•Jega
By now, President Goodluck Jonathan would have discovered that a postponement of six weeks might have been enough to gain some strategic respite, particularly to recover his poise and pull some stunts against an opposition that would have been stung by the sudden turn of events. But it is not enough to scramble what has been fecklessly unscrambled; or to attempt to cobble together a new hegemonic power formation in the country.
Jonathan had a whole six years to will this new power bloc into being by forging new alliances; by building bridges and by breaking out of his ethnic cocoon to create a pan-ethnic charter for the nation. The time was ripe; the opportunities were abundant. For a fleeting magical second, the moment seemed to have met its man and its match. But he bombed it spectacularly. You cannot give what you don’t have. Unprincipled expectation is the bedmate of promiscuous optimism.
A few months into the Jonathan presidency, it ought to have been clear to all but the most hardy optimists that it was all a horrendous scam. It was obvious that the new ruler lacks the discipline, the diligence, the application, the visionary impetus, the intellectual wherewithal and the psychological stamina and steeliness to administer a complex commonwealth of two hundred million souls tottering at the edge of despair and despondency.
Jonathan’s charm offensive of the past three weeks, particularly in the South West and his singularly offensive and obscene attempt to buy his way back into electoral reckoning by massive bribery of the political elite and agents of influence must rank as the worst instance of presidential delinquency in the annals of electoral corruption in Nigeria . With this in your face , I don’t care impunity, there can be no further proof that the Nigerian president does not care a hoot or give a damn about the sanity of the political system or the survival of the nation itself.
It has been observed that a person should keep his friendships in a state of constant repairs. How anybody in a few weeks can cobble together a dominant power consortium that can withstand the tumultuous revolt of the Nigerian multitude that we have on our hand remains a perplexing mystery even to the most accomplished of political witchdoctors. It is said that politics is the art of the possible, but even in politics, certain things are simply impossible.
The presidential gallivanting, the executive walkabout and the dollar spree even as the naira, the ultimate symbol of national sovereignty, was tumbling in the market would have been unnecessary if Jonathan had done the needful. At the onset of his presidency, Jonathan had at his beck and call the active base of the traditional South West activists and progressive politicos who fought a relentless and slogging campaign to validate his presidency.
He could also have tapped into the dormant resentment against the feudal arrogance of an oligarchic cabal bent on sabotaging his ascendancy. But all the goodwill was frittered away in a jiffy as Jonathan retreated into an ethnic igloo to be surrounded by tempestuous tribesmen and other recuperating revanchists.
As for the wise, wily and formidably discerning Yoruba obas who are rumoured to be beneficiaries of Jonathan’s dollar deluge, if they didn’t know what to do, they wouldn’t be on their fathers’ throne the first instance. Past masters of the cloak and dagger politics that come with empire building, they are also astute readers—bar one or two feckless ones—of the dominant political mood of their people. After almost a thousand years of an unending battle of will and wits with the populace in which many of them paid the supreme sacrifice, they know where the balance of power resides. They will collect and then they will recollect.
As the Jonathan presidency slouches towards a momentous finale, the entire country lies in ruins and smouldering wreckage, spiritually, politically, economically and militarily broke and back-broken. At no other point in the country’s history has the nation faced more dire prospects of economic annihilation. At no other point has Nigeria been at the military mercy of neighbours.
Never in its history has Nigeria been confronted with and wracked by such intra and inter-religious animosities and conflicts. Never have the political elite been this riven and polarized along the fearsome fault lines of region, religion and ethnicity. It has even become impossible to get the various factions of the political class to agree on the minimum precondition for the conduct of election.
Never has an election brought out the worst in our people, thanks to a political campaign that has been unprecedented in its rancour and distemper. Not even in the run up to the infamous 1964 general elections which was boycotted by the UPGA party did we witness such intense bitterness and animosity within the ruling class. It was a bitterness that fed directly into the subsequent violent military mutiny, a momentous pogrom and inevitable civil war.
As we have seen in Nigeria and more recently in Kenya and Cote D’Ivoire, whenever the electoral process is marked by intense hostility and a lack of elite consensus on the basic rules, we may be sure that the outcome is already vitiated by political adversity. When a four-star general and one of Nigeria’s most decorated soldiers and a global citizen in his own right is summarily cashiered for attending the birthday celebration of his former commander in chief who also happens to be the political benefactor of the current commander in chief, we can be sure that the gloves have come off and the battle line sharply drawn.
This past week, Ben Nwabueze, the respected constitutional lawyer, has advocated a coalition government or a government of national unity to manage what promises to be a momentous post-election tempest. If this is not a wily kite flying on behalf of an embattled government, then it is a case of trying to shut the stable door after its equestrian inmates had bolted. For it presupposes, against all evidence to the contrary, that there might still be a semblance elite amity after such a polarizing and divisive election.
In the unseemly circumstances that we have found ourselves, a ruling coalition or a Government of National Unity is possible and feasible only under strict international supervision and after the tempest might have blown off. Under similar circumstances in Kenya, Mwai Kibaki, the old Gikiyu fox, summarily terminated the results as they rolled in and declared himself elected.
In Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo simply barricaded himself in after he had lost the presidential election until he was flushed out of his underground bunker with the aid of French forces. As if to confirm the looming apocalypse, international emissaries have been coming in and out of Nigeria like doctors in an emergency ward, trying to appeal to the political class to save the nation from imminent perdition.
Their grim, unsmiling and taciturn visage tells its own story. In any case if anybody misses the import of all this, the unscheduled but widely publicized visit to Aso Rock by one or two members of our own equivalent of the 1922 Committee of the British parliament should tell those who know how to read tea leaves that once again, the nation is on the cusp of momentous events.
As he rues the ruins and wreckage of the country gifted to him in a moment of spite and hubris by the man who is the most influential and arguably the most controversial personage of the Fourth Republic, the otherwise genial and affable Goodluck Jonathan must be wondering what happened and the road not taken. Never in the history of the country has a ruler snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in this manner. But this is not the time to continue to excoriate the formerly shoeless boy from Otueke. This is the time to put on our thinking cap about how to extricate the nation from the debris of another historic cul de sac.
There are times when sharpening contradictions suddenly mature, forcing a nation into a fundamental rethink about its future. This is the moment of the grand gridlock. In a sense, Jonathan himself is a victim of the post-colonial condition in a way the colonial imaginary that founded Nigeria and the colonial imagination that powers it along could not have envisaged. This is the moment when colonial malice meets post-colonial malignancy. Having been thrown into the chessboard as a helpless and hapless pawn, Jonathan has shown that he has other ideas.
As sober students of history would attest, nothing is completely without some value, not even the most horrendous human experience. As a matter of fact, there are some radical philosophers and historians who push this view to the bitter conclusion that nothing good can come out of history. It is just a record of random brutality and contingent cruelty. As a British historian, floored and flawed by facile empiricism, would put it, “history is just one fxxxx thing after another.”
But history is ultimately and in the last instance structured in such a way that perplexes us and challenges the rigour of the dialectical imagination. It may well be that the paradoxically revolutionary dimension of the Jonathan administration is to expose for all to see, the huge racket of the neo-military civilian fascism foisted on Nigeria by retreating military barons. But having exposed the hoax, Jonathan has shown that he lacks the revolutionary nobility of spirit, the cerebral endowments and the political stamina to force through a new charter for the nation.
This is the basis of the historical conundrum in which we have found ourselves. Even if Jonathan spends the next hundred years in office, he is unlikely to make a dent on the deep rot, the political malaise, that afflicts Nigeria. What is not there is simply not there. National transformation is not a function of empty sloganeering.
Transformation is deeper than mere change because it involves a deeper, more integrative, more holistic and more deliberately systematic reordering of a society towards a new orientation and a new set of values. As it is, the paradox of our situation is that change is now required in order to even begin to think of transformation.
The last patriotic duty Jonathan owes a country that has given him so much is to leave quietly if he loses the election fair and square. He must resist the temptation to play the biblical Samson. Thereafter, he must be accorded the respect and dignity accruing to a former head of state, of a man untested and untried who ruled Nigeria in very difficult circumstances and who tried his very best, only that his best was enough. If he cannot lead the way, he has at least taken explosives to the house of cards. The Nigerian ruling cabal must rue the day they invited a neophyte of power nuances to hold the fort for them.
The next fortnight is going to be the longest night indeed for Nigeria. It is going to bring out the worst or the best in Nigerian. There is no point in demonizing and scape-goating poor Attahiru Jega and casting ethnic slurs on a very patriotic Nigerian. As readers of this column would testify, we harbor reservations about the way and manner of Jega’s appointment, but this has never extended to questioning his integrity. Never in the history of the nation has a man been saddled with a more onerous and difficult duty of electoral umpire. Jega should be allowed to do his job without any further let or hindrance.
One of the lessons that Nigerians must take away from the current crisis is the fact that as a complexly variegated country with diverse ethnic nationalities in different and often divergent modes of economic, spiritual, intellectual and political production, Nigeria is powered along by a micropluralism of power centres which induces a negative equilibrium which can only be disturbed or disrupted by a conventional power formation at its own peril. This is Jonathan’s undoing, just as it has been the undoing of Obasanjo, Abacha and Babangida before him.
A negative equilibrium is a tense equipoise of countervailing forces; an unstable ensemble whose stability is dependent on the dynamic instability of its elements. Only a new revolutionary power group led by complete outsiders or what Antonio Gramsci has described as the emarginati, people from the margins, can shatter the order by inaugurating a new order.
In the absence this revolutionary countervailing power formation, and while still waiting for the arrival of a pan-Nigerian critical mass, it is worth restating that any Nigerian ruler who is a product of the old status quo must keep his friendship in a state of constant repairs. As Jonathan will learn in about a fortnight, scrambling for votes at the eleventh hour is not the sign of a man who has learnt the elementary lesson of politics.
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