Is Goodluck Jonathan Plain Stupid? By E. C. Ejiogu

Posted: November 20, 2011 - 21:49

Goodluck Jonathan

By E. C. Ejiogu, PhD

When you think you have seen it all—including the most bizarre—in the caricature land, which Nigeria is, something silly and bizarre quickly crops up in or about the place or its conscience-deficient minders.  At the time when Olusegun Obasanjo actively foisted the walking corpse, Musa Yar’Adua as president of the place, some people who have refused to write the Nigeria project off as a lost cause, still let their hopes linger on the belief that the place might be turned around someday.  Even as they hoped, it didn’t take long before it became self evident that Yar’Adua was truly dead, in fact, too dead to function credibly as the president of anywhere except Nigeria. 
He remained there all the same—shuttling regularly to Germany for what was called medical attention as his handlers indulged themselves looting and stealing public funds.  It got to the point when the Germans refused to admit him any longer in their hospital.  But the bizarre absurdity continued as the Saudis took over.  Even when the Saudis washed their hands off him, and he was parceled back on life support and left outside the seat of power in Abuja in an ambulance where he decomposed away, he was kept on as president.
As all that went on, there was Goodluck Jonathan, rolling over silently in the full view of the world, contented with being the vice president to a president who was as far as anyone knew, dead!  When they eventually knocked something together for him and called it acting presidency, he concurred, literally flashing his signature sheepish grins.
One of Jonathan’s first acts after Yar’Adua’s decomposing corpse was finally wheeled out of the seat of power, and way was paved for him to assume de facto control, of state power in the project, was to bother the autocrats in Saudi Arabia to let him come over and thank them for ‘taking care of’ Yar’Adua.  Again, he simply grinned some more after they turned him down.
In the last several months, every reasonable person watching as things continued to unfold spiral down in Nigeria has been rankled by the ease with which the Boko Haram Islamist terrorists sustain their blood-letting all the way from Abuja to several parts of the Sokoto Caliphate areas.  They have done that in a manner that fits what obtains in climes that are devoid of governance.  It got to the point where the US intelligence establishment stepped in to furnish what became the only credible security warning over the menace.  Directed at American citizens who were cautioned to stay away from two luxury hotels in Abuja, the alert came handy also for everyone else, including Jonathan and elements of his hapless make-believe government, who free-loaded on the alert that their own outfit is incapable of generating credibly, and deserted the two locations fingered in the alert.

As that raged, from nowhere, the same Jonathan broke out in a speech that he made somewhere, boasting that the Boko Haram menace will fade away in less than no time.  Note his language: fade away in less than no time!  Even if his confidence was spiked by the recent disclosure by SaharaReporters.com that the US Pentagon had infiltrated special forces through Niger and Chad to stalk and combat the Boko Haram Islamist terrorists, no reasonable president would go as far as declaring victory a-priori that way. But he wasn’t done yet.  Jonathan’s response to the humiliation that Chinua Achebe rightly smeared him with when he tried to bribe him with the hollow ‘national honor’ was an expression of ‘surprise’ that Achebe is unaware of the ‘progress’ that his transformation agenda has already splashed all over the land.  This pattern of response that fits a fantasy gambit that he brandishes each time whenever he senses that his ineptitude is being rightly ridiculed is a worrisome indicator of a problematic persona especially about someone who is president.  The other time, he loudly grumbled that US president, Barack Obama appreciates his string of lofty achievements while people at home prefer to disparage him.

All of these canalize into a sad reality: Goodluck Jonathan, his sterile-brained butterfly of a wife, their unfortunate exploits in public life, indeed, everything about them constitute yet additional indicators that the Nigeria project is, in Graham Green’s description, a burnt out, in fact, a basket case. 
I don’t know about you, regardless of the façade of being president—to that I say, president gbakwaa oku!—as much as I have seen of this Jonathan, there is simply nothing extra that I need to see in or hear from him to sufficiently de-convince me that the man is not plain stupid, I mean silly!  It’s only a stupid person that will buy into the absurdity, which is being whispered into his ears by the likes of the flotsam-jetsam character like Ruben Abati who presume that paid cheap public relations blitzes in esoteric magazines—some are currently running in the November issue of South Africa Airways in-flight magazine, Sawubona—constitutes their so-called transformation, which clearly translates to deceit.   
Worrisome as this reality is, it is not a surprise though.  A social ecology in which—as the late Obafemi Awolowo once said during his lifetime—dogs devour lions, is an aberration.  It is only a plain stupid man like Jonathan who would delude himself daily that he is waxing successful as president even when it is plain clear that the land is falling into pieces literally. 
•E. C. Ejiogu, PhD, is a political sociologist, and the author of The Roots of Political Instability in Nigeria published in March by Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
 

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