A foxy president

Here it is: Try yourself to scan the mind of Dr Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan for a moment. Here’s what we think we know. Faced with a barefooted childhood, an unhappy bowler-hat, a hostile wife, unfitting black-coat and a grammatically opportunistic name, Goodluck has but one option to reduce the pressure on him and his […]

Here it is:
Try yourself to scan the mind of Dr Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan for a moment. Here’s what we think we know. Faced with a barefooted childhood, an unhappy bowler-hat, a hostile wife, unfitting black-coat and a grammatically opportunistic name, Goodluck has but one option to reduce the pressure on him and his desperation to continue to rule at all cost-jump off his high horse, extend the olive branch, make peace overtures-some small, some big, some symbolic, others substantive-that will buy him time and space to live to fight another day.
Nigeria’s problem are systematic and beyond any one man. Jonathan must be lying to himself that he can solve Nigeria’s problem with his sour minority rhetoric. In this, he is, to a large extent, politically correct but realistically, a dark horse. There were economic issues before Jonathan came and there will be long after him. There was militancy before, there are militant bombs now and there will be militancy in the future. The state was on decline before, it is on the precipice now, and will definitely be beyond recovery if this set of marauders are allowed to continue.
So if you’re Jonathan or a friend of his, be realistic. The successes you can record will only be of the most limited kind possible. For the rest of us who aren’t regarded, it’s true that lowering our expectation of this government is not only convenient but a realistic assumption when nothing is eventually achieved. So this rejection of personal culpability that Jonathan is engaging in is only worsening things and not bettering them.
If Jonathan reneges on this treacherous slide, the looming crisis would abate; PDP’s dwindling fortunes in the east and the north would recover; and party could arrive in 2015 with a fighting spirit. On the contrary, do nothing at least nothing good or lucky, and Jonathan and his government will be chewed-up and spat out by the forces agitating, covertly and overtly, to oust him. In the last couple of months I would have written enough about Jonathan to earn a gizzard. It is because I often wonder why Jonathan would choose to be frog-jumped into an increasingly certain ouster instead of doing what’s necessary to earn a reprieve and improve his party’s prospects at the 2015 election?
Jonathan has already promised this country a free, fair and credible election, why wouldn’t he simply consolidate his promise with some hard decisions on the economy, some smart decisions about the judiciary, some quick fixes on security and some sure steps in power supply.
The sure-bet answer isn’t necessarily the right one but it is the possible one.  So let’s journey through the mind of the regent of the PDP and try and figure out what his game-plan could be, beginning from that infamous denial of the treaty of gentlemen. His appetite for power, just for the sake of it, is nauseating. The early predictions that Jonathan and his bunch want to grab as much as they could as quickly as they could before swimming to safer havens has begun to manifest.   The few years the PDP has been in power, it has proved to be a governance disaster, eliciting groans from even the most faithful of its supporters. Now, alarm bells are ringing across the country. The several PDP by-election victories offer little comfort. Polls are almost always rigged and no one cares about the issues but the lucre. And now that the party leader has decided to stab his party in the back, it only remains to be seen how much destruction will befall the country.
Now, if that’s the scenario you’re looking at as Jonathan, then an unconstitutional ouster by the unhappy brass, a judicial defeat by a hostile group of men in black robes or a forced drift to alternative parties by those who hate your opportunism wouldn’t seem so bad, would it?
Fifteen years into this democracy, the PDP has been exposed as wretchedly incompetent and with little appetite or capacity to even try and fix things; which means the biggest party in Africa has turned out to watershed the biggest flop in politics and now it also threatens a peaceful transition of power that is a preordained arrangement within its structures. In a delicious paradox, the one thing that does offer Jonathan and his PDP hope for a brighter electoral future is the very group trying to undermine them: Jonathan’s friends.
If those friends succeed in bringing down this government they will get the backup of the disaffected at-the-moment PDP base. Anger over yet another PDP government dismissed before its time will smoulder among the parts base.  The upshot? The PDP base will be shattered once and for all. The regular, principled, democratic way to mollify all these onerous demands is easy: it entails fixing the economy, correcting governance failures, re-establishing the states writ in a strife-torn country and stopping the bombs from ticking off. But that would test even the ablest of administrators and the most towering of statesmen, personalities the PDP doesn’t exactly have a surfeit of at the moment.
As the lowest-common-denominator, success is more straightforward: it triggers the visceral, emotional reaction of the average voter. It makes that voter feel like it’s the PDP against the world, and galvanizes him to want to conquer and he is likely to stick by you. Faced with the likelihood of a devastating knockout in a fair -and – square fight at the polls, Jonathan could be facing a TKO. That way, he and his friends can bounce away somewhere down the road, buoyed by an angry PDP base which will have forgotten about the party’s governance troubles.
After a long foray into Jonathan’s mind I came to the conclusion that Jonathan is self-destructive, because he is hard-wired to pick the worst among available options and because Jonathan will be Jonathan. How would you then describe Jonathan but crazy like a fox?