Olakunle Abimbola: Jona e don come again

By Olakunle Abimbola

Here lies our mutton-loving king,
Whose word no man relies on,
Who never said a foolish thing,
And never did a wise one – John Wilmot (1647-1680), Earl of Rochester, on Charles II (1630-1685)
Jona e don come again – what does that remind you of? Afrobeat legend, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and his immortal number, Fela e don come again? Fela, that with his stinging lyrics and brash irreverence whipped wayward Nigerian leaders, military and civilian, into line?
And who does the Wilmot quote above, on King Charles II of England, remind you of? Change “mutton-loving” to “cassava bread-gobbling”, and you would probably see Charles II leap into 21st century Aso Rock; and our own Goodluck Jonathan dive into 17th century Court of Saint James!
There are differences in specifics, of course. While Charles II loved his mutton and Goodluck Jonathan loves his cassava bread, the jury is still out on whether or not, like Charles II, no one ever relies on Jonathan’s word, whether Jonathan never said a foolish thing or ever did a wise one – since his first term is still counting; and he is busy, very busy, ogling a second!
What is without controversy, however, is that like Wilmot’s rather unflattering impression of Charles II (who should have been wiser, for his father Charles I – 1600-1649 – was executed by the Oliver Cromwell mob), Nigerians are nervy about the their president’s lack of verbal rigour, since they hold their breath anytime the president speaks extempore – and he never disappoints by the seeming sheer shallowness of his thinking; and the seeming eternal grudge in his psyche!
It is true: Ibrahim Babaginda peppered us with subversive slipperiness, Sani Abacha sapped us with Stone Age starkness, Olusegun Obasanjo bombed us with empty superiority complex, and Umaru Musa Yar’adua (Allah rest his soul!) teased us with health-challenged taciturnity.
Might Goodluck Jonathan be adding a lack of gravitas and executive inferiority complex to the mix? That brings to the fore the president’s latest gaffe, during his surprise visit to the Police College, in Ikeja, Lagos.
Now, without reference to the merit or demerit of the president’s points, that outburst followed a disturbing pattern, which always sends many a concerned Nigerian reeling.
As a dutiful president, highly paid and generously maintained by the citizens, his job was to go there, after the Channels TV expose, to find out the level of the rot and fix it.
But alas! The president, from his comment, was sadder at the PR disaster the decaying Police College was giving his government than at the scandalous decay of Nigeria Police’s premier training college! How can a president justify his keep with such grudge reasoning?
O yes: a committee has been set up to probe the rot and make recommendations and all that “Jonathanistic” predictable! But by that tragic Freudian slip, of a president fishing for motive when the reality of the situation was sobering enough, most would continue to doubt the appropriateness of Jonathan’s temper for leadership; and even his competence to analyse problems and solve them.
So, Jonathan is more interested in smashing his self-conceived agent provocateurs who allowed “penetration” into the sorry college than he is in fixing the mess. Now, what sort of self-misguided president is that?
But that was not the first time President Jonathan would evince such abhorrent traces. In January 2012, after the “fuel subsidy” removal ill-advised by his Breton-Woods radicals, bent on making Nigeria the eternal peon of their Western metropolitan masters, Goodluck Jonathan fumed without end on how his enemies sponsored the protests; and how these presidential traducers provided Lagos protesters with choice victuals and bottled water; that even his own presidential villagers of Otuoke could not afford!

To start with, such un-presidential whining was absolutely uncalled for – both as private riposte and public presidential counter. In a democracy, the legitimate job of the opposition is to paint government black to ease its own way to power, just as the government, if it falls into opposition, is perfectly entitled to same tactics, to claw its way back from power wilderness.
But the disturbing pattern then – as now in the Police College case – was that the president would blame people protesting a heinous policy rather than rebuke himself that pushed that policy. As it has turned out, the so-called “subsidy” was partisan election gravy which Jonathan wanted Nigerians to, willy-nilly, pay back. What if those protests had not partially checkmated that unconscionable plot!
To compound the Jonathan presidential tragedy, he has surrounded himself with “elders” pushing his cause who nevertheless are no more than juveniles – and wilful, misguided ones at that!
The other day, Elder Godsday Orubebe, minister of Niger Delta affairs, pounced on Rivers Governor Rotimi Amaechi, for no crime than a rumoured aspiration for presidential ticket 2015; and for not “respecting” the president – as if Jonathan were a god to be worshipped willy-nilly and not a republican chief public servant to be judged, rewarded or punished strictly by the worth of his work.
Then on January 24, Edwin Kiagbodo-Clark, Ijaw nationalist, took up the president’s case, descending on the PDP Governors’ Forum for not bowing and trembling before his protégé; and former President Olusegun Obasanjo for subverting the PDP party order.
To be sure, Clark’s attack on Obasanjo is not unjustified, for Obasanjo really ruptured the PDP hierarchy by amassing both presidential and party powers. But is Pa Clark piqued because Obasanjo grabbed power or because Jonathan has the governors to contend with, in his own sorry attempt to repeat Obasanjo’s power-grab rascality?
Pa Clark, with all due respect to him, speaks like one without a sense of history. As a younger man, he served under the young Gen. Yakubu Gowon (1966-1975). Sure, Gowon back then, had his own share of gaffes, like the claim that Nigeria’s problem was not money but how to spend it.
Still, Gowon boasted no doctorate when he ruled (though he earned one later); and was far more callow than Jonathan. But was Gowon a tell-tale of fumbling, and lack of rigour and wisdom like Jonathan, with his PhD, now? Yet, Clark would bad-mouth anyone saying Jonathan is unfit for second term, as his disastrous first-term record is clearly showing – just as he libelled anybody that opposed Jonathan’s presidential bid in 2011.
Well, there is news for Pa Clark and his protégé. A time was, when some power brokers thought you just needed a stamp of the North, no matter how defective you were, and you were as good as president. That prompted the disastrous Bashir Tofa-Sylvester Ugoh 1993 presidential ticket.
Now, Clark and co think if only Jonathan can muscle the PDP nomination (like Obasanjo before him), his presidential encore is assured. Let Pa Clark, and his ilk, dream on. Someone needs to be sacrificed, anyway, to clear the illusion that only the worst is good enough as president for Nigeria.
Jonathan, with his utterly uninspiring present term and clearly illogical fixation with a fresh term, has done enough to earn that electoral disgrace.
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