PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

President Jonathan’s Victory; Nigeria’s New Dawn?

ndajika@yahoo.com

As was to be expected, President Goodluck Jonathan’s not-so-unexpected trouncing of former vice-president, Atiku Abubakar, the Northern consensus candidate, at the January 13 PDP presidential primaries, has been greeted with a torrent of adverts congratulating the president for his “well-deserved victory” – to use the words of one of such adverts by one of the president’s leading cheerleaders, Dr. Hassan Adamu, Wakilin Adamawa, CON.

“The PDP Family,” said the Wakilin Adamawa in the full page advert in last week’s Sunday Trust, “is solidly behind Mr. President on continuation in office as the preferred PRESIDENT for our great country in 2011.”

A similar advert in several newspapers, this time by a “Committee for Fidelity,” one of the myriads of the fly-by-night organisations that thrive in times of elections, thanked the party’s delegates “for doing the right thing,” by, of course, voting for the president. It then went on to promise all Nigerians that the president’s victory will usher in “A NEW DAWN.”

No doubt the president’s victory was comprehensive and overwhelming. He defeated his rival in each and every one of the country’s six geopolitical zones – 615 to 9 in the president’s native South-South; 423 to 23 in the South-East; 383 to 24 in the South-West; 380 to 172 in the North-Central; 301 to 155 in the former vice-president’s native North-East; and 422 to 365 in the North-West.

The president also won 31 states out of 36, plus the Federal Capital, leaving his rival with only five states. He won a total 2,736 votes against his rivals 805.

The president’s victory was so comprehensive and overwhelming that his supporters could be pardoned some indulgence in triumphalism and a bit of gloating.

Predictably one such gloating, if a text making the rounds of mobile phones is to be believed, came from Mujahid Asari Dokubo, a most rabid Northernphobe Delta militant, if ever there was one. “Finally those who act as God,” he allegedly said, “has (sick) been told by the people that they are not God. Let us not relent in our struggle to throw off this evil yoke from our back. Never again will the Gambari (meaning the Hausa) have a free ride on us. Thank you every one for this victory.”

Mobile phones texts being what they are, this could be some mischief makers at work against Dokubo and, by extension, against where he comes from. However, given his consistent denigration of Northerners it would not be surprising if he was indeed the author. For example, in an interview in The Sun (June 21, 2008), he condemned Northerners as leeches. “First,” he said, “they are parasites. They contribute nothing, absolutely nothing intellectually or resource wise to the entity they call Nigeria. They are only parasites.”

This notion of Northerners as parasites can be easily debunked. All you need to do so is to point at the fact that agriculture, the main occupation of the region he so loves to denigrate, contributes about 45% of the country’s GDP as against less than 20% from Oil and Gas.

True Oil and Gas accounts for over 90% of the Federation Account but most ordinary Nigerians from all parts of the country – and certainly the Dokubos of this world who have become filthy rich from exploiting the legitimate disaffections of their people through the gun or the pen or both  are no ordinary Nigerians -  have been the poorer for all the billions of dollars that the sector has contributed to government revenue.

So I, for one, have always been baffled and amused by all this talk of Northerners being leeches.

But I digress. The Wakilin Adamawas, the Committees for Fidelity and the Dokubos of this world can indulge as much as they like in their triumphalism and gloating over the January 13 primary, but deep inside they know that it was neither free nor fair.

First, they know what role money played in swinging the votes for the president. From media reports of the events both sides spent tonnes of money in both local and foreign currencies. But everyone knows that the bids were asymmetrical between a president with access to the public treasury and innumerable means of patronage and a rival who has to count his pennies no matter how huge his private wealth is.

Second, they also know what role publicity played in the game. My good friend, Bitrus Gwada, Esquire, took the trouble to watch the NTA news broadcast, News Extra, on two occasions, first on November 30, and then on December 7. On both occasions, he said, he recorded roughly 58 items. Thirty seven out of these, ha said, were on the president himself, the presidency and the First Lady, Patience, and her projects.

Both our electoral laws and the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission’s guidelines on coverage of elections make it mandatory to give equal coverage to all sides. Few things could have been more unequal than the short shrift not only the NTA but most government media gave the opposition between and within political parties.

However, of all the unfair and underhand means used to beat the former vice-president – and the two above were not the only ones - hardly any could beat the way he was kept away from meeting the delegates right up to the time of voting at the Eagle Square, Abuja.

We all know that accreditation of voters is central to the fairness and credibility of an election. Yet up to the time the primary was conducted the list of delegates kept evolving at the whims of the state governors who everyone knew had been whipped into line by the presidency by a crude combination of carrots and sticks.

In the circumstance the president’s cheerleaders should know that their victory at the primaries might yet prove pyrrhic. That is assuming the president is sincere about his commitment to ensuring that every vote counts at the general elections.

And the signs that he truly means what he says don’t look assuring judging from what happened during the primary, most especially from the disgraceful manner the party chairman, Ezekwesile Nwodo, was shown the way out yesterday, for no better reason than a suspicion that he was a closet sympathizer of Atiku Abubakar.