The Goodluck Implosion: How this Presidency went from favourite to unpopular in 3 years
On April 7, 2013, twenty-five months after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake hit Japan and crippled the Fukushima power plant, a skiff which was part of the debris from the quake washed ashore near Crescent City, California.
There are those who will argue that Goodluck Jonathan can take only just about as much credit for becoming president of Nigeria as the flotsam from the Fukushima quake can take for arriving several months later on the sandy shores of California; he was quite simply borne into that office by the momentous defeat of the third term bid of former president Olusegun Obasanjo in 2006and the powerful tide of events that it set off leading up to the demise of Umaru Musa Yaradua.
Gleaning from revelations emanating from such disparate sources as the narcissistic biography of Nasir el-Rufai, Wikileaks, the now rested NEXT newspapers, Sahara Reporters and the sick drama series played
out on national TV by the Federal Executive Council over the late president Yar’Adua’s illness; the period between the failure of the third term bid of Olusegun Obasanjo and the forced adoption of the ‘doctrine of necessity’ by the National Assembly which made Goodluck Jonathan Acting President can best be described as a game of high stakes lottery. The eventual winner did not even purchase a ticket to play.
With a little bit of luck
Goodluck Jonathan emerged from the whole saga with as few enemies as anyone can manage in Nigeria’s dog-eat-dog politics. Cutting the picture of an innocent schoolboy being bullied out of his lunch by Turai Yar’Adua and the ‘cabal’ of aides, he moved civil society groups and a cabinet minister like Dora Akunyili to stick out their necks- and have him sworn into office.
He stayed (or played) loyal deputy through the suspense-filled months; a dark period during which Nigerians were regularly regaled on NTA—the state-owned television station—with ‘Arabian Tales’ of a comatose Yar’Adua starring as an Olympic decathlon athlete and bouncing up stairs.
Thus came full circle the fairy tale rise of a lowly education inspector to the highest office in the land in the short span of about ten years. It was an irresistible and inspiring story. His emergence seemed to have disrupted the usual cycle of Nigerian power and prominence.
The country was pregnant with belief on a very personal level – if anyone from anywhere could just as well experience such a twist of fortune; that it just might be possible to as quickly dig ourselves out of the cesspool of poverty and corruption and rise to the highest.
It was with such high promise of goodluck for the nation that Mr. Jonathan came into office in 2010. Because of him, Nigerians were inspired, it was no longer audacious to hope.
No longer at ease
Three years down the road, the prognosis for that pregnancy is looking like a stillbirth.
Poverty has deepened; the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, telling business leaders recently, that “It is clear that the top 5% to 10% (of the population) is capturing most of whatever growth there is and people at the bottom are being left behind.”In fact, recent data from the World Bank indicates that in spite of the brisk growth of GDP over the years, poverty rate in Nigeria has nevertheless risen from 63% in 2003 to 68% in 2012.
While we can take the incurable optimist’s view that poverty is only crawling in its effort to annex the country, it is unarguable that corruption is pursuing the same objective at a dizzying gallop.
One way to understand the scale? It is quite conceivable for one individual to become a trillionaire strictly from the proceeds of corruption under this administration.
Add to the potent mix of escalating corruption and deepening poverty the fact that; unemployment rate in Nigeria stands at 22% (World Bank); there is a low grade, high cost civil war in the northeast; a thriving kidnap for ransom and armed robbery industry in the south, and you begin to understand why the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Nigeria as the worst place to be born in 2013.
Faced with the daunting challenge of every day survival in a country where life expectancy is a shameful 52 years—same level as 1910 USA a century ago – it is understandable that many Nigerians now seek new justification for believing in a president who promised fresh air but appears to have plunged them into choking fog.
The Red Sea
There are those that will trace The Jonathan Implosion to that awful moment in 2010 when he spoke in Abuja about domestic terrorism in the Niger Delta and exonerated “my people”. Then there are those who will point to the amounts of monies that flowed out and around his campaign in 2011 – frightening, excessive, obscene.
But if the seeds had already been sown, they certainly bore fruit in 2012.
The relationship between the president and Nigerians deteriorated very quickly when he made the national broadcast on 1 January 2012 announcing the removal of subsidy on petroleum products.
Nigerians poured into the streets in many major cities and the capital Abuja to protest the resulting 100% hike in price of petroleum products – and everything else.
From Kano to Lagos, Minna to Ilorin, Nigerians were (almost) unanimous in calling for the total reversal of the policy, with a nationwide strike that threatened to sweep the president out of power in what might have been the West African leg of the growing global push for more accountable governance. With his ministers scrambling on television, and a frenzied push to court goodwill; it was clear that Aso Rock was shaken.
A lethal mishmash of ethnic cards, weary protesters, a tainted leadership and partisanship crippled the historic protests however, and the president lived to fight another day.
That nasty experience must have convinced the president that there was only one way to be with Nigerians:.
There was the president who, in September 2011, at an inter-denominational service to mark the nation’s 51st independence anniversary, had announced: “I don’t need to be a lion; I don’t need to be a Nebuchadnezzar; I don’t need to be a Pharaoh; I don’t need to be an army general. I can change this country without those traits.”
Then there was another, who had seen the effectiveness of using the army to quell nationwide protests; the wisdom of being a lion must have become more obvious. Asked on national TV during the Presidential Media Chat of 24 June 2012 why he had refused to publicly declare his assets, he roared – “I don’t give a damn.”
For a president who once seemed a break from the past, this was, for many, chilling confirmation that this was not the one they had been waiting for.
There was a president
In a country where leadership has been gotten by force and private whims equated to public consensus, Nigerians have viewed the constitution’s “we the people” as no more than pedantic, redundant verbiage, Jonathan was supposed to the dawn of a new era.
YNAIJA LONG READ: The Princess Diaries – How Stella Oduah got away with everything
There were a lot of notables – not least the fact that Nigerians were getting their first PhD for president, optimists even willing to stretch belief with the utopia of Plato’s philosopher king. Many also liked the game changing value of an ethnic minority president, something that now seems par for the course, but was virtually unthinkable before Mr. Yar’adua’s final trip to Saudi Arabia.
His biography amplified the sense of, well, fresh air.
Mr Jonathan famously went to school barefooted because his parents were too poor to afford shoes; and then here was a man not desperate for power; too decent for intrigue – always ended up in elective offices for which he never contested on account.
Here was a man of immense fortune, destiny even. Goodluck.
Forgotten in the euphoria was the fact that, as governor of oil rich Bayelsa, he left no real legacy of leadership. Or that his ‘simplicity’ obscured a lack of charisma, or any visible competence. The leading lights of the Obasanjo regime would speak of meetings at the Villa with the man where he wouldn’t make any contributions worth remembering.
He nevertheless rode into office on that public euphoria, capturing about 59% of the votes; helped no doubt by the strongly alienating personality of his major opponent General Muhammadu Buhari who was widely considered a Muslim fanatic and a military dictator in civilian clothing.
Two years later however, President Jonathan seems to have lost the affection, even the respect that came with the popular mandate with which he was gifted.
For a candidate who tramped the campaign trail wearing a sheepish grin and making crowd-pleasing promises like building an airport in all the 36 states of the federation, it has been a steep slope.
Between Diezani Alison-Madueke and the oil thieves, Stella Oduah and the bullet-proof cars, Farida Waziri and the dog that wouldn’t fight, the second coming of Diepreye Alamieyeisegha, Patience Jonathan and The Battle of Rivers, the Very Public Letter of Sanusi Lamido Sanusi amongst many other public missteps, the love affair – at least in the media and with influential pols from Rotimi Amaechi to Olusegun Obasanjo – is finally over.
Where is the love?
Mr Jonathan probably feels it is Nigerians who owe him better treatment. While addressing the 52nd Annual at its Conference Nigerian Bar Association in August 2012, he said, “I think I am the most criticised president in the whole world.”
He went on to argue that he inherited the problems facing the country and was being unfairly blamed – an old defense, someone should have mentioned, deployed by virtually the country’s every past leader.
Unfortunately, this has not just been a statement, but, to all intent and purpose, a strategy for his government. It has certainly been the thrust of its media push.
That, and the fact, that his achievements are ignored. For which, a legitimate case can be made.
It can be argued for instance that in keeping with his promise when he assumed office to push electoral reforms; while not having done anything substantive, he at least appointed someone widely considered credible, and independent, to chair the electoral commission. Furthermore, he has largely refrained from interfering in the electoral process in the way that former president Obasanjo honed to an art.
Critically, his efforts to push forward the privatisation process in the power and petroleum sectors are probably his most important accomplishments so far. Having succeeded in concluding the transfer of the ownership and management of the power sector to private investors, there is hope that the power situation will be turned around in a matter of years, allowing the Nigerian economy will really take off.
In a related vein, modest success has been recorded in transportation with the reopening of long dead rail routes. The administration has however sought to gain more mileage out of this than it sensibly should. In an age of bullet trains, a country of the stature of Nigeria should not be taking out paid adverts to celebrate the launching of a line from Lagos to Kano that takes a whopping 30 hours for a journey of less than 1000km – a mere 30km/hour. For a country supposedly in a hurry to catch up with its peers and become the 20th largest economy by 2020, it cannot afford to travel at the speed of a burial motorcade.
His reforms in the agriculture sector have also received wide commendation; he has been credited with finally succeeding in breaking what was considered the fertilizer cabal, which hitherto ensured that farmers paid a steep price to get the commodity. Though even then, there are many who see more hype than substance.
Questions remain about long term impact considering hastening free fall of the naira and ban policy flip flops, but the immediate impact of President Jonathan’s macro-economic policies has largely been positive. Inflation has consistently fallen and now hovers around a single digit 8% which is remarkable for the region.
Importantly, GDP continues to grow at a decent 7% per annum and Nigeria continues to be a top investment destination.
The measure of the man
What is however growing faster is the consternation of Nigerians at the boundless rate at which graft has grown under the watch of this president.
That has become a real problem for this administration.
You could say Nigerians have adjusted to the other issues – his assumed position as Complainer-in-Chief or tinkering with term provisions for his office. Even the faulting handling of the Boko Haram problem has not coalesced public opinion around a common verdict due largely to the inherent polarising nature of the problem.
What appears to be the one irreconcilable difference with the generality of Nigerians is what is considered to be, according to the Speaker of the House of Representatives Aminu Tambuwal, his body language encouraging corruption.
It is a long way from his swearing-in as Vice-President in 2007, when Mr Jonathan declared his total assets to be worth N295million. At the time, his spokesman Ima Niboro said “the Vice President’s decision to make public his assets declaration was to show that there is nothing to hide, and that there comes a time when even the law must take a second place and the public mood must define our actions. To the Vice president, this is such a time, hence the choice to send you a copy of his declaration for publication”.
The rife belief is that Mr Jonathan is no longer able to declare his assets because he would have had to explain its dramatic growth after his rumoured involvement with such corrupt deals as the $1.1 billion Malabu Oil assets buy over by Shell and the N2 trillion subsidy scam which blew open about the time of subsidy removal in 2012.
Other serious corrupt deals closely linked with the president include: the N15 billion waterways security contract awarded to a former militant Tompolo who has promptly joined the teeming population of private jet owners in Nigeria. The deal is alleged to help him better oversee the theft of crude which has reportedly grown to up to 200,000 barrels per day and is threatening the ability of the federal government to meet its financial commitments to the federating units. There is also the N469 billion police pension scam involving Abdulrasheed Maina who many consider is being shielded by the president. That is without measuring his continued ignoring of the weighty allegations against Stella Oduah who approved purchase of two luxury armoured cars by a cash strapped agency of her ministry for her use, to the deafening tune of N255 million and who is all but set to manage his presidential campaign again in a matter of months.
It doesn’t help of course, that, before his former boss, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, convicted of corruption and impeached as governor of Bayelsa, got the deeply controversial presidential pardon, the president had appointed Salisu Buhari an indicted certificate forger and impeached former speaker of the house of representative as member of the governing council of a foremost federal university.
Power to his people
Some analysts have noted that this hobnobbing with corruption is considered within the president’s inner circle as necessary political manoeuvring towards the 2015 elections. It is also justified based on the corruption perceived by previous administrations, by the body language of his team.
With the rumoured ambition of Alamieyeseigha to run for the senate in 2015, it is believed that the pardon and the most awkward appointment of Salisu Buhari indicate the desperation of Mr Jonathan to create new power bases as he faces increasing opposition from the APC, which has benefited from the continuing implosion of the PDP.
If the analysts are right, then the prospects for Nigerians are dank.
The president has had to fight on many battle fronts already: the Nigerian people still smarting from the subsidy removed, the Academic Staff Union of Universities, the Nigerian Medical Association, the New PDP, Nigeria’s first real opposition force, the APC terrorists with their mixed message of demands; the north with its argument for turn-by-turn-o-cracy; the lower house of the NASS with its open hostility; and a coalition of dis-empowered elite led by former President Obasanjo.
With its propensity to hunker down and point fingers in crisis, it is reasonable to expect that as other battlefronts open towards 2015, the president’s desperation will grow – and so a willingness to buy favours and loyalty, and while finger is on the national purse.
Forget everything you’ve known until now. Things are just about to get ugly.
Source: Ynaija.com
