Ahidjo was in control. It is said that an almost taciturn Biya endured with stoical equanimity taunts and other forms of humiliation under Ahidjo and his éminence grise. When Biya took over as president at the retirement of Ahidjo, he soon metamorphosed (Or showed his true colors) by savagely sidelining Ahidjo and his allies and went on , within a space of under four years, to systematically empty the Cameroonian treasury with a clique composed mostly of members of his Beti tribe. A relatively prosperous Cameroon during the Ahidjo years has been turned into a land of desolation and rampant tyranny under the delinquent and bestial autocracy of Paul Biya.
Jonathan should avoid falling into the trap of sectarian reflexes and partisan provocation by constantly reminding himself that he is the symbol, even if temporarily, of Nigerian unity. He must, at all times , through his actions, endeavor to uphold the dignity of the presidency which was badly eroded during the traumatizing dereliction of the former dictator which lasted from 1999 to May 29, 2007. Let’s keep the faith in the hope that the darkness of the last decade is behind us for good. “Post tenebras spero lucem”!
Aonduna Tondu.
As acting president, Goodluck Jonathan must never lose sight of the peculiar circumstances of his ascendancy. The recent grandstanding by all manner of opportunists and pretenders around the notion of constitutionality notwithstanding, Jonathan remains a key beneficiary of a stolen mandate. As a willing partner in the 2007 electoral heist that brought both him and Yar’Adua to power, he lacks both political and electoral legitimacy. What this means is that the government headed by himself and his boss is barely tolerated by fellow citizens. The reality of a Yar’Adua/Jonathan imposition has thus created a special burden for the PDP duo: They must transparently demonstrate that they have cut off any umbilical lien that still unites them with the reckless impunity of the former despot and his henchmen in the likes of Mallam el-Rufai, Nuhu Ribadu and Femi-Fani Kayode whose irredentist designs have been on display in the media for some time now. And this is a rather charitable way of looking at the situation in which Jonathan has found himself.
Who doesn’t know that during much of the current Yar’Adua/Jonathan presidency, disgruntled elements of the last Obasanjo tyranny, including their principal, have sought to denigrate, cast aspersions and basically diabolize Yar’Adua due mainly to selfish concerns having to do with a byzantine struggle within the PDP? The self-serving squabbles for power by Obasanjo and his allies have taken a new twist, transforming into a pseudo-pro-democracy advocacy that preaches what is tantamount to the status quo. In that unwholesome enterprise, they seem to have found ready allies in the likes of Wole Soyinka, a troubling enigma of contradiction and hypocrisy.
In my very first essay on the post-Obasanjo era entitled “The Illusion of A Yar’Adua Presidency” ( NVS, June 12, 2007 ), I did posit that his illegitimacy notwithstanding and precisely on account of it, Yar’Adua and his administration would do well to make a clean break with the policies and ways of the regime immediately preceding them. Here is what I noted, inter alia: “There should be a deliberate policy on the part of Yar’Adua – assuming that he truly wants to make amends to the Nigerian people – to neutralize and clear our national political spaces of the likes of Obasanjo …Singly or together, Obasanjo and his associates …have inflicted more damage on our collective unconscious than what the military did to the national psyche in the past three decades of authoritarian rule. The political emasculation of these harmful characters is long overdue. But one has to realize that Yar’Adua will not do it alone. He will need the support of the political class across the ideological divide and critically, that of Nigerians in general…”. I concluded that undoing the damage left by the ex-tyrant and his criminal ways is not going to be easy and that it is “a task that Nigerians must be prepared to undertake as a matter of priority, with or without the support of Yar’Adua. Only then can we realistically begin to think of laying the basis for genuine democracy in our country”. We cannot over-emphasize the urgency of those words considering the state of the nation today.
A special mention should be made regarding that class of individuals referred to as Corporate Nigeria and whose members benefited tremendously from government patronage and in return provided much of the financial clout that actively aided and abetted the rigging of elections in 2003 and 2007 in particular. The recent bank sector reforms under the intrepid Sanusi Lamido Sanusi have exposed the greed, profligacy as well as the profoundly selfish character of these men and women. But worse than that, one is confronted with the worrisome determination on the part of these individuals and their allies to maintain their predatory stranglehold on our socio-economic spaces by mounting a rear-guard campaign of calumny and denigration against what they perceive as constituting a threat to their nefarious activities. Surely, Jonathan cannot afford to be seen as succumbing to the dictates of these “nouveaux-riches”. Rather, he should continue to give the transparent support of the administration to the efforts by both the CBN and the EFCC aimed at sanitizing the banking sector. There is a strong belief out there that much of the anti-Yar’Adua cacophony these days is being sponsored by shady groups with ties to some of the corporate tin gods whose fiscal banditry has been responsible for a lot of the distress the country’s banks are experiencing nowadays. The corporate ‘gangsters’ would seem to have of late, not surprisingly, found a common enemy in Yar’Adua. Jonathan, beware! These ‘oligarchs’ who held sway during the previous misrule of Olusegun Obasanjo when the nation’s most priced assets in the likes of NITEL, refineries and strategic real estate, just to mention a few, were recklessly expropriated by them and their allies in (and out of ) government in the name of a very corrupt privatization process are conceivably fantasizing about the ‘good old days’ under Goodluck Jonathan. The acting president must prove them wrong, in words and in deeds. One of the things the Yar’Adua administration has done right is to have reversed the wholesale stripping of our collective patrimony that was associated with the past privatization bazaar.
Jonathan should continue what he has been doing since Yar’Adua took ill and was flown to Saudi Arabia about two and a half months ago. His first priority should be the dousing of the contrived hysteria the country has witnessed in the last few weeks. He can do that by keeping at bay the various opportunistic elements who have sought to capitalize on the health-related issues around Yar’Adua to stake a claim for anticipated spoils. Also on the priority list of dossiers requiring urgent attention are the energy, employment, education, health, and roads sectors. These and other issues should keep the acting president busy and thus reduce to the barest minimum the temptation to engage in conduct that is unbecoming.
On a rather personal note, whether he likes it or not, there will be some mischief makers or opportunists who would urge Acting President Jonathan to be his own man, to assert himself, for the wrong reasons, especially vis-à-vis Yar’Adua. Already, sectional and irredentist voices of reaction have been whipping up primordial sentiments by a needless ‘tribalization’ of the debate around Yar’Adua’s absence from the land. For instance, intellectually lazy and immoral arguments have been advanced by ethnic jingoists and cranks alike to say that it is the North’s ( meaning ‘Hausa-Fulanis’ ) soi-disant hegemonic agenda that did prevent Yar’Adua from officially delegating all executive powers to his vice. The obtuse stereotyping and ‘scape-goating’ that are implicit in that line of reasoning must be dismissed as both egregious and pedestrian.
But there may be other personal considerations that could act as emotional triggers prompting Acting President Good Luck Jonathan to feel the need to assert himself. Nobody is saying that Jonathan should be a drab wall flower at Aso Rock but in the exercise of his newly acquired executive authority, he should avoid what I’d like to call, for want of a better expression, the Paul Biya Syndrome (PBS).
A self-effacing figure prior to the retirement, on November 4, 1982, of his master and president of Cameroon, Ahmadu Ahidjo, the man whom the late Cameroonian writer, Mongo Beti, described as having "une voix chevrotante" due to his effeminate, if quavering declamations, was a polished bureaucrat who had studied in one of France’s elite schools before joining his country's governing party, the Cameroon National Union ( CNU ) in which a dominant Northern establishment led by Ahidjo was in control. It is said that an almost taciturn Biya endured with stoical equanimity taunts and other forms of humiliation under Ahidjo and his éminence grise. When Biya took over as president at the retirement of Ahidjo, he soon metamorphosed (Or showed his true colors) by savagely sidelining Ahidjo and his allies and went on , within a space of under four years, to systematically empty the Cameroonian treasury with a clique composed mostly of members of his Beti tribe. A relatively prosperous Cameroon during the Ahidjo years has been turned into a land of desolation and rampant tyranny under the delinquent and bestial autocracy of Paul Biya.
Jonathan should avoid falling into the trap of sectarian reflexes and partisan provocation by constantly reminding himself that he is the symbol, even if temporarily, of Nigerian unity. He must, at all times , through his actions, endeavor to uphold the dignity of the presidency which was badly eroded during the traumatizing dereliction of the former dictator which lasted from 1999 to May 29, 2007. Let’s keep the faith in the hope that the darkness of the last decade is behind us for good. “Post tenebras spero lucem”!
Aonduna Tondu.
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