By: Sam Omatseye
Some political losses are like death. To those who win, especially when the loser is a man in the top office of the land like Goodluck Jonathan, it is like a big iroko that crashes through a forest. No tree or leaf or bough is stout enough to repulse the thuds, hisses and howls of its fatal fall.
The victors, the likes of Buhari and his APC, could have looked at Jonathan’s fall as “a magnificent death,” the same way Joseph Conrad penned an obituary, in his metaphoric story titled Youth about the bonfire of a ship at sea. Hear the prose master: “A magnificent death had come like a grace, like a gift, like a reward to that old ship at the end of her laborious days.”
If it was a reward for the victor, it was a sackcloth for Jonathan and his PDP. So, the clamour for his return is an effort at resurrection. We were all witnesses to the death and burial, and there has been none like it since the birth of this nation. Jonathan set a record for presidential failure as the first to go belly up in office. We saw Pastor Orubebe and his hysteria at the funeral hour. Jonathan consecrated his annulment in a concession telephone call to Buhari that went viral.
The call for another Jonathan presidency reflects the four attitudes to a death: denial, rage, negotiation and acceptance. His people, and Jonathan even, have not reached the acceptance stage. They see Jonathan as the prophet Joel who didn’t go belly up but must survive the biblical whale’s belly, the revenant politician. The thing about mourning is that when mourners have not reached the acceptance phase, they show denial, rage and negotiations, sometimes have the psychosis of witnessing all of them at the same time.
We saw it in Bala Mohammed in his many spasms. We saw it in Jerry Gana, and his many shadowy advocates. We see it also in Jonathan who cannot come out in one word to say he will or will not. He does not feel it is the end of his hope, and perhaps, his ambition still flickers in denial and does not agree with Shakespeare that “he that dies pays all debts.” He probably believes Nigerians owe him.
Mourning in politics means a lot. You mourn a loss of prestige, the privilege of access, the contracts and perks, the new palaces here and abroad, the fattening wallets in dollars and pounds and Euros, the family flamboyance at shopping malls in Europe and North America, the social standing, the free tickets, the photo ops at high-profile events and with the high and mighty, the top perch at social parties, the small impunities over the lives of “lesser” beings, the village honour, the syrupy flatteries.
Jonathan and his acolytes mourn these. So does the PDP that has been in disarray for some time. Some of those in the interloper party, The ADC, are now bored because they cannot get those perks. It is not about the people. It is the flattery and magnificence of high office.
The Jonathan who became president and tugged at the popular conscience with his “I had no shoes” rhetoric was a different one who sought re-election. He was known as clueless, and this column called him famously as “his excellency the snake.” But he somehow believed that he would win again. A top politician told me recently about how many henchmen assured him the north was solid for him. He was too naïve to doubt. They told him he had Jigawa, Kano, Zamfara, and they did that to “collect”. And they did in spades.
Hence his recent outburst about politicians who betray. He had that in mind. And they were the same order of men sweetened him into disaster. They in the words of Shakespeare in Macbeth, flatterers of “yesterdays (who) have lighted fools the way to dusty death.” But Jonathan must be thinking about his chances, and the most challenging is not about getting a ticket, it is whether if he gets a ticket, it will not be in vain. As aviation minister Festus Keyamo cautioned, the constitution has said you cannot be sworn in more than twice as president. It is booby trap.
So, while he and his men may be mourning a death that occurred in 2015, he may be wary of a second death, apologies to the Book of revelations. But a second death is a revelation that comes as a prophecy he is wary of fulfilling.
Jonathan has made himself to believe he is an African statesman, simply because he accepted in public that he did not win the polls, and waxed poetic about his ambition not worth the blood of innocent lives. It is the sort of meekness that brought him to power in “I had no shoes,” that also inspired his presidential epitaph that he did not want his ambition to equate the shedding of innocent blood.
But politics is not for meek people. Ambition, as Shakespeare wrote, is made of “sterner stuff.” Jonathan had good luck and it made him a president. It did not redound to good governance, good welfare, well-calibrated policies. In fact, the policies under his watch contributed to the distortions in the economy now under repair.
But what some are seeing as his second birth of good luck are the one-term opportunity for the south, and what some see as an economic situation that strains the poor. Another factor is their reliance on collective amnesia and some non-Yoruba in the south’s belief that, somehow, they can snatch it for one term. It is in this context that Peter Obi, ever the hustler, is now a homeless man seeking a shelter of opportunity.
So, what we have are a few impediments for Jonathan. The biggest of them is the law. It forbids his ambition. Two, he may have to struggle for a party that will damn the law. The PDP does not seem to have goose pimples at his prospects except for a few self-serving carpet baggers who want to climb on his back and have, at least, a job to do until that scheme goes belly up again.
Again, for a Jonathan that did not heal an economy but broke it, many businesses will remember how broke they were in his days. If a collective amnesia holds forth today, an election campaign can rip up the scab of his time. The ethnic factor, ever an unspoken part of the Jonathan proposal, may turn out to be a bad market because he will return to the dog whistles of tribe and faith that may turn him into the Obi sort of divisive candidacy that may not work again this time.
So, what we may have is not Goodluck Jonathan of 2011, but a man of hard luck. It all seemed picture perfect for him. He did one term and he is the perfect man to complete it but the law says no. He could play messiah for an economy but his past says he failed. He cannot conjure tribe and faith or he will compete with Obi who did it and we know the result.
So, what we have is Jonathan of bad luck in a time of opportunity. This leaves him and his acolytes to decide whether to accept his political obituary or return to the doomed cycle of denial, rage and negotiation, like Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s award-winning novel, The Discomfort of Evening. The novel, written in a register of lugubrious innocence, tracks a family that finds it hard to live in acceptance of
Remembering Gani again
While many persons have penned tributes in memory of Chief Gani Fawehinmi, a few things still remain distinct for me. The first was his love for books, that many do not say much about. If he heard of any new book, of whatever subject, he would pick it up. For a man enamoured of politics, I was amazed to see books on poetry, drama and novels in his treasured cove. His library was massive. I recall when the chief conducted Femi Ojudu and I through shelf after shelf, a cornucopia of big minds aflare on his walls. So enthused were both of us that Ojudu promised to bury his next leave as a staff of Concord Press in between his book covers. I bought my copy of In a Free State by Nobel Prize-winning novelist V.S. Naipaul because it plopped into my eyes from the shelf. One day, I ambled into his office with a book I bought from “bend down bookstore,” previously owned by Olu Akaraogun. Immediately he saw it, he grinned in his boyish way and quipped, “That must be about the French Revolution.” He was right. It was a book about Reflections on the French Revolution by Edmund Burke.
The other thing was his fascination with dictators. He loved Kemal Ataturk, Joseph Stalin, et al. I challenged him once that Stalin lived for 20 million people to die. His riposte was an aplomb face, and then he said the Soviet leader needed such ruthlessness to build his massive mechanization project. Yet when the Soviet Union fell, he told me its parallel was coming for the IBB regime. He somehow managed to remain a closet authoritarian in public. He might not want an Ataturk for Nigerian, I think he might have favoured what political philosophers now call competitive authoritarianism that we now see in places like Turkey and Poland. He was IBB’s nemesis, and each January he would say, with sanguine mischief, “this government is going to fall this year. There is no doubt about that at all.”
I recall his intimacy with Olu Onagoruwa, and how they met for banter and cackles in his house over fried goat meat called asun, and how they travelled together on weekends out of Lagos, Gani going farther to Ondo, while Onagoruwa held the brakes at Ijebu. Up till today, I muse over how the quest for a public good made a mincemeat to a storied friendship.
But pray, how did a Gani go for a swim in a public place like the Sheraton Hotel? How can way say it was not where he ingested what eventually took his life with SSS always trailing him?