By CLEM AGUIYI
Truth is hate for those that hate the truth – Anonymous
Let me begin by admitting that both the North and President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ), like the South East and South West, have the constitutional right to contest for the seat of presidency in 2015. The temptation to contest weigh more on the side of Jonathan, given the lure and pressure of his incumbency position and also on the North for her drum beats of war and unwavering insistence that 2003, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2015 were and is her turn, but then 2015 is neither for the North nor for Jonathan and it does not matter how much both want to be comforted with lies.
The North had consistently claimed that GEJ violated the PDP zoning arrangement in 2010 and 2011. But the truth is the North’s position in 2010 when former President Yar’Adua was incapacitated and after he died in office were all based on power mongering and political blackmail as whatever arrangement that was in place in PDP never took into consideration the death in office of a sitting president. If late President Umar Musa Yar’Adua were to be alive in 2010, he would have completed his four-year term and may have renegotiated himself back to power like former President Obasanjo did in 2003.
President Obasanjo’s second term in office was not predicated on any zoning arrangement. The like of Chief James Ibori and Dr. Orji Uzor Kalu told him point blank to accept the Nelson Mandela option. His deputy Atiku Abubakar who had majority of the governors on his side indicated interest to contest against him. He (Atiku) would have won if he had contested in 2003 but he made his judgment, which from hindsight was a wrong judgment. The popular story was that Obasanjo knelt down for Atiku and the recalcitrant governors to plead for a second term opportunity.
This scenario wouldn’t have happened if there were sacred and sacrosanct zoning agreements in place at that point. Not very sure that the bargain with Atiku and the governors were real, Obasanjo played the ethnic card, which enabled him secure the support of the then South West governors of Alliance for Democracy (AD), who, under a blind arrangement, decided not to field a presidential candidate for the election but to vote for Obasanjo.
The rest is now history. Contrary to the northern position, President Jonathan did not violate the PDP zoning arrangement. In 2010, the constitution allowed him to succeed Yar’Adua and the will of the people propelled him to a massive victory in 2011, and nobody could have stopped him. Zoning was already dead. Obasanjo killed zoning in 2003 with the cooperation of Atiku and co. That was it. Now with three years in the kitty as vice president and five years of interrupted presidency I have every strong indication that President Jonathan will go by 2015.
He will not run for re-election, as anything to the contrary will amount to him stretching his good luck too far and at the expense of a peaceful Nigeria. He should learn a lesson or two from Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of the United States of America. Faced with similar circumstance in 1968, President Johnson, who took office after the assassination of President JF Kennedy on November 22 1963, took a patriotic and honorable decision not to run for a second term, so as to avoid a constitutional crisis of being sworn in as president for a third time and to help America find peace from the Vietnamese war.
Recall that Johnson as Vice President and then President served out approximately one year of Kennedy’s presidency, just like Jonathan as Vice President and then President served out the remaining of Yar’Adua’s one year. In 1964, Johnson won the presidency with 61 percent of the vote and had the widest popular margin in American history – more than 15, 000, 000 votes, just like Jonathan won in 2011 with the widest popular margin in Nigeria’s political history.
Jonathan is currently faced precisely with similar political and constitutional situation, like Lyndon Johnson and I will urge him to emulate Johnson and retire by 2015 and become a great statesman. His decision not to run will help Nigeria’s social recovery from violence that has characterised his administration. Like Johnson, he should, on retirement, devote his full effort unimpeded by politics to the quest for peace.
The North should also forget the presidency in 2015 because it had effectively held on to power for 40 or more years of Nigerian 52 years with no good account of it neither to its people nor to the rest of Nigeria and cannot, in good conscience, claim it has been cheated or politically marginalised in comparable to the South East. Nigeria is structured on six geopolitical zone of North West, North East, North Central, South East, South South and South West. All of the regions already took turns to produce the president, except for the South East.
In the face of the above, the North, in the interest of justice, must chew up her power greed and born to rule mentality and allow the South East to take a fair turn in producing a Nigerian president for a single term of four years. The North will lose nothing under this arrangement. A South easterner, as president, will, in the usual characteristic of the Igbo, cause good governance, spread prosperity and cause development across the country, which is what the far North, in particular, needs now, not power, at all cost.
For more than 40 years since after the civil war, in which the South easterners lost over one million people, many lies had been told against the Igbo in particular. They are branded as warmongers, secessionists and rebels, just to put them down and denied of their rights untrammeled. Despite being targeted with state sponsored hostilities and organised resentment the Igbo still believe in a prosperous indivisible Nigeria, where every man is as good as the other. Whatever is our fault, I believe individually and collectively Igbo people have paid their dues and have given enough of our blood for the unity of this country.
The North, in particular, have hunted, slaughtered and massacred the Igbo people, both in war and peacetime with ferocious lust. They have extracted enough of their pound of flesh and must not continue to assault her with injustice while the rest of Nigeria, particularly the South-West, pretend to remain neutral. Forty years is long enough time for the North to bring a closure to the civil war, a closure to the pains, killings, sufferings and unjustified resentment of South Easterners.
By holding down the Igbo race, stopping her growth, resisting her participation in political leadership due to unfounded fear and conspiracy the North is unwittingly impeding on her own survival and Nigeria’s progress for no nation achieves greatness when it refuses to reckon with the indomitable spirit, enterprise and resilience of one of her largest population. 2015 is therefore, neither for the North nor for Jonathan.
However, in the event that the North and Jonathan insists on running, due to some tall ego and unbridled ambition, the South West must rise up to intervene on the side of justice and to remind the North, in particular, that the rest of Nigeria is not a feudal colony. The South West holds the key to Igbo presidency and I expect her to un-luck it now to put an end to the reign of the oppressor. Finally, for the Igbo nation to gain the trust, confidence and support of the highly sophisticated South West political elite, it must brace up for the leadership challenge by producing a viable candidate that will command the confidence of the people, a leader with wisdom, sagacity, the time, energy and resources required to manage this delicate process.
Such a leader must be highly qualified and must have enough political experience and not just business experience. He must have the outside reach to the West, to the North to some extent and to the international communities. He must, by his own preparation, be qualified to accomplish desirable social objectives within a short time. He must be someone who understands the complexity of Nigeria and must be a leader who is prepared to work under pressure and in comparable produce good governance for the common good of all Nigerians. He must be someone prepared for leadership not a pretender.
The Sun
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