Jonathan's Dream of Free & Fair Election In Nigeria Is Possible, But On Two Conditions

by Dr. Wumi Akintide

Politicians all over the world, quite often, say one thing for public consumption but do entirely different things behind closed doors. The outcome is one step forward and two steps backward which ultimately means retrogression, if you get my logic. Those politicians figure out what they think the public wants to hear and they just tailor their messages accordingly.
The observation is not just a Nigerian problem but a global one.

The few wise among politicians, however, prefer not to pull a fast one on the public and their own conscience. I see the public pronouncement of President Jonathan to shoot for a legacy of free and fair elections in Nigeria from that prism. His heart is in the right place without any question , but I think he is still not up to par with the passion and the commitment needed to obliterate election rigging in Nigeria because even in America voter suppression, like we witness in Ekiti and Osun, is a subtle form of election rigging.

That some of our politicians see Americans doing it makes it right or justified in their convoluted minds. I draw that conclusion based on President Jonathan’s track record so far but I still give him credit for following the Yar Adua’s mindset or preference rather than that of Obasanjo who once made the unfortunate statement he should forever regret that Nigeria is still not ready for free and fair elections.

There are a few things President Jonathan still needs to do...

to be taken seriously on his promise to wrestle election rigging to the ground in Nigeria. His low tolerance level for blatant corruption sends precisely the wrong message because corruption is the twin sister of election rigging. You cannot fight one and leave the other. Getting his party to deviate from its mindset to want to rig every election is a Herculean task that only a President with a mind of his own can achieve.

It is not a mission President Jonathan can accomplish if he is out to please everybody because some in his party and the opposition profit from the malady and they don’t ever want to see it go away.

The President has to be willing to sacrifice his ambition for re-election by all means and at all cost, if that is what it takes to get the job done. A President who does that may be unpopular for a season like Abraham Lincoln when he first passed the Emancipation Proclamation Law in America. Likewise, FDR's signing of the life-changing Social Security Bill initially faced stiff opposition from the Republicans in US congress and even a few of his party leaders.

Ronald Reagan also encountered widespread opposition when he chose to go forward with his amnesty program for illegal immigrants in America. US supreme court Chief Justice Robert, who routinely voted as a conservative surprised, and indeed angered many conservatives, when he cast the deciding vote in ruling Obamacare as legitimate and constitutional.

Barack Obama has his lowest approval polling of 40 per cent or lower today because of his courage to sign into Law the Affordable Healthcare Legislation that passed the US Congress by the narrowest of margins due to stiff opposition from the Republicans who have since made 55 attempts to repeal the Law and have since been threatening to impeach Obama because they hate to see a black President take the everlasting credit for such a monumental law affecting the lives 46 million Americans.

They instinctively knew that their hopes to regain the White House was forever doomed, if Obama and the Democrats were allowed to take all the credit. Rather than join with the President to improve some of the provisions of the Law, they think total repeal is the way to go.That is part of the reason I keep predicting the Republicans have gone mad. They do more harm to themselves.They are just too blind to see it.

Obama would go down in history as one of the greatest American Presidents if he goes ahead to add his comprehensive Immigration initiative by executive order since the Republican-controlled Congress in their foolhardiness, is never going to pass the Legislation.

To be a great President Jonathan has got to be willing to stand up for what is right for the country regardless of how that stand may affect his political fortunes and ambitions. He is already President of Nigeria and nothing is going to change that even he is President for only a few months like Ernest Sonekan or Abdulsalam Abubakar who was President for just one year.

Jonathan should sometimes find the courage to overrule some of the hawks in his party to do what is right for Nigeria. He should have the courage to let his party know he is President of Nigeria and not President of the P.D.P alone. They may disagree with him for a little while, but he would go down in history as a great President. Jonathan should realize that any good he does to Nigeria is really self-serving because he is part of Nigeria and he has no other country to call his own other than Nigeria.

Ibrahim Babangida who initiated the A4 conditionality to have voters line up for their votes to be counted on the spot at each polling station initially demonstrated the promises of a potentially great President but he blew it. The same Babangida introduced the Structural Adjustment Program which was the right thing to do even though it was very unpopular back then. The program failed because IBB lacked the discipline, the integrity and the honesty of purpose to make it work.

Ibrahim Babangida also introduced the 2 party system which would have fundamentally changed Nigeria forever, but because the man had a hidden agenda to never leave office or allow a southerner to take over, he blew it again. By so doing, he unleashed a reaction that went far beyond his control when his Second- in- Command, Sani Abacha derailed his evil genius plan to install Ernest Sonekan as interim President to appease the Southwest for robbing M.K.O Abiola of his mandate.

Sani Abacha took over power while permanently sending IBB into a turkey farm against his own will. IBB did make several attempts after that to regain power, but Obasanjo and Danjuma, the two senior colleagues he feared the most in the Nigerian Military simply cut him loose frustrating his plans. They told him to hit the road and never come back, and that was it for I.B.B.

If you refuse to leave power, power can decide to leave you. That was what happened to I.B.B and the rest in History. President Jonathan came into political limelight riding on the coat tail of Obasanjo who singlehandedly chose him as Vice President to Umaru Yar Adua on the presumption he could continue to macro-manage both of them and still remain in control of Nigeria after leaving office. 

God had his own plan which Obasanjo could not fathom or second guess. Yar Adua died in office and the door was open for a Goodluck Jonathan to pick up the mantel of Power without dropping a sweat. God put Jonathan there for a purpose. If he appreciates that, he would deliver on his promise to truly transform Nigeria. Jonathan, I must add, is not as bad as some of us are painting him. If he is open to advise, he still has the time to turn his reputation and image around like Murtala Mohammed did when upon coming to power turned over to the federal government his row of houses in Kano built with money he had illegally acquired.

I believe Jonathan has started doing that with his apparent decision to rehabilitate the Igbos by putting them in very sensitive positions in Nigeria thus paving the way for the Igbos to reclaim their right to the Presidency someday. An igbo man is Secretary to the Federal Government today. An Igbo woman is Minister of Petroleum and another well- qualified Igbo woman is Minister of Finance. The Igbos have never had it so good since the Biafran war. I give Jonathan credit for that because the Igbos are just too important in the Nigerian equation to be treated as second class citizens. The Igbos represent, like the Yorubas and the Hausas, one of the three tripods upon which Nigeria stands. If you remove any one of the three Nigeria cannot stand.

If Jonathan is seen to be non-partisan in some of his actions as President, he guarantees for himself a pathway to victory in 2015. He has to distance himself from some of the excesses of his party men and nominees for public office like Obanikoro, Iyiola Omisore, Fani Kayode and the current chairman of Police Affairs who deliberately violated the electoral Law in Ekiti and Osun States in the name of the President.

They think the best way to please the President is to be more Roman-catholic than the Pope by doing things they think the President would appreciate. The President can drastically redeem his image by doing some of the things suggested in the remaining segment of this write-up.

I want to first of all apologize to the President for being very hard on him in some of my articles. I rooted for him when some elements from the North tried to deny him of his chance to succeed Yar Adua as required by the Nigerian Constitution. I disagree with him on his handling of corruption in Nigeria but I can see he is making some progress on his efforts to outlaw election rigging in Nigeria. The two problems are two sides of the same coin as I hinted earlier.

I will be the first to admit that Nigerians are a very difficult people to govern. I get that. I know the President, as the first minority President in Nigeria, has his job cut out for him in his quest to leave behind a good legacy. He surely can take a script from Barack Obama, the first black President who is so underrated by his political enemies just because of his skin color. The Republicans say a lot of things that are not true about Obama. They openly confess they want to see him fail forgetting that such a failure is bound to drag the rest of the country and themselves in the mud because they are also part of the country.

The same thing is true of Nigeria where a lot of actions taken by President Jonathan are being misinterpreted and misconstrued to make the President look bad. I have been guilty of that myself in some of my comments on the President. But there are still some pertinent observations the President needs to hear loud and clear if he wants to achieve his ultimate goal. His decision to fight corruption and to leave a legacy of free and fair elections are two of those problems. He still has a lot of work to do to cross that Rubicon.

I respected Umaru Yar Adua and I still do because he was candid and humble enough to admit his own election was flawed and that he was going to do something about it. He actually did a few things to assure Nigerians he truly meant business. His decision to give back to Lagos State its entitlement from Federal allocations that Obasanjo’s has refused to pay, was one of such gestures. He refused to influence the Judiciary in deciding any of the cases referred to it by the election tribunals.

Unlike Obasanjo, he gave the judges a free hand to make their rulings. Yar Adua did not subscribe to Obasanjo’s impunity in intimidating and punishing the opposition parties in Nigeria just because he could. Umaru did not buy the argument of Obasanjo that the PDP has a right to forever rule Nigeria thereby creating a one-party dictatorship. Obasanjo made the self-serving determination that Nigeria is not yet ripe for the kind of Democracy practiced in places like the United Kingdom and the United States.

Unfortunately Yar Adua was terminally-ill and he did not live long enough to fulfill all of his promises to Nigeria but he knew and understood that a strong and vibrant opposition was an asset to Democracy.

Murtala Mohammed arguably the best of our military Heads of State presented Nigerians a laundry list of what his Administration wanted to do and he urged the News Media to hold him accountable and to hold his feet to fire if for any reason he did not keep his promises. He survived for only 200 days as a catalyst for change in Nigeria but he delivered on his promise with clock-like precision never before witnessed at the Federal level.

The only one among our civilian leaders who totally kept his promise to change his region by implementing some of the ideas he had learnt from his student days in the United Kingdom was Obafemi Awolowo. The Western Region became the pace setter for the rest of the country under his leadership. Awolowo gave the Western Region the edge it has passed on to the Southwest in education, economic, industrial and social development. He was, without any question, a strong leader even though he had his own faults as a human being.

President Jonathan cannot retain his popularity and appeal with the PDP if he wants to be a change agent as he professes. His selection of Professor Jega to lead the INEC was one of his best decisions as President because many Nigerians knew that Professor Jega was a radical who would not be easy to push around or micro-manage. I give Jonathan kudos for sticking to his guns and for allowing Jega a free hand to do what he has to do to ensure credible elections in Nigeria.

The last two elections in Ekiti and Osun have shown that Nigeria is making progress and that is something Nigerians should celebrate and be proud of. We still have a long way to go, however, but we are making progress. Professor Jega should be allowed more time to sanitize our conduct of elections like he has already started to do.

President Jonathan needs to work on the alleged militarization of Ekiti and Osun States during their last Governorship elections. Deploying no less than 73,000 soldiers or Law Enforcement agents to Osun was clearly designed to harass and intimidate illiterate voters. It was an abuse of authority the President can avoid in the future by heeding the advice I would now elaborate upon with the remaining segment of this article.

The President ought to have summoned a meeting of all interested parties in those elections including the leadership of INEC, the leadership of the competing parties, the Police and D.S.S and the Military and the Media a week or two before those elections. He should have announced to all and sundry what he expected from all of them so everybody could be sure of his position in a very transparent way. The notion of soldiers and police going to arrest and detain leaders of A.P.C as if they were waging a war against the opposition should have been avoided or discouraged.

The Minister of State in the Defense Ministry going to Osun State with no less than 50 soldiers as body guards was clearly a misuse of power designed to intimidate and harass the opposition. It is alright to keep a few soldiers or Police men at each polling station to maintain Law and Order. But putting the whole state under blockade and making it look like a war zone was excessive.

All those armored vehicles roaming around Osogbo should have been deployed to confront the Boko Haram militants in Chibok and the Northeast and not to the law abiding citizens of Osun who needed to go cast their votes. The people arrested should not all have come from the opposition party alone because there are also hoodlums and thugs in the P.D.P.

The President should have followed such a meeting with a live broadcast to Ekiti and Osun voters telling them they should all feel free to come out and vote. The President should not just rely on information he is fed by his staff to form an opinion on what is really going on. He should make it a point of duty to always read online breaking news from a disinterested News outlet like Sahara Reporters who have a reputation to report news as they are happening faster than any of the regular news media in Nigeria.

That is a fact a good President with some knack for the truth could avail himself. The President should show he is on top of the news just like many of the staff working for him. He should take a script from Obafemi Awolowo who will ask you for a draft speech but will be busy preparing his own just to be sure he did not leave out anything important and he wanted you to know he was not completely abdicating his responsibility to you. That is the mark of a strong leader and that his something President Jonathan would do well to learn going forward.

The winners in the Osun election include President Jonathan and his hand-picked INEC chairman and his team. They include Rauf Aregbesola himself and his party men for doing a good job and for bending over backwards to get enough of his supporters to show up at the polling booths despite the harassment and intimidation tactics of the Federal Government. They also include the good people of Osun. I leave you to figure out the losers. 

I rest my case.