We Have Heard Obasanjo, Can We Hear Jonathan?

Ex-President Obasanjo wrote his ‘Before It Is Too Late’ finger-pointing treatise against President Jonathan and many have hastily applauded without hearing the other side. Some say, his ‘Before it’s too late’ is already late.

Earlier, Speaker Tambuwal had presented Jonathan’s administration as not good enough to fight corruption. Good too. But only to the extent that he be found clean when the gong goes.

The accusation is legion; indeed, it’s all the failures of Nigeria since 1960. See some: Jonathan is becoming terribly divisive and clannish, destroying his own party, polarizing the country along regional and religious lines and ridiculing Nigeria in the comity of nations. ‘Nigeria is bleeding and the hemorrhage must be stopped’, he wrote.

Take ‘Nigeria now terribly divisive and clannish’. No leader elected for a whole would deliberately settle for a part without diminishing himself. No. Divisiveness stemmed from a section rejecting a nationally elected person.

What Obasanjo has done is ‘talk-from-the-middle’: an unseemly approach to truth that earns momentary applause.

Truth starts from start. When Jonathan won the 2011-election, comments from the likes of Ciroma/Buhari/Rufai pointed to bloodletting and ungovernableness.

We the watchers pointed to the serious implications of such political arson and expected voices like Obasanjo’s to call them to order, at least, for the reason that Jonathan, comfortable with becoming the governor of Bayelsa, found himself trolleyed to the Presidency by the now-accuser whose stake-holding understanding hinges on the exclusive right to pick and crown leaders.

He was mute. Here we are: the maker playing the un-maker to tacitly acquire the status of one who can make and unmake. Shortly after those elite incendiary threats, Nigeria sank into terror. This is the beginning of her match to ‘ridicule in the comity of nations’. This beginning must not be omitted.

It’s on record that Jonathan was accused of weakness/cluelessness in handling armed insurrection, that same clan now accuses him of depending solely on stick neglecting the carrot and failing to address the underlying causes of the terror-menace. Perhaps, someone would now say, place Yusuf’s death over and above those violent threats from the elite who incited and escaped.

There was a time Chief Obasanjo was sent to salvage the insurgency with his vast experience and acclaimed patriotism. His local aid was murdered, he returned to a safer south with no carrot. If he had found a workable solution, oh, if only he had, but he didn’t. Blame is a lot easier.

‘Nigeria is bleeding and the hemorrhage must be stopped’. This is the kind of language we heard in the days of repeated military coups. Being a chief actor in that era, should we expect a military coup to stop the hemorrhage? That was Nzeogwu’s option and we know the result. Should we expect a political coup hinging on impeachment? That too will have its rocky consequence. Or will the stakeholders give the President an ultimatum to renounce his 2015 ambition, if any? There, we would need to search the constitution for a provision.

He said Jonathan told him before the 2011 election he would not seek a second term, and made the same promise to governors, party stakeholders and Nigerians.

The president’s refusal to keep his promise cast him as a man without honour, he said. Good. But we want to know under whom the term, ‘third term’ sneaked into Nigeria’s political lexicon and what adverse imprints on the polity?

I think it was at the podium of our National Assembly that a heap of cash appeared from nowhere and vanished to nowhere with many questions without answer, all for 3rd. term.

It was in this country that we had a President who doubled as Minister of Petroleum without account. Now, is there any moral content stopping a 2nd . term aspirant when the ‘stopper’ stood for 3rd.? Was honor on vacation then and can it be reaped where it was not sown? Won’t that be the vortex of incongruity?

This page cannot attend to all that Chief Obasanjo raised but suffice it to say that invisible snakes have entered into the house of the elite. Rather than call it ‘stakeholders gathering to save Nigeria’, it’s more like stakeholders gathering to avoid being dismantled and the fear it triggers.

I don’t expect Alex Ekwueme to join, be used and dumped a third time. It looks more like an elite war coming, and recruiting public opinion early in the struggle may be smartness in reverse order. Now that we have heard Obasanjo, it’s time to hear Jonathan. Only then can we come to a balanced judgment.

Their silent whisper in Kenya notwithstanding, this bare-buttocks revelation may be what the people need to know how far their oppressors have gone with their decimation. Let’s hear it all.