Jonathan, Jackson and Sharpton

I nevertheless feel sorry for Jonathan because I know that in spite of their being privileged, presidents are, after all, as human as all of us. Like all of us, they are subject to feelings of pain, unfairness, injustice and they can also develop a victimhood complex because, every day, they are savagely criticized and […]

I nevertheless feel sorry for Jonathan because I know that in spite of their being privileged, presidents are, after all, as human as all of us. Like all of us, they are subject to feelings of pain, unfairness, injustice and they can also develop a victimhood complex because, every day, they are savagely criticized and even abused unfairly for problems they neither created nor compounded.  Worse still, by virtue of their offices, they sometimes have to carry their pains with stoic resolve. They dare not complain publicly as their doing so may do enormous damage to the realm they are presiding over. They hold so many pains and have little outlets for expressing them and nothing can be more painful and more suffocating like the lack of chance to let loose some excruciating pains.
I feel for Jonathan because he looks to me more or less like a victim of Nigeria’s peculiar circumstances. He arrived on the throne at the most challenging of times. He came at a time when, as my socialist friends would put it, all the thesis and antithesis and the contradictions and crisis of Nigeria’s nationhood came to a head and needed to be resolved. And they came all at one time. He inherited a lot of problems he never created and some of them he has tried to give his best shot without any tangible dividends yet for the people to appreciate his efforts. Some pundits have made the perfectly valid observation that presidents are not elected to solve only the problems created by their administration or those created in their times. They are there to solve all the problems of both their times and the ones of previous times. Yet, we must admit that some problems have no easy solutions.
Take the Boko Haram insurgency, for instance, which has come to define the Jonathan presidency more than anything else.  Those who are charitable admit that the problem did not start with him. But that is where their fairness ends. They proceed to castigate him, unfairly to my mind, over his handling of the crisis, charging that his ‘delay’ in viciously wiping out the sect at their infancy is responsible for why they grew into the monster they have become today. I consider this charge unfair because that argument ignores the fact that he is called upon to fight a friendly/brotherly/ guerrilla war which is not an easy war to fight anywhere in the world. You cannot appear to be brutish in fighting a domestic war such as the one against Boko Haram or else you risk alienating a substantial portion of the population. Blood is thicker than water.
As I argued in a piece I did on Jonathan’s presidency two years ago, I consider his handling of BH insurgents as one of his delicate political achievements considering the nature of our country. Although BH reared its ugly monstrous head under late President Yar’ Adua, a Muslim,  if Jonathan, a Christian,  had tried to wipe away BH as many critics charge and lament that he ought to have done, his use of brutish means and methods  would have ignited a religious war. Some Muslims who are now complaining that initially he was not tough enough on BH would have been the very ones who would have accused him of waging a religious war against a people who were no more than ‘peaceful apostles’ of Islam.
Our nation is driven by sentiments and anyone who sits on that seat where Jonathan is sitting and is not conscious of this fact will not last as long as Jonathan has done. At that time when Jonathan inherited the presidency, the cup of iniquity of BH was not as full as now to have ignited the kind of bitter sentiment everyone across our fault lines now harbours that they should be wiped away by all means fair or foul. A precipitate savage response to the BH group at that time would have spelled danger to Jonathan and Nigeria and I think the man knew that and avoided a rash action.
I pointed out  in my last week’s piece that Jonathan was right when he made the  observation that a nation should pray hard not to have a terrorist group emerge on its soil because once it does, it is not easy to fight and defeat them. This was not the confession of a man who had come to a resigned acceptance that Boko Haram has come to stay in our land. He was making a statement of truth in light of what has become reality in many countries of the world today.  And any terrorism that is founded on a religious agenda is even much harder to defeat for nothing motivates man to commit savagery against his fellow human like the invocation of God as the cause of his action. See what was done during the Crusades. See what was done during the Inquisition. See what Al-Qaida is doing in the world today.
It is easy to reason out terrorists whose fight is based on ideology especially when political steps have been taken to effect change in the direction that the armed agitators want. But with terrorists who believe they are fighting on behalf of God, they can be so implacable. And that is what we are seeing in BH. Even if Jonathan steps down today or is forced to do so, his successor is not likely to put an end to BH any time soon. Am I sounding pessimistic? The answer is no. Terrorists are one hell of a people to deal with.
As Jonathan is facing criticism from every quarter, my words of comfort and consolation for him are the words which the charismatic African American leader the Reverend Jesse Jackson once gave to another Black leader and protégé, the Reverend Al Sharpton as quoted in Michael Eric Dyson’s book April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Death and How it Changed America: ‘’… have you been in a football game? If you’ve played football, you noticed that the players, the offense and the defence, they’re all thinking about one thing. The guy with the ball. If everybody’s after you, it must be that you have the ball. Nobody’s chasing anybody that doesn’t have the ball’’. Jonathan must realize that he is being chased because he is the one on the hot seat now and so much is expected of him. Jackson went ahead to tell Al Sharpton: ‘’Great leaders are those who can suffer and take  pain, and still give out positive aura and inspirational hope while never betraying the pain they experience. Pain is part of the price you pay if you’re going to lead, and if you’re not willing to pay that price, you ought not to lead’’.