A Rejoinder by Assam E. Assam, SAN
I have just read the preview of the excuses proffered by my leader,
President Goodluck Jonathan, for losing the 2015 Presidential Election.
I
would not have bothered to react but for the fact that I had thought
that he was sincere when he conceded defeat to Muhammadu Buhari. An
honest man does not hold one opinion and express another.
That is my
mantra. To now read that Dr. Jonathan was forced to concede the election
is absolutely preposterous! If he had the benefit of sound advice, I am
certain this is one subject he needed to avoid so soon after he made us
believe he was a statesman.
Who does not know that the election was for Dr. Jonathan to win or
lose. He chose to lose! Period! He squandered the South-South
opportunity, an opportunity of a depressed, deprived and exploited
people and trying rather so belatedly to explain it away, without even
an iota of self recrimination is dishonest and without merit to say the
least!
Our elders say that “the poisons” as well as “the antidote” are both
inherent in the king. Caesar was warned about “the ides of March”, but
his pride led him to what was a purely avoidable catastrophe.
Those of us within the party who were termed “outcasts” had warned,
very early in 2013, that the signs were ominous, that unless certain
radical decisions were taken, we would hand the 2015 Presidential
Election to General Buhari because the “fresh air”, which the coming of
Dr. Jonathan was expected to bring into the political atmosphere of
Nigeria had been greatly polluted and the President had completely lost
the confidence of the electorate.
It got to a point when the daily
staple served by the press to the electorate was the “cluelessness”, the
“weakness” and the vacillating character of Mr. President!
There were issues which culminated in the non-electability of
President Jonathan and completely characterized the 2015 general
elections.
It was unfortunate that some of these things were foisted
upon him, by people he thought were indispensable, yet the general
public, understandably, attributed those failings to him, and rightly
so. The buck stopped at his presidential table!
Sometime in 2012, some members of the Governors forum who were close
to President Jonathan, successfully sold him the idea that Governor
Amaechi of Rivers State was not “loyal” to him and would use the forum
to ensure he did not secure the Presidential nomination of the PDP. They
organized an election where the total votes of 35 took one week to
count.
I mean the Governors could not count 35 votes in six days! At the
end, 19 Governors were said to have voted for Amaechi while 16 had
voted for David Jang, a retired Air force General and Governor of
Plateau State.
David Jang was declared the ‘winner’ and was promptly
received by President Jonathan and recognized as the Chair of the forum.
At that point, the President was seen as also capable of twisting truth
and he also promptly lost the confidence of the general electorate.
Why
did he even need to get involved in an issue which had no
constitutional basis? And yet this was his albatross.
This did not go down well with five PDP Governors who did not just
leave the party, including Amaechi, but worked resolutely against the
party.
Even those, particularly from the North, who still publicly
identified with the party ensured during the elections, that in their
States, all positions were won by PDP.
Some of them even contested the
Senate seats on the same day with the Presidential elections but
President Jonathan could not even score the mandatory 25% in those
States.
I am sure the President has forgotten how he masterminded the
ousting of Dr. Bamanga Tukur as National Chairman of the PDP.
Aghast,
the world watched the removal from office of one man who worked hard to
give our President a quality international image and supported him 100%.
The same group brought Adamu Mu’azu who could neither manage the party
nor the Presidential campaign.
It forced the President to set up his own
team and in the process, distanced himself from the party’s structure
and appointed Peter Obi, who was not a member of the PDP, to lead his
campaign in all the Southern States.
The poor man could not even utter
the slogan of the party. How did President Jonathan expect to win the
election?
The other problem was the impunity which characterized the primaries
in the Peoples Democratic Party. This time it was not rewarded with the
usual “sidon look” attitude.
Those who were cheated while President
Jonathan watched helplessly, along with their supporters, went out of
their way and campaigned and voted against the party.
There was always
the belief that after the primaries, “a reconciliation committee”,
usually headed by the same “cheats” would go round explaining to members
why they were cheated and asking them to support those who cheated them
in order that they may win the elections and continue the cheating.
The
placid assumption that this strategy would always succeed was the
Achilles heel of the party.
Accordingly, the plea of literally all the
reconciliation committees failed, this once, to assuage the victims.
Thousands of aggrieved party members and their supporters who identified
with their well publicized plight all over the country worked
assiduously against the party particularly the President who did not
want to intervene in their plight in order that the feelings of his main
people would not be hurt and his elections prospects would not be
disturbed.
He sacrificed every other persons’ interests and eventually
lost his. Now the party is the worse for it and the rift is there for
all to see.
President Jonathan, a sitting President, in power and in full control
of all Intelligence, Policing and Military institutions, a young man in
his early fifties, in vibrant health, with a Ph. D, lost the
Presidential election to someone that we in the PDP, pontificated as
having no education, no money, was sick, had no political constituency,
and was not in power.
That was really not surprising for, rather than
engage as squarely with the electorate as our opponent had done, we
spent so much time wearing baseball caps, dancing with comedians and
entertainers.
The electorate was not amused that our Presidential
candidate could find time to engage with people who would never visit
their polling booths on the day of the election. They were also aware of
the billions that were spent on those events including paying for
live-airing of those programmes.
At the end, we failed to react to the
promises of free feeding for students, making the Naira equal to the
Dollar in value, fighting corruption as a menace, reducing complete
reliance on hydrocarbon as our economic mainstay, and restoring security
to the nation, which our opponents sold to the electorates and easily
connected with them.
And now, President Jonathan says the Western Democracies cost him the
election! If they did, that means he was unable to sell himself and his
programmes.
In truth however, I do want to know how the Americans, the
British and the French, by deploying their frigates to the Gulf of
Guinea, generated the under-aged voters in Kano, and Katsina which Dr.
Jonathan says helped Buhari to win the election?
But which election? The
candidate was the President, Commander in-Chief on whose table the buck
stopped! This sounds to me like ‘an old wives tale’.
How come the
President never alerted the nation of a plan to invade the country if
Buhari failed to win the election? He could even have gotten one of his
spokespersons to leak the story.
Now he reminisces, sounding belated and
comes across as an afterthought.
President Jonathan says he had no clue why “There was this blanket
accusation that my body language was supporting corruption, – – – – – –
– the same thing I kept hearing from the Americans without specific
allegations.”
Whether that “allegation” was correct or wrong, the fact
remains that the world is nine tenths, a matter of perception. What a
person really is, does not matter as what people think of that person.
Our President could not sack erring Ministers, who were clearly fingered
as corrupt, one of whom refused pointedly to appear before the National
Assembly to answer to charges of abuse of office and corruption.
There
was no reprimand and no effort by the president to correct the
impression that he was behind these persons.
Right in his cabinet, the
monetary group and the Fiscal team literally came out of the same room
speaking different languages.
Sanusi as Governor of Central Bank was
perpetually screaming of the rot in the Finance Ministry and fingering
NNPC as the major culprit.
The president bought cotton wools in packs
and stuck in his ears. These inactions completely eclipsed the work he,
as a person was trying to do to clean up the system and rather made it
sound “like a little too late”.
All these were being watched and
analyzed by those Nations who he tried to relate with for relevance.
That was the body language.
The Northern conspiracy theory is as huge a joke as the level of its
acceptability. How come that there was a Northern conspiracy and our
President’s closest ally was his Principal Secretary, a northern
oligarch! There was no conspiracy of the North. The North never
supported Jonathan. Just as the South South never supported Buhari.
In
the 2011 elections, of the 13 States of the North East and North West,
PDP won elections only in Adamawa and Taraba States. Why we won the
overall election was because we won all the states of the North Central
and the West.
As a consequence of poor advice, we squandered our
relationship with the West, and in 2015 lost heavily in all the Western
and North Central States except for Ekiti, Nassarawa, Plateau, and
Taraba, which we won marginally, we lost elections in all the States of
the North East, North West North Central and West.
We let go of those
who could have cultivated the North for us. As for the West, they could
not point at anything they had for supporting us in 2011. Perhaps this
is the Northern conspiracy.
As for Jega, good for Goodluck! Did he not say, with all amount of
glee, that when he appointed the man, he did not even know him and had
never met him before? So you appointed and vouched for a person to
perform such an important act as the conduct of national elections and
yet you did not know him! Now Dr. Jonathan says he was betrayed by Jega.
That is for Jega to answer. For me, Jonathan got what he deserved. He
always listened to people who would rubbish him.
Look at the case of his Vice President! We had a very bad running
mate for the Presidential election. A person who in the first term could
not secure for the party the votes even of his Local Government and
every effort targeted at choosing a credible running mate who the North
will feel comfortable with, as a likely successor to Dr. Jonathan’s
administration failed. Mr. President we tried to cultivate the North
using the wrong targets.
We failed to address their concerns. We lost
the Vice President’s ward at the election he contested as a running
mate. How did President Jonathan expect to win the election, which he
blames on Jega?
Or is it true that President Jonathan actually expected Jega to
truncate the election during the announcement of the results?
If his
statement is true that he “was betrayed by the very people I relied on
to win the election”, I hope Jega, the National Chairman of the
Independent National Electoral Commission, who was expected to be a
neutral umpire, was not one of them for he would be exhibiting a corrupt
tendency in believing that Jega would “help him win the election”?
I am
sure the President now knows better because those who generated all the
enmity for him quickly disowned and avoided him the day after he lost
the election.
A good number of them are now with President Buhari in The
All Progressives Congress. The others are soon to join.
We all applauded Dr. Jonathan for being a statesman when he conceded
the election to General Buhari. Now that the argument is that he was
coerced by the presence of American frigates in the Gulf of Guinea and
the Governments of America, France and Britain who were in league with
the opposition to unleash mayhem if he failed to comply, how does
President Jonathan want to be remembered, – courageous, heroic, brave,
determined, and fearless? One thing that must be credited to Dr.
Jonathan is the Federal Executive Council Approval of the 27th of May
2015, two days before leaving office, awarding the contract for the
construction of the road to Otueke, Bayelsa State. These Northerners did
not even allow Mr. President to build the road to his village!
Ambassador Assam E. Assam
Senior Advocate of Nigeria
Immediate Past Nigerian Ambassador to
The Russian Federation and Belarus
And Member of the Peoples Democratic Party.
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