As he spoke at a dinner early last month, it was clear that Tony Anenih, chairman of the Board of Trustees, BoT, of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, was determined to ‘fix’ the issues generating bad blood and acrimony within the party.
Known widely now as ‘Mr. Fix-It’, because he is believed to have the uncanny ability to provide solution to every political problem under the sun, Anenih gave President Goodluck Jonathan a piece of advice: He asked Jonathan to reveal his intention in respect of the 2015 presidential election.
“I will appeal to our leader, the President of this country, that at the end of September or as we enter October, we should not tell anybody that the time is not right. I think the time is right. It is good that we tell our people where we are going to; what our journey will be like.” With this seemingly harmless admonition, Anenih had placed a clumsy finger on the festering sore of his party, Nigeria’s ruling party since the return of democracy in 1999.
At the core of the party’s crisis is President Jonathan’s hide-and-seek game in respect of his second-term ambition. In Anenih’s plea is a veiled complaint that the President has not been sufficiently forthcoming about his 2015 ambition and that in spite of that, he is perceived in some PDP circles as using his presidential powers to hijack the party machinery and arm-twist the party into presenting him for the next presidential contest. At the time the BoT boss gave the advice, the party’s umbrella had literarily been torn into two following the August 31 botched convention that saw emergence of the Kawu Barage group with seven of the party’s governors and Atiku Abubakar, former vice president, forming the ‘New PDP.’ Indeed, the seven governors – Sule Lamido (Jigawa), Rabiu Kwankwaso (Kano), Abdulafatah Ahmed (Kwara), Babangida Aliyu (Niger), Aliyu Wammako (Sokoto) and Murtala Nyako (Adamawa) – had staged a walkout at the convention, with Abubakar. The walkout presented Anenih the opportunity to sound a conciliatory note to the President.
If the President got the message, he did not publicly act on it until September 23, when in faraway New York, United States, US, during a visit to address the United Nations General Assembly, he gave some Nigerian professionals, over lunch with him, what looked like a justification for his second-term bid.
According to him, “Already, we have a constitution that makes provision for maximum of eight years for anyone who wants to become a president or a governor.” Although many believe that the President is still speaking tongue-in-cheek, unable to make a bold declaration, some particularly in the ‘New PDP’ believe that the President, by this comment, has given enough indication that he was warming up to actualise his 2015 ambition, using the Bamanga Tukur faction of the PDP as a launch pad.
This is why the ‘New PDP’ faction, in its reaction to the President’s New York declaration, warned him against seeking a re-election. They told him that he was not eligible to run in 2015 as to do so “is not in the best interest of the country.” Even then, they see Jonathan’s bid as a threat to his personal integrity and credibility having, as they claimed, said two years ago that he would not present himself for re-election in 2015.
The factional PDP argued; “In February, 2011 while interacting with Nigerians and diplomats working in the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the African Union in Ankara, Turkey, President Jonathan clearly stated (that) ‘I would have loved that the Nigerians in the Diaspora vote this year (2011) but to be frank with you, that is going to be difficult now. (Currently), the law does not allow voting outside Nigeria and so this year, Nigerians in Diaspora will not vote but I will work towards it by 2015 even though I will not be running for election.’
According to the ‘New PDP’, “Mr. President went ahead to add, (that) ‘Four years is enough for anyone in power to make significant improvement and if I can’t improve on power within this period, it then means I cannot do anything even if I am there for the next four years.’ This is a historical fact which Mr. President himself cannot deny now since he had two years to deny that statement but never did so,” they wrote wondering why Jonathan could not “keep his words as a man of honour instead of allowing himself to be misled by selfish advisers to go back on his words, thereby overheating the polity.”
On March 26, 2011, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, in a speech he read at the grand finale of the campaign for the Jonathan/Sambo ticket, praised President Jonathan for agreeing to stand for only a term and urged Nigerians to give him the chance.
Obasanjo specifically stated that “'We are impressed with the report that Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan has already taken a unique and unprecedented step of declaring that he would only want to be a one-term President. If so, whether he knows it or not, that is a sacrifice and it is (statesmanlike). Rather than vilify him and pull him down, we, as a party, should applaud and commend him and Nigerians should reward and venerate him. He has taken the first good step. Let us encourage him to take more good steps to achieve what we need to achieve for this country by voting for him in a landslide victory as the first elected President of Nigeria on the basis of our common Nigerian identity and for the purpose of actualising the Nigerian dream.”
Although the former president’s words seem to underline the claim that Jonathan would run a one term, he too was quoting a report the source of which he did not disclose. But the silence of Jonathan and his aides at the occasion indicated that he did not mind the imputation that he would serve one term as president.
In spite of the sound bites attributed to Jonathan, the ‘rebel’ PDP faction is also claiming that Jonathan gave a written undertaking that he would not run for elections in 2015. “We have facts and figures that the President promised not to run come 2015,” said Chukwuemeka Eze, the group's national publicity secretary who signed the group’s statement last week, warning that, “at the appropriate time, we will release the document.”
The claim that the President endorsed a pact with the governors to exit in 2015 is not new. In fact, it has been the singsong of Aliyu, who has been pleading with Jonathan to play the statesman and respect his gentleman's agreement not to contest in 2015. But the President's spokesmen including Ahmed Gulak, adviser on political matters, have denied the existence of such an agreement. Gulak particularly said the alleged agreement “only exists in the figment of the imagination of somebody with presidential ambition,” a veiled reference to Aliyu.
While politicians give the impression of an apparent short memory, the magazine found out that apart from Obasanjo, some PDP bigwigs who have now found themselves in the opposition camp, had while making a plea for Jonathan to contest in 2011, expected Jonathan to spend only one term of four years. One of them, Barnabas Gemade, former national chairman of PDP and BoT member, had argued in August 2010 while commenting on the party's zoning arrangement that “those of us who crafted the PDP constitution know that the Presidency involves the President and the vice president... As long as one person is still operational, it's still valid and must be enjoyed to the maximum. So, the two and half years done by late President [Umaru] Yar'Adua continues with Jonathan and that also involves (Jonathan) having the right to another term in office starting from 2011.”
Gemade continued that, “as far as PDP is concerned, Jonathan has inherited the full rights of Yar'Adua from May 29, 2007 till May 29, 2015.” The simple interpretation of Gemade's position, which he made three years ago, is that Jonathan would complete Yar'Adua's two terms of eight years in 2015 and hand over the baton to another person, preferably from the northern zone.
By 2015, Jonathan would have spent six years as President in addition to the two and half spent as vice president and six months as acting president. If he contests in two years’ time and wins, he would be putting in 10 years as full- fledged president, a record that surpasses that of any of his civilian predecessors. Of importance is that, even if he leaves the office in 2015, he will have the enviable record of being the first Nigerian to be in power at the state and federal levels for a stretch of 16 years. Jonathan began his political journey in Bayelsa State as deputy to Diepreye Alamieyesigha, became governor when the latter was impeached following allegations of corruption, and was warming up for the substantive post of governor when he was chosen as vice president to late Yar'Adua. This is one of the reasons the ‘New PDP’ group is saying that enough is enough for Jonathan.
But President Jonathan, by his body language and tongue in cheek pronouncements has been telling his adversaries that ‘enough is still not enough’. Perhaps unknown to his opponents, the President had started making a case for another term as early as two days before he was sworn in as President in 2011. On May 27, 2011 at the 2011 presidential inauguration lecture, Jonathan had in his remarks noted that a four-year tenure was too short for a President or governor to make significant impact. “I will not talk about the tenure of the government, the constitution has said four years, though some believe that four years is too short to make any change, which I also believe,” he said, while reacting to the guest lecturer, Professor Ladipo Adamolekun’s posers on leadership.
According to the President, “if you are a new person and you are elected as a governor today, it will take one to one and half years for you to really stabilise. And you also know that some members of your cabinet are not good and that is why in most cases, after one year or two, Mr. President reshuffles the cabinet and by the time you want to go for another two and half years, it is another election and you are all busy about winning election. That is a constitutional problem.”
Some weeks later, President Jonathan followed up his conviction by sending an executive bill to the National Assembly asking for a seven-year single tenure for the president and state governor. Defending his executive bill at his fourth Presidential Media Chat after assuming office, on November 18, last year, the President, when asked whether or not he would contest elections, had said it was too early to ask. He declared, “This is one of the reasons we agitated for this single tenure issue. If a President tells you today that ‘I am contesting’ it will generate a lot of issues; ‘I am not contesting’ will also generate a lot of issues. If I say I am not contesting some of my cabinet ministers will even resign and go because most of them, if not all of them, are qualified to contest the position. So we have a four-year tenure, which is quite short, because if you look at the African scenario, it ranges from four years to seven. Some countries have five years, like South Africa, some seven years, others six years of double tenures, but we operate what we copied from the United States of America.”
So for President Jonathan, the tenure challenge has been on the card since he was elected in 2011. It is alleged now that having failed to get the support of the National Assembly in his seven-year single term tenure proposal, from which he promised not to benefit, he has taken refuge in the provisions of the constitution as a fallback position. In this regard, many people including famous constitutional lawyer, Ben Nwabueze, a professor of law and Senior Advocate of Nigeria, while admitting that he is constitutionally entitled to four more years, have advised that he should honourably leave office in 2015, in the interest of the country.
On the other hand there are those who believe that he should run. Rather than putting on the toga of a sly politician with an underdog mien as he did before his election in 2011, his supporters expect him to be bold enough to defend his right under the constitution.
Among those who see his re-election bid as a right are Paul Unongo, a Second Republic former minister; Kofo Akerele-Bucknor, former deputy governor of Lagos State and Sunday Ekanem, chairman, South-south PDP forum. They argue that under the constitution Jonathan has the right to seek a re-election in 2015. They are supported by Mashood Erubami, president Nigeria’s Voters’ Assembly; Nnaemeka Amechina, and Francis Njoku, both lawyers.
To Ekanem, “the issue is not about the President, it is about the South-south. If the President does not want to contest, we will tell him to contest. It is beyond him because other zones have been having their eight years, so we must have our own too. It is our right. We supported others to run for eight years, so it is our turn now.” Amechina argued that, “Jonathan said he is eligible to contest but I don’t understand why people should make so much noise, waste so much energy on advising anybody not to contest. Who made them the kingmakers? Jonathan has the right to contest and the citizens of Nigeria have the right to either vote for him, or not. This is a constitutional democracy, where the choices should be left to the people who can only be persuaded to either vote for the President or not.”
But if the President is right in law to re-contest in 2015, is he morally right to do so after he purportedly gave an undertaking that he would not run? Again, Amechina submits that no independent party has been able to bring out any evidence to back up the claim and if there’s anything of such, like a binding agreement, they should go and retrieve the matter, in order to stop him. Bucknor-Akerele also argued that, “it is up to the people who he signed for to reveal the document.”
Similarly, Njoku insisted that since no one has shown Nigerians the undertaking, “the onus rests on those alleging the existence of such undertaking to prove its true existence by producing it. We want to see it. It is not enough to allege such an undertaking. If the proponents of the existence of such undertaking could not produce it and show it to the world, then we could only assume that it is a part of the campaign of calumny against the President to stop him actualising his constitutional right to seek a second term in office.”
But Unongo describes this as a moral problem for the President. “If they can prove that he made the agreement, then I will advise that he should forget about re-contesting in 2015 for the sake of party politics and the political process. If he does otherwise, it would only confirm to Nigerians that politicians are dishonourable people. Politicians ought to respect agreements they willingly made. If politicians make agreements, they should be asked to honour such agreements,” he advised.
Junaid Muhammed, a Second Republic politician, argued that it was obvious President Jonathan had long made up his mind to contest again “even if it means setting the country on fire. In a democracy, candidates who feel they have delivered, offer themselves for re-election. But it is clear to every Nigerian, including Goodluck Jonathan, that he has not performed and he doesn’t have the competence to govern Nigeria. What he said in New York about those seeking the office of the president was an insult to those elements in the North who have presidential ambition.”
On the issue of performance, most of the people the magazine spoke to, agreed that Jonathan had performed below expectation to deserve a re-election. According to Erubami, given the President’s monumental non-performance, in the areas of power, employment, poverty reduction and security, Nigerians might be reluctant to vote for him. The current crisis in his party is a sign that the country might not benefit from government again because governance seems to have been shut down for politics and nothing is working again.
However, while observing that the critical sectors of the economy including power, education, roads, and health are still reeling from neglect, Njoku submitted that Nigerians should not forget that President Jonathan “is a war-time President. Let us not forget that a sizeable chunk of the President's time and available resources had to be diverted to the war against terror in the North. He was forced to share his attention between his economic blueprint and the serious security challenge. This certainly must have contributed to the less than satisfactory performance scorecard of the President.”
Many are blaming the President for his less than brilliant handling of the searing political crisis. He is believed to be muzzling and arm-twisting his party into submission. His forces have attempted to crush the Nigeria Governors’ Forum, NGF, led by Rivers State governor, Chibuike Amaechi. The NGF, a hitherto powerful political group the President could have used to strategically position himself for another round of electoral harvests, and the democratic forces within his party, is torn apart by wrangling within the party allegedly sponsored by the President’s men. Unfortunately, in the unfolding crisis, the President’s political persona that Nigerians have always known does not agree with his apparent belligerent approach of nowadays, which paints him as a person desperate to hang on to power.
As the situation continues to heat up the polity, some say threatening to break up the country, two eminent personalities have offered the President a way out. Nwabueze and Archbishop Emeritus of the Catholic Archdiocese of Lagos His Eminence, Anthony Cardinal Olubunmi Okogie. In asking him not to contest in 2015, Nwabueze who acknowledged Jonathan’s right to contest a second time, said he believes that the problem of the country is national transformation and that the President cannot combine such task with contesting election. “The two are so different because once you get involved in electioneering, you undermine your authority to lead the nation for national transformation and I said if I were the President, I would restrict myself to serving the nation, transforming this country and creating a new Nigeria. These would be my concern and I would go down in history as a hero. So, if Mr. President does that, he would become an instant hero in this country; but it is for him to choose. If I were him, I would choose to become a hero to lead the country into transformation and abandon the ambition of a second term,” the professor argued.
For Okogie, it is not a matter of law or right to rule. It is a moral burden. “If I were Jonathan, I will not try it (running for a second term), because the writing on the wall does not favour it. We have not even got to 2015 (yet) there is so much sycophancy and flattery,” he told a national newspaper.
The Cardinal Emeritus wondered what President Jonathan would be looking for again having been in Aso Rock for almost six years; “there was a time, he was vice, and now President for four years. What is he looking for again? he asked. He also submitted that if it is true that Jonathan had an agreement that he would do just one term, do you think those who were there when he said ‘just one term’ are stupid.”
Credits: TELL
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