Jonathan: Hard choices for 2015

subterfuge, chicanery  and other sordid tendencies that define the predictability or otherwise of critical electoral outcomes. The most significant of these is the complement of circumstances that will determine who becomes president come May 29, 2015.  In an emerging democracy like Nigeria, with tendencies of feudalism and oligarchy being remnants from legacy traditional institutions of […]

subterfuge, chicanery  and other sordid tendencies that define the predictability or otherwise of critical electoral outcomes. The most significant of these is the complement of circumstances that will determine who becomes president come May 29, 2015.  In an emerging democracy like Nigeria, with tendencies of feudalism and oligarchy being remnants from legacy traditional institutions of governance, the presidency is easily deified, often not by the incumbents, but by the handlers, many of whom do so only to feather their nests through a hostage or propped president.
 In spite of the ongoing high drama that is pre-election politics in Nigerians, many compatriots may have settled for certain outcomes as irreversible realities that the country has to accept with respect to 2015 and beyond. Three months to the general elections, signals from the political parties are as disturbing as they come. Firstly, the condescension of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to discard time honoured tenets of internal democracy, even as is enshrined in the party’s constitution, and handpick collegiate delegates, many of whom are confirmed cronies of party stalwarts,  in the place of open election of same, remains an issue. The consequences include a wave of self-inflicted in-house crises in its chapters in virtually all the states of the federation, with the climax being the eventual sack of the party’s national secretariat, by some aggrieved members who came all the way for the purpose, from Rivers State. That incident  remains an enduring lesson that the party’s dilemma is more than skin deep.
To accentuate the gravity of the PDP’s headache, it recently suspended its former National Chairman Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, erstwhile believed to be a key point man for President Goodluck Jonathan. What was his offence? He took the party to court to ‘seek the validation of his mandate’ and allegedly ‘tried to scuttle the forthcoming National Convention of the party’ at which the anointing of Jonathan as the party’s sole presidential candidate, would be sealed.
  On the other hand, the inability of the mega opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) to field a presidential candidate, so close to the big elections, has kept its members on edge, as it sets the stage for President Goodluck Jonathan of the (PDP) to run virtually unopposed, for a second term. It remains to be seen how the APC can present a presidential candidate, market same and checkmate the PDP across the nation within the available time, given the socio political circumstances of the country. As for the remaining political parties, Nigerians can only pray that they get their act together and join the show.
 Except the picture changes, it will serve the national interest for Nigerians to start considering the future with the likely incumbency of Goodluck Jonathan extending beyond 2015. And with 2015 approaching, the challenges facing the nation and the administration are equally changing and require unique approaches as well as hard choices as may not have been seen earlier. Needless to point out that the time has come for the President himself to be, or may soon start confronting harder choices than he faced before, and whose handling may make or mar his chances of further successes in office and power.
 Even before 2015 some of the imperatives that will demand novel and hard choices manifest at both domestic and foreign dimensions. At the domestic level they include the deepening of the insurgency in the country, the renascent economic austerity regime with its attendant fallouts of currency devaluation and withdrawal of fuel subsidy, increasing strength of opposition politics, and a succession of looming face-offs with the governors’ forum which will synchronise and synergise with a strong ex-governors’ lobby in the Senate. Others will be the traditional factors of change including the reactions of labour and civil society to stringent government policies.
The most significant factor at the foreign level remains the responses of the world to our various acts of commission and omission.  Already global geo-political considerations are coalescing towards a more trenchant approach to the country, with the United States of America giving us a cold shoulder with respect to critical assistance and collaboration in areas like the suppression of insurgency. It is possible that certain elements in the administration may be tempted to call the US bluff, but that may not be consonant with the present mood and strength of the nation.
In the light of the foregoing, the president needs to re-engineer his machinery, not in conformity with the restrictive prism of his handlers alone, but in line with the perspectives and aspirations of the wider Nigerian society. What Nigerians expect from government is primarily accountability. Government owes the governed a duty to be open and responsive. After all the largesse for running government business does not accrue from the resources of the government officials, but the general public.
A common weakness of many public servants who are at best attaches to potentates, is the tendency to assume omnipotence, and actually delude themselves that they are necessarily the best, even if it is only because they find themselves rightly or accidentally in the corridors of power. History is replete with cases of such appendages wielding more power than their principals. In the same vein the Jonathan administration has its full complement of the good, the bad and the ugly operators.
It is not in dispute that the Jonathan administration has scored significant landmarks in terms of changing the Nigerian story. With major reforms in the power sector, railways and road construction – to name a few, it has earned for itself some positive rating in the annals of governance in Nigeria. For it to endear itself further and make a second term historic, the president’s hard choices must start with changing the face of government from that of  an agency for conquest of the governed , to one of  service to them.
For instance the Jonathan Nigerians have come to know does not need to trade vituperations with anybody to make his point, as obtains in the primitive courts of better forgotten despots. Secondly to facilitate a new regime of improved responsiveness to burning issues of the day, his presently suspect strategy team has to go.
If actually the observation that Goodluck Jonathan is the most unjustly vilified president in Nigeria’s history, as often claimed by some of his handlers, then they should respond by helping his government share more smile with Nigerians.  
That is what Nigerians yearn for.