On coming back with empty stomachs

Dr Goodluck Jonathan is celebrated as the first doctorate degree holder ever to lead Nigeria but this boast is often undermined by his communication skills. Last Thursday however he contributed to the political dictionary a phrase that will be remembered for some time. He said those men and women who defected from the Peoples Democratic […]

Dr Goodluck Jonathan is celebrated as the first doctorate degree holder ever to lead Nigeria but this boast is often undermined by his communication skills. Last Thursday however he contributed to the political dictionary a phrase that will be remembered for some time. He said those men and women who defected from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the victorious All Progressives Congress (APC) in the wake of this year’s elections “would return to PDP with empty stomachs.”
Jonathan made several interesting claims at the occasion where he received a report from the PDP Presidential Campaign Organisation headed by its director general Dr Ahmadu Ali. From what could be gleaned from his comportment, the president believed he was scoring serious political points in a humorous way. It is difficult for many people to follow the trend of his thoughts since he tends to jumble up many issues together, to assume his listeners know what he is talking about and he also tends to leave many statements hanging, begging for completion.  
Jonathan likened the recent elections in Nigeria to the civil war and said, “The first book I read on the civil war was My Command by Obasanjo. He gave his perspective on what he saw and the role he played. If you read it, the dimension is tangential to the threat…I know that the issue of the 2015 general elections, maybe after some years we will get a different perspective. With my position I have the privilege to know better than most other people. The key thing is not whether we lost or won election. The key thing is that Nigeria as a nation must move forward.”
It is amazing, I think, that the first book Dr. Jonathan read on the civil war was My Command even though he was a citizen of the Biafra Republic while it lasted. My Command was published in 1987; at least I read John de St Jorre’s book The Nigerian Civil War in my secondary school library in 1973. Between that time and 1987 a lot of books were published on the civil war. They include but not limited to Eddie Iroh’s trilogy 48 Guns for the General, Toads of War and Siren in the Night; Elechi Amadi’s Sunset at Dawn; Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset in Biafra; Bernard Odogwu’s No Place to Hide; Nelson Ottah’s Rebels Against Rebels; Frederick Forsyth’s Emeka, Prof Isawa Elaigwu’s Gowon, Ojukwu’s Because I Am Involved; Alexander Madiebo’s The Biafran Revolution and the Nigerian Civil War, and Cyprian Ekwensi’s Divided We Stand. It is not good that a PhD from Port Harcourt University missed all of those.
Anyway, what Jonathan is saying here is that Obasanjo’s account of the civil war was lopsided and he gave primacy to his personal role in the conflict. Actually, many people said as much when the book was published in 1987. Now, is Jonathan saying that Dr Ahmadu Ali’s account of the 2015 election presented to him that day was similar to Obasanjo’s book, or was he saying that the widespread local and international praise of the 2015 general elections will one day be reviewed and the contributions of PVC and card reader will be downgraded?
President Jonathan then switched to another lane without “trafficating” and said, “For PDP, I always say that you don’t need to go to Americans to know how they moved from Democrats to Republican and so on. You can even come to Ghana very close to us. The present administration lost election some eight years back and it came back. The issue is how do we re-consolidate our party and we are committed and work hard. PDP will come back stronger.” He is saying here that PDP and APC will soon be alternating in power the way Democrats and Republicans do in the U.S. Is it now that PDP has seen the value of power alternation? In the 16 years when it held total sway, PDP did not remember the American example but was instead threatening to rule continuously for 60 years.
Dr Jonathan then made another controversial claim. He said, “PDP is still the dominant party. If you look at the result, the difference is 2 point something [million] votes. If you look at areas where it appears that the PDP scored so low, PDP cannot get that kind of result. But the elections are over, the country remains.” There are three issues jumbled up together in this statement. One is the claim that PDP is still the dominant party in Nigeria when the recent elections took away its control of the presidency, reduced the number of states it controls from 21 to 14 and took away its majorities in both Senate and House of Representatives.
Secondly, the president seems to be saying that the election results are insignificant because only two and a half million votes separated the winner from the runner up. How big a majority must one get to win an election? In 1979 Shagari defeated Awolowo with 600,000 votes. President Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon with 113,000 votes in the American elections of 1960. Thirdly there is the claim that “if you look at where PDP scored low, it cannot get that kind of result.” President Jonathan did not say which states he has in mind but most likely he was referring to the states where APC reaped millions of votes namely Kano, Katsina, Kaduna, Bauchi and Jigawa. Since PDP has governors and powerful ministers from these states, Jonathan feels it should have garnered more votes. Yet APC too did very poorly in Rivers, Edo and Imo states even though it has governors there.
Even though it was good for Nigeria that Jonathan quickly conceded the election, PDP ought to have arranged with one of the smaller candidates in the election to go to the tribunal so that the card reader could be called as witness in those states that had the largest vote tallies. Of course that includes Delta, Abia, Rivers and Akwa Ibom. As it is, we have now lost the chance to get a tribunal to subpoena evidence from card readers to cross-check the votes cast in the presidential election. This would have been a much simpler task than in 2011 when CPC wanted to prove fraudulent thumb printing of ballot papers. Instead of getting thumb-print experts to prove this, it chose to raise dust over lack of access to INEC’s biometric data bank.
The president then came to his main point which was that party members should not desert because of the election defeat. He said, “I encourage members of our party to remain and not be in disillusion just because we lost the presidential election and decide to go to where to get things that will feed their stomachs or something. It is not easy. I have been here for over five years and you can hardly satisfy 50 per cent of those who worked for you. So, these people who are running, some of them are already carpet-crossing. They will come back with empty stomachs because they would touch the primary members of their party before they would look at you, the peripheral, because they know you are coming because you think there is food. Before it will get to you, the food will be gone. So let us be committed to PDP.”
Even as the president spoke, the Chief Executive Officer of his controversial Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) Chief Ifeanyi Ubah suddenly burst into tears and began to sob uncontrollably. Since Ubah is the CEO of Capital Oil, it is unlikely that he was worried by the prospect of an empty stomach. However, the thought of losing billions of naira in regular “fuel subsidy” payments is enough to elicit tears even from party billionaires, not to mention the party foot soldiers. How can you tell them not to follow the food when in your heydays a PDP chieftain famously said Chief Bola Ige was invited into the cabinet “to come and eat”?