Harried, besieged
and hounded most times in very extenuating circumstances, Nigeria’s
immediate past President, Goodluck Jonathan, more than twice in the just
ended week emerged from a self- imposed silence to launder his 6 years
at the helm of affairs.
He drew the first blood when at the
Peoples Democratic Party, PDP convention on August 12, flatulently
attempted to position himself and his government in a certain way in the
minds of the people and got off the hinge to deliver well aimed jabs at
his traducers. Pronto, he got a surfeiting slide kicks enough to seal
his lips once again. He had murdered silence. But the infernal prince
would rather not cave in to the swift crackers on the loose. The
epiphany came when he took on President Muhammadu Buhari’s government on
the vexed issue of corruption which has roundly been adjudged the
Achilles’ heels of his administration.
The acetic exchanges rekindled the war of
attrition that attended the 2015 electioneering that swept him out of
office. He boasted: “Ever since 2014, Nigeria has not improved in
Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perception index ranking
and has remained 136 in2015 and is still 136 on the latest TI ranking
released in 2017.” A flurry of reactions from the presidency and the
ruling All Progressives Congress, APC flew out brimming with brine and
got the ex – president who thought he had got the people dancing with
his bravado hurriedly seeking for ill -planned refuge.
The counter exchanges presented a flaring scenario of “an angel craving chaos and a demon seeking peace.” Both
sides portrayed the picture of “Devil and God” which foremost Austrian
writer Dejan Stojanovic insists “has two sides of the same face”.
Jonathan came reeling under the weight of accusations of memory loss
which Harley King described as a sly “devil that pretends to wear the
cloak of truth but deceives us both in our youth and age”.
The presidency gloried on self-
edification, chest thumping and incipient hallucination that has come to
be the trademark of power in Nigeria, and indeed elsewhere in the black
world. But in that hissing moment of triumphal ecstasy they forgot
Socrates’ wise counsel that the “secret of change is to focus all of
your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” Their
flame came to a pale blue, a burden refusing to be respected. They knew
what to tell the former president to get him worked up. But he was
rather buoyed up to tell it, so that it will become part of his past.
His entrenched habit of soaking in the tensions of flings of
debaucheries and other flicks of hits from the flimsy corners of these
hit men was thrown overboard; now rarer than a hen’s tooth.
He had come full circle like the full
moon, shining bright and ready for a go. He too forgot that by not
moving on and getting over it, he was giving someone the satisfaction of
watching him suffer. Regardless of what Thomas Paine said centuries ago
that “Reputation is what men and women think of us, character is what
God and Angels know of us “ He plunged into the dog fight. The roar is
only beginning, the din will soon drown the cacophony of the pin drop
silence and the music will blare beyond the 2019 breast tape. Elsewhere
on graffiti in a nondescript chicken shop in Lagos is the bold
inscription that “you will never have to tell a real man how to be one”.
Born on November 20, 1957 in Otuoke,
Bayelsa state, he was a former deputy governor and governor of the state
before serving as vice –president of Nigeria from 2007 to 2010. He
became the president of the nation in 2010 and ruled till 2015. He is
the first sitting Nigerian president to concede defeat. He holds a BSC
degree in Zoology, an MSC degree in Hydrobiology and a PHD in Zoology
from the University of Port Harcourt. Before he got into politics in
1998, he worked as an education inspector, lecturer; and environmental
inspection officer. He is married to Dame Patience and they have two
children.
No comments:
Post a Comment