Tuesday 5 March 2013

Jude Egbas: Be Very Afraid Of Goodluck Jonathan


Be Very Afraid Of Goodluck Jonathan


I run this place....with cassava bread and all
I run this place….with cassava bread and all
In his intrepid page-turner “The Accidental Public Servant”, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai depicts the picture of a President Obasanjo who donned the façade of a moron in public in a bid to send the wrong signals to the watching world throughout his tenure. During one routine ‘closed door session’ with his Principal, the Ota warlord had lectured the “diminutive” El-Rufai in his trademark sickening baritone drawl:
“But I am lucky–God gave me a not -so- clever face. People think I am stupid. So you can’t look at me and know what is going on in my brain.”
President Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan could well have ripped a few pages off the Obasanjo playbook. An uninspiring demeanor in public with several stuttering performances thrown in for good measure nonetheless, President Jonathan is surreptitiously plotting his way to a second term in office come 2015 in a manner that could have made Machiavelli go green with envy. The fedora wearing son of a fisherman is perhaps smarter than most folks give him credit for. And in the last fortnight, he has given political watchers a few glimpses of what to expect as the race for the Presidency in 2015 gathers some momentum.
First, the President has moved to install his loyalists as members of his Party’s National Working Committee. With loads of experience in thwarting the will of the people at the polls and with a CV that has corruption written all over it, Tony Anenih has returned to the ruling party’s inner circle as the party’s Board of Trustees (BOT) Chairman. Alhaji Bamanga Tukur has been singing like a canary the President’s eligibility to run all week and the President’s political adviser, a mustachioed gentleman called Ahmed Gulak has adorned a didactic garb recently, lecturing us all on why no one can stop the President should he decide to contest in 2015 even if that person’s name reads as Babangida Aliyu. The Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) Governors’ Forum has emerged from the blues and its Chairman, the garrulous Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom State, has gone scriptural with speeches of fishing for ‘Judases’ within the party’s ranks. The PDP has been blowing hot air in the direction of the new kid on the block—the All Progressive Congress (APC)—ridiculing the latter as a cult group.
All of the noise emanating from Abuja, the nation’s seat of power, has the 2015 general elections coloring every decibel. Perhaps it is no longer news that Nigeria’s number one citizen will have a second stab at power in 2015. What should make the news, like one of his supporters reminded me last week, should be if his name isn’t on the ballot at all. Agreements will be trampled upon, new friends will be courted as older ones are discarded, truckloads of extra-budgetary cash will make the rounds around the thirty six states of the federation, and the electorate—you and I—will perhaps be relegated to the background until the party machinery anoints President Jonathan as its flag bearer in the spring of 2015.
It would be interesting to see who the opposition puts forward as President Jonathan’s challenger to the juiciest post in the land in the months ahead. The opposition does have its work cut out in the coming months. Ruminating on the powers an incumbent President possesses in Africa’s biggest joke of a democracy, Goodluck Jonathan could be forgiven if he fancies his chances of returning as President on the back of a lethargic performance in his first term. Whether his unbridled lust for power will signpost his eventual denouement or not will rest with the opposition and civil society groups.
Grapevine sources say even General Olusegun Obasanjo, renowned for his poker face in “The Accidental Public Servant”, appears to have been beaten at his own political game by a rampaging Jonathan as the 2015 election plot thickens.
The writer is on Twitter as @egbas

No comments:

Post a Comment