Jonathan laughs last

The attempt by an indeterminate group within the All Progressives Congress (APC) to surreptitiously conscript Goodluck Jonathan and anoint him presidential candidate of the party a few months back was very curious. The plot was reportedly on till almost the eve of the party’s national convention last June.

Expectedly, there were tendencies and interests within the APC, which vehemently opposed the draft-Jonathan moves. The Bola Tinubu group, for one, would not have any of that. Tinubu never hid his ambition to have a crack at the presidential race. Having contributed immensely in selling an inflexible Muhammadu Buhari to Nigerians in 2015, the former Lagos State governor expected thereafter that the next APC presidential ticket should be his without contention. His expectation was driven essentially by a sense of entitlement.

The attempt by some tendencies in the party, said to be primarily from the north, to drag Jonathan from across a chasm and make him the party’s presidential candidate was, definitely not acceptable to Tinubu. He fought it as he knows best how to, forcing whoever it was that was promoting the Jonathan option to back off. He equally brushed aside the moral pitch by the South East zone that it was its turn to present a presidential candidate for the party, going by the extant rotation arrangement. As far as Tinubu was concerned, it is his turn.

The idea of Goodluck Jonathan, a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)-elected president re-emerging seven years after he lost his bid for second term, to be the presidential candidate of APC that toppled him, was actually too unreal a project for any realistic group of people to pursue. In Nigeria, however, no mountain of absurdity seems too high for power brokers to attempt climbing.

Even at this, beside not being a member of APC, or the fact that he had defeated and lost to the party in two straight elections, something about Jonathan and APC made the prospect of his being the new face of APC extremely absurd.

APC’s relationship with Jonathan as president was devoid of respect, love or goodwill. As a matter of fact, all that the party had for Goodluck Jonathan was ill will, venom and outright malice. Elements in the APC simply had raw animus for the man. Contempt for him, his family and his presidency was ingrained in APC chieftains. It went beyond normal opposition in the line of politicking.

Name them; Bola Tinubu, Nasir el Rufai, Lai Mohammed, Adams Oshiomhole, Kashim Shettima. All they had for Jonathan was hostility and hatred.  Every word that any of these uttered against President Jonathan and every policy or act of his government was laced with malignancy.

Taking full advantage of the man’s obvious naivety and an apparent lack of fight in him, for most things, including defending his stool, the Tinubu-led APC troop ridiculed, maligned and undermined the Jonathan government, eventually bringing it down in the 2015 election.

In politics, it is often said, there is no permanent friend or enemy, only permanent interest. The axiom, attributed in its original construction to Lord Palmerston in the House of Commons in 1848, surely retains relative relevance in the unscrupulous terrain of partisan politics. Even at that, there must be a limit to the acceptability of the precept or else the human society becomes a den of knaves. Politics, no matter how defined, cannot be a glorification of crass dishonesty, bereft of principle and integrity.

The recent brazen efforts by Jonathan’s erstwhile traducers in APC to cosy up to him, to the point of even recanting their vicious utterances about him, comes across as cheap and repugnant. That is no politics. The room for principle and dignity in human conduct, including in politics, must not be allowed by the society to be obliterated entirely.

While it is already commonly noted that most of what APC sold to Nigerians in 2015 and 2019 were dud, the chieftains of the party should not take Nigerians for granted to the extreme.

First, there was Adams Oshiomhole, former national chairman of the APC and one of the rampant traducers of Jonathan as President. Oshiomhole had no qualms declaring publicly that most of what APC said about Jonathan as President were lies and unfounded. According to the former party chairman, Jonathan is a good man and many of his policies that APC pilloried were good policies. By undermining Jonathan and the country during the Jonathan government, Oshiomhole said what he and his colleagues in APC were doing was playing politics. In effect, the APC chieftains were ready to bring down the house in the name of politics. And they tried. How Nigerians feel about such destructive politics anchored on dishonesty was obviously immaterial to the former APC chairman.

Now enter the APC leader himself, Bola Tinubu, now presidential candidate of the party for the 2023 election. Last week, Tinubu visited with Jonathan in his house, where he reportedly sought the former President’s support for his ambition. Jonathan the clueless, the “drunken Ijaw fisherman”, the one who lacked ideas on how to manage the resources of Nigeria. What can such a man offer?

For good measure, Tinubu went on the visit to Jonathan’s house with Kashim Shettima, his vice-presidential candidate. Shettima it was who, in the spirit of APC defiance of President Jonathan, defied the instructions of the President on protecting schools in Borno State in the face of threats by bandits, thereby making himself culpable for the kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls. Shettima subsequently promoted the principal of the school where the young Chibok girls were abducted to a commissioner in his cabinet, a reward as it seems for defying the President, even at a great cost.

The spectacle of Jonathan lending a helping hand to Tinubu to enter the house during the visit last week spoke volumes. Ann Kio-Briggs, environmentalist and human rights activist, found the visit of the Tinubu team to Jonathan to seek electoral support, extremely resentful. To her, that must be the hight of politics without principle.

In her words, “these are people who cannot differentiate between politics of ideology and shameful politics. They hauled insults at him (Jonathan), they hauled insult at his wife…they constructed effigies to mock Jonathan, they organised ‘Occupy Nigeria’ and paraded with coffins and did all kinds of things against Jonathan. Today, they are shamelessly visiting Jonathan sitting on his chair in his house”.

“One by one, from top to botton”, said Kio-Briggs, “they will all go back to Jonathan to receive their shovel of hot coal on their heads…”

It is not difficult to understand this strong expression of aversion at such barefaced assault on principle. Jonathan must be laughing and probably wondering what manner of men these are.