2015: has Jonathan delivered on his pact with God?

Nigeria is no ordinary country. It is one of a set of bell weather countries around the world put and held together by divine will to advance God’s grand design for human kind. In the case of Nigeria, it is obvious that its manifest divine destiny is to lead God’s plan for the renaissance of […]

Nigeria is no ordinary country. It is one of a set of bell weather countries around the world put and held together by divine will to advance God’s grand design for human kind. In the case of Nigeria, it is obvious that its manifest divine destiny is to lead God’s plan for the renaissance of peoples of African race whose collective experience is one of subjugation and ridicule by other races of human kind. Its convenient geostrategic position as a confluence of African cross currents has proven an attraction for the building of empires and kingdoms predating the advent of European colonization of Africa. Out of this has emerged a uniquely African country aggregating the continent’s diversity thus carrying its hopes and aspirations in the world. It follows therefore that the parameters of every Nigerian leader past, present and future will be determined by how effectively he advances the Nigerian nation in the pursuit of this divinely ordered path.
In this regard, President Jonathan’s ascension was God’s way of demonstrating to Nigerians that by his own will anybody from among the scores of ethnic groups could be called upon to preside over the affairs of the country which he has put together by his will and power. The Devine covenant with President Jonathan was for him, free from the encumbrances of coming from a major ethnic group, to apply himself in presiding over this country in an objective, fair manner giving all Nigerians a sense of belonging, hope and faith in the country and in the process helping to advance the grand plan of God for Nigeria.
From the outset however, once safely ensconced in office, President Jonathan set out to systematically degrade the institutions that helped propel him to power and those that he met. He wasted no time in distancing himself from the coalition of civil society groups and individuals that fought successfully for his constitutional right to be installed in office as successor to the terminally ailing incumbent President Umaru Yar’adua. To the generality of Nigerians who had sympathized with his cause and hoped that having rose from humble beginnings and coming from a deprived environmental background as majority of them, he would return the favour by lessening their socio-economic burden, he chose the inopportune time of his first seasonal period in office to raise the price of petroleum products not minding the hardship that would cause. Next he turned to his political party, the People’s Democratic Party. By sleight of hand, working surreptitiously he began the process of identifying and marginalizing those well placed individuals within the party whom he felt uncomfortable with. With time as his confidence grew he began to show his hand openly by intervening and imposing his will on the party in total disregard of laid down procedure. Today with scores of highly influential individuals having already left the party more are set to follow mainly as a result of the blizzard of undemocratic imposition of candidates for various elective posts for the 2015 elections all traceable to President Jonathan’s desire to subvert the internal processes of the party for his own ends.
While the foregoing could be said to be at the micro level, events at the national level under the Jonathan Presidency has proven to be more damaging to the fortunes of the nation. The law and order challenges in the North East which he inherited from his predecessor, has under his tenure become a full blown insurgency threatening the very fabric of the nation. As has become typical of him President Jonathan has chosen to take a detached posture about the almost daily harvest of fatalities from the insurgency in the North East and the unrelenting spate of bombings and sectarian violence elsewhere in the country.  By universal acknowledgement, the signature of this Jonathanian posture was his twin failure to rescue or secure the release of the over 200 girls abducted in Chibok, and his decision to attend a partisan political rally in Kano, twenty four hours after a tragic and devastating bomb blast that took the lives of scores of commuters in Nyanya, Abuja.
President Jonathan’s incompetence is not restricted to issues of security and safety alone. By his askance attention to transparency and integrity, Jonathan’s administration has proven to be a boon to corruption which by independent accounts has cost the nation a lot in terms of development. As a result Nigeria is now ranked below such resource poor countries as Mali in the development indices.
In the light of these glaring cases of incompetence and underperformance, it can only amount to poor judgment on the part of President Jonathan to seek to continue to rule over a Nation whose expectation he has not met over the past six years. Clearly what has informed this poor judgment on the part of President Jonathan is the alluring but mistaken notion of the power and advantage of incumbency by which it is assumed that a sitting President can always use the apparatus of his office to fend off attempts to unseat him. But like all things transient in life the power of incumbency cannot trump the power of God who gives power to whom he wishes just as he granted to President Jonathan six years ago against all odds. Clearly the President Jonathan, who rode on an inclusive coalition of Nigerians across this vast country and on the momentum of God to power, is a different Jonathan six years after. The Jonathan seeking to continue in power in 2015 is a divisive President who has not only divided and almost destroyed his own political party, but is also replicating the same methods on the country over which he presides with the same consequences. Clearly President Jonathan’s 2015 project is at variance with the Devine plan for Nigeria and having failed to fulfil the covenant with God on Nigeria he cannot find favour with God on his 2015 elections plan.
Gadu is a former Information Attaché in the Nigerian embassies in Germany and UK