A shocking disclosure of huge financial and bureaucratic malfeasances perpetrated in the last four or five years, the public can only guess what is on the now vast and troubled mind of former president Goodluck Jonathan. His immediate concern is of course the supplementary election of the Bayelsa State governorship poll, in which Seriake Dickson, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate and incumbent governor, is leading. Should the governor lose, the shaky and tenuous empire inherited by Dr Jonathan from ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo would disintegrate. The moral and geographical borders of that empire had been suffering attenuation since 2011, shortly after he assumed office.
By the beginning of last year, not to say March when the polls began, it was clear to even the most sanguine Jonathan supporter that there was no conceivable way to arrest the relentless abrasion.
The continuous shrinking of the Jonathan borders has in real terms left only Bayelsa State in the hands of the former president. He will be ecstatic should Mr. Dickson win the poll, not because it advances the interest of the PDP, for that is the least of his considerations, but because it touches directly on whatever is left of his image; for after the malodorous revelations of the great heist that took place under him, his image is all he has left. Dr Jonathan will expect that in today’s supplementary poll, his fellow Bayelsans who have proved strangely inured to his blandishments will spare a thought for him and not allow the little pride he has left to be comprehensively dismantled. Before the election was declared inconclusive, there was no strong indication that Bayelsans included him in their thoughts. Mr. Dickson was unquestionably leading, but the lead was neither impressive nor unassailable. The supplementary election in the Southern Ijaw Local Government, therefore, retains enough potential to upstage Mr. Dickson. But there is no proof he will be upstaged. If the governor is not unhorsed, Dr Jonathan will heave a sigh of relief and concentrate his grief on the great national debacle he orchestrated and which repercussion he is suffering from, no thanks to the tenacity of President Muhammadu Buhari’s anti-corruption war.
When this column debuted on the first Saturday of January 2015, it began almost immediately to fight, together with others, for the dethronement of Dr Jonathan. But even when it joined the fight to defeat the PDP and bring Dr Jonathan to grief, the column had no idea the mess perpetrated by the Jonathan presidency was overpowering. Perhaps Dr Jonathan himself knew the extent of the mess. If he didn’t; if he had no idea just how total and nauseating the wreckage he orchestrated was, now that President Buharia has managed to expose the five-year fraud which the Jonathan government was, how does the former president feel?
Is he remorseful or, like the rest of the PDP, defensive? So far, Dr Jonathan has kept so pianissimo quiet that none can scarcely hear him. Other than a few hoary whispers now and again, and one or two secretive forays into the Buhari lair, the former president has seemed to wait in Otuoke, Bayelsa State with bated breath for the other shoe to drop. He had reached an agreement with President Buhari before relinquishing power; and not being a man of scruples, he has made up his mind to let the finicky president wrestle with the morality and troubled conscience of absolving him from blame, or if not blame, then responsibility.
The farthest any observer can get is to speculate generally and vaguely that Dr Jonathan is bothered by everything. But no one can really say for sure how he feels, or what is on his mind. It is possible he sees the scattered canonisation he is receiving from one or two institutions in the United States and other parts of the world as expiatory. It also makes sense that he might conclude, like many others, including his ardent supporters, that he made a huge sacrifice relinquishing power after an election he is probably still not sure he lost fairly. Had he not conceded defeat and allowed peaceful transfer of power; had he gone for broke as the Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe has repeatedly done, there is no telling whether he would not still be in power. Perhaps he reasons in such bombastic, unfeeling terms, and continues to reprove the Buhari presidency as ungrateful, cold and idealistic for exposing and ridiculing him. For some time to come, especially as the disclosures and exposures continue, Dr Jonathan will be tossed back and forth between his conviction of his own dubious altruism and the public’s impression of his betrayal of the common cause.
What is also certain is that in a corner of his heart, Dr Jonathan will be ruing lost chances and other great and noble things he could have committed himself and his presidency to in the five years he presided over the affairs of the country. Were this piece purely a consideration of the Chief Obasanjo presidency, such hopes would be naturally misplaced, for the Ogun State-born ex-president, much more than Dr Jonathan, is not capable of either introspection of any kind, or of that salient and undisputed appurtenance of statesmen — foresight. Throughout his over five years presidency, Dr Jonathan continued to convince himself he did his utmost for democracy, oblivious of his clampdown on the media and his direct attacks on the judiciary, best exemplified by the sack of Appeal Court president Justice Ayo Salami. Dr Jonathan will wonder in that small corner of his heart whether he did not allow his aides and ministers too much latitude; whether he did not show too much desperation to win reelection over which he is now blamed for nearly all the scandalous financial indiscretions of his presidency; whether he could not have done better to rein in his garrulous and obtruding wife; and whether he did enough to unite the people of Nigeria, put religion in its place, foster electoral and criminal justice, and reshape and remould the political superstructure of the republic early in his four-year presidency rather than as an afterthought.
Dr Jonathan’s mind will be seething with many options and permutations. He will agonise over whether he needed more than five years to make a great impression on the country and the African continent as a whole. He will wonder whether, more than the mere fact of conceding defeat to a successor from another party, he has any other legacy worth the trouble of historians remembering. He will ask himself whether he has the confidence to walk the streets openly without being stoned, trusting the famed geniality of Nigerians and their forgiving, trusting and accommodating proclivities. In fact, he will be of a double mind: to either move out and reach out more to his opponents in the last election, his supporters and admirers, and the uncommitted; or to remain virtually indoors, taking refuge in phlegmatic solitude. Should he affect gregariousness and travel within and outside the country more, perhaps for a wedding or two and a few lectures and symposia, he will be unsure just how damaging to his self-esteem and public image the revelations about corruption under his presidency are. But should he opt for reclusiveness, he will wonder when or whether he will ever come out from his cocoon happily and confidently.
What is on Dr Jonathan’s mind? He will probably be in suspended animation, overwhelmed by everything happening around him, unsure where to go, what to think, and what to say. But the buck stopped at his table when he was president. He was for a little over five years president, and as they say in these parts, executive president. He had more powers than the United States president, powers conferred on him by the constitution, convention, culture, and the general laxity of religious subservience. He had the choice to deploy the enormous powers to do enormous good, and to leave the country much better than he met it, in such a fashion that after his presidency the lives of Nigerians would have changed in far-reaching and unalterable way. He chose not to. Perhaps he now recognises those missed chances, and is pining away in regret.
