PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Credible Election 2011: Eight Reasons Not To Believe The President’s Promise

ndajika@yahoo.com

My good friend, Olatunji Dare, arguably Nigeria’s leading political satirist and certainly one of its most rigorous columnists, must have been in a rather generous mood the other day when he rated President Goodluck Jonathan’s 50th Independence anniversary speech as “one of the best from on high to which Nigerians have been treated in a long, long time,” (The Nation, October 5). Even then the speech was certainly a marked departure from the president’s characteristic incoherence which Nigerians have become used to.  

One of the highlights of that speech was his reaffirmation of his commitment to a free, fair and credible election next year.

“When God gives you an opportunity,” he said towards the end of his speech, “you must use it to His glory and to the glory of His Creations. I promise to use the opportunity given to me by God and the Nigerian people to move Nigeria forward. We must therefore, pay special attention to the advancement of our democracy through credible elections. I have said this and I will say it again, with all the convictions in me: Our votes must count! One man One Vote! One woman, one vote! One youth, one vote!”

I can think of at least eight reasons to doubt that the president will keep his promise.

First, is the all-too-quick, all-too-often, invocation of God by the man himself and by his supporters as explanation for his seemingly inexplicable rise to power. Fact is, there is nothing inexplicable about the rise. On the contrary, there is the perfectly rational explanation that he rose to power as a protégé of President Olusegun Obasanjo who was more ruthless and tyrannical in mufti than he ever was in khaki back in the late seventies.

This, of course, is not to say it would still have happened without God’s Will. A thousand Obasanjos would not have made Goodluck president if God had disposed otherwise. But to reduce his rise to power essentially to divinity is to say that he is infallible and therefore beyond challenge by any mortal. If that were so then it would, for example, have been wrong for the Israelites to have challenged Pharaoh or for the world to have fought Hitler because they too could claim their power ultimately came from God.

Outside the irrational attempt at mystifying the president’s rise to power, there are seven other reasons why I fear the man will not keep his promise to conduct a credible election next year.

First, was his sacking of Chief Vincent Ogbulafor as President of his party, the Peoples Democratic Party, ostensibly for alleged past misdeeds but in reality for insisting that the party should uphold its provision of power rotation in its constitution. After all, the party knew about those misdeeds when it still went ahead to give him the job.

Worse, his replacement, Chief Ekwesilieze Nwodo, was also a subject of similar, if not even more serious, allegations. Worst of all, the man had become notorious as a serial carpet crosser.

Second, no sooner had the president used the erstwhile PDP Reform Group led by former Speaker Aminu Masari and former Senate President Ken Nnamani to oust Ogbulafor than he dumped the group by backing, perhaps even initiating, the statement that the party would no longer tolerate pressure groups. It was not for nothing that Masari left the party the other day and dismissed it as un-reformable.

Third, was the revelation by the Sunday Trust of October 17 of the declaration in Kano by the Director-General of the Goodluck/Sambo Campaign Organization, Dr Dalhatu Sarki Tafida, that his principal is prepared to pay any price to win next year’s presidential election.

Tafida may yet deny the story but when, as happened to be the case in Kano, the state chairman of a party says his chapter has already picked its delegates for the presidential primary well ahead of the event and that he has pledged those delegates to the president, only the credulous would believe Tafida’s denial, if he ever does so.

Fourth was the somewhat similar meeting in Kaduna late September between Vice-President Namadi Sambo and the governors of Benue, Kaduna, Plateau and Taraba states during which the five agreed that Kaduna State was a swing state whose governor,  Mr. Patrick Ibrahim Yakowa,  must be returned at all costs. The agreement, sources close to the meeting said, had the blessing and support of the president.

Fifth, anyone with half an eye can see that Dame Patient Jonathan’s pet project, Women for Change, is a thinly disguised battle tank bought with public funds to fight for her husband’s presidential bid.

Fifth, while opposition campaigns have been hampered, and in some cases blocked, by the security organisations, the president himself has been hiding behind official tours to sell himself to the electorate.

Sixth, the man seems to be only too happy to have Obasanjo breathing down his neck in spite of the clear danger that his benefactor’s hug could prove to be a fatal bear hug. As Professor Tam  David-West put it all too well in an interview with The Spectator (January 29), there is widespread perception that a vote for Jonathan would be a vote for the resurrection of Obasanjo’s aborted Third Term.

“Jonathan,” said David-West, “is Obasanjo’s man. Yar’adua dismantled Obasanjo’s structures. He wants to smuggle in Jonathan so that he can now control us from Ota Farm.”

The most sensible explanation for Jonathan’s reluctance, probably even refusal, to keep his distance from his benefactor in the face of this clear danger is that he is only too happy to be his good student.

Last but by no means the least is the president’s apparent rethink on how to conduct party primaries after he has signed the electoral law which has forbidden the use of presidential and governorship appointees as automatic delegates. Indeed if there is one move by the president which has given his game away it is this rethink. Clearly the man has been persuaded by his advisers that the internal democracy which genuine primaries represent is a risk he must avoid if he wants to carry on as president next year.

One could go on and on but these eight reasons are sufficient proof that in spite of the president’s mantra about every vote counting, it is doubtful that he will keep his promise.

As Pastor Tunde Bakare of the Latter Rain Assembly said in effect in an interview with the Sunday Sun (June 6), it would be foolish to take the man for his word when as yet there is yet no good reason to do so

Asked by the newspaper if the Save Nigeria Group, of which he is an initiator and which fought tooth and nail against attempts to stop Jonathan from taking over power from an apparently terminally ill Yar’adua, trusted the president to conduct a credible election next year, the controversial pastor said, “If we trust anybody, we would not be going out to speak about how to conduct one. It is because we can’t see anything in place that points to the fact that there would a free, fair and credible election.”

 

On “Between Jonathan and the opposition”

Dear Mohammed,

Just a minor correction.

In your article, "Between the President and
The Opposition",you wrote:"Indeed speculations were rife shortly before Dokpesi’s invitation that the then Acting National Security Adviser, Colonel Kayode Are, lost his job to Jonathan’s kinsman, General Patrick Aziza, because he said he could not carry out orders from on-high to rope in not only Babangida but several other Northern leaders opposed to Jonathan’s bid for PDP’s presidential ticket."

Do note that the new National Security Adviser is
General Owoye Andrew Azazi (rtd), not Major General Patrick Aziza (rtd).  General Owoye Andrew Azazi is a retired four star General of Ijaw (
Bayelsa State) extraction and a former Director of Military Intelligence, GOC, Chief of Army Staff and Chief of Defence Staff.

Major General Patrick Aziza (rtd), on the other hand, is a retired two star General of Urhobo (
Delta State) extraction. An Infantry officer, he is a former GOC and Federal Minister, and was also the Chairman of the General Abacha's Special Military Tribunal of 1995.

They are two different characters

Regards

Dr.Nowa Omoigui.

I stand corrected and wish to apologize to the officers for the mix-up.