By Monima Daminabo
Talks about past presidents of the country put Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan in a class of his own. No matter what any of his unrepentant…
Talks about past presidents of the country put Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan in a class of his own. No matter what any of his unrepentant critics will say, one thing that will not be denied him is his aversion to hold on to power as a do or die dispensation. His rather ‘un-Nigerian’ disposition of aversion towards “seizing, grabbing and running with” as well as holding on to political power at any cost, obviously discomfited not a few of his ardent supporters, who would have wished that he fought even dirty, to hold on to the presidency in his time, no matter the price.
But the patriot in him would hold out throughout his tenure as president between 2009 and 2015, and even during the 2015 presidential elections when he saved the country from impending crisis of apocalyptic dimension, by declaring that his political ambition was not “worth the blood of any Nigerian”. Needless to add that such a declaration prevented the play out of the typical, Nigerian-style, gangster-land, electoral madness which routinely features play outs of vote-rigging and ballot box snatching, as well as all-out armed combats, avoidable murders and other malfeasances that usually accompany electoral exercises in the country.
Today, the country and the entire world are celebrating those eternal peace-building words on marble by Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, and now hold him in high esteem as the most valuable export from Nigeria, to the terrain of global geopolitics as well as diplomacy, and have him travelling from country to country to promote peaceful co-existence among disparate peoples of the world. Not a few African countries and even some beyond the continent have benefitted from the shining example of temperance in political leadership from him. This is just as not a few Nigerians also recall with nostalgia, the Jonathan years as easily qualifying as Nigeria‘s golden-era of presidential dispensation.
The simple reason for the success story of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan as president was his well-honed disposition to allow Nigerians freely breathe the air of democratic liberties, including providing the opportunity for the country to discuss, review and define the preferred course of governance for the future, in the 2014 National Conference. For Nigerians who still remember, the credo during his tenure was that the country needed more of strong institutions instead of strong leaders.
However, soon after his tenure Nigerians were to see the other side of use of political power as the credo during his successor – Muhammadu Buhari changed towards a preference for strong individuals, instead of strong institutions. Hence was the era of President Muhammadu Buhari marked by the supplanting of the constitutional primacy of statutory institutions, by the redoubtable proclivities of the president and his junta of men in power. This syndrome ran all through the eight years until 2023, when his largely uninspiring tenure petered out due to the effluxion of time, to be succeeded by the current Bola Ahmed Tinubu ascendancy.
Placing the Nigerian presidency in perspective, the period between 2015 and 2023 has featured in the main, significant swings in leadership paradigms; ranging from the season of generous political liberties of the Jonathan era, to the daunting period of quarantined freedom of the Buhari misrule, and now the Tinubu dispensation that is unfolding with suspect tendencies of an oligopolistic dispensation, which may cage Nigerians more viciously than they had ever witnessed all through the country’s history. This derives from its inclination to restrict citizen liberties and fixation on tackling any tendency towards administration change even if conditions for such manifest. Yet, regime change under prescribed circumstances remains a constitutional provision.
Having come into office through the inspiring message of renewing the hope of Nigerians for a better future, the early administrative steps of the government unfortunately led to a most debilitating regime of wide spread privations for Nigerians across the entire country, featuring runaway prices of food and other basics of daily living, with widespread hunger and starvation. Inevitably, the situation ushered a downturn in the flow of public goodwill towards the administration and led to the wave of mass street protests across the entire country, with more of such anomic tendencies looming in the horizon to manifest, just in case the administration adopts further missteps.
In the present circumstances, the burning issue now is which way the administration is going, in the light of the prevailing circumstances – the most topical of which is the aftermath of recent protests, as such stands to define what support the wider society will avail it. Even as the Tinubu administration may opt to beat its chest that it is heading in the right direction on the basis of its economic and policy models as fashioned in the comfort of air conditioned offices that are far away from street level Nigeria, the complement of reactions from Nigerians, especially the protests, provide more than enough impetus for a change in direction by the administration.
Rather, what the administration is seemingly more fixated on is boxing the entire country into a paradigm paralysis, whereby hardly can any brainwave beyond the narrow, mental constructs of the same team whose enterprise spawned the nationwide protests in the first place, see the light of day. Yet these are the same operatives and pretenders in the presidential corridors of power who, courtesy of revelations from the pervasive social media platforms, are associated with suffocating strangle-holds on the country’s political and economic strongholds, such as oil and gas, as well as banking, security and the dynamics of leadership selection.
This, however, is hoping that Nigerians’ wait for credible reforms under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, will not be as endless as waiting for the proverbial Godot.