A Royal Ruse

 By Sam Omatseye

Goodluck Jonathan has always counted himself a lucky man. He became deputy governor, governor, vice president and president without ambition or prayer, without a campaign or mass appeal, without money or structure. He rode nature’s express. He floated on the wind of fate. He washed up ashore to a feast of kings. He was even better than the character in Jerzy Kosinski’s immortal novel Being There, about a fellow without quality. From tending a garden, he suddenly was, by popular acclaim, going to be the president of the United States. A nondescript soul morphed into the sole monk of the enclave.

Only the paths of royals are so oiled. So, Jonathan must thrill to the moves of Buhari loyalists who are plotting to make him a royal again. They want him to be president and succeed President Muhammadu Buhari. They want him to be not Nigeria’s royal, but theirs. They want to make him a president after the northern heart. It is not because they love Jonathan. It is because he can be their boy and buoy; their sweet heart and southern beau. In a headline report from ThisDay newspaper on October 4, they are saying that Jonathan is a good man and that qualifies him to be president again.

They said, “He handed power peacefully and nursed no bitterness against anyone and therefore will not be a threat to the interest of the north.” It is not only a machination of a hegemon, it is also naïve. When did Jonathan, in the eyes of this same group, become a saint? They are trying to canonise a man who, they told us, had supped with the devil. “Saints preserve us,” noted French writer Balzac. But how do you radicalise a devil into the holy one for Nigeria? Was he the one they campaigned against? The target of their adjectival invectives: They described him as clueless, incompetent, and corrupt?

They rode on his back to the presidency. He was the bogeyman and also the victim. Jonathan fell to them. The clueless man became humbled. I was there at the Eagle Square at the handover. Jonathan put up a brave and sunny front on the day he expected to begin his second act as president. He waved his hand feebly, smiled often and benignly, spoke less, but his body language was subdued. Melancholy draped him.

Buhari gave a hint of embrace. He said Jonathan had nothing to fear about him. He was right. Jonathan has not fallen under his radar, if his minions sometimes have. Recently, he has been a darling of the presidency. He became an ambassador of peace and democracy on its behalf and embarked on a shuttle diplomacy over a coup in a West African neighbour.

Maybe they see him as a pliant soul, a man they could cudgel about. Hence they are seeing him as a better person than an unknown figure who may erupt from the south to give them a headache. They may look at their tenure without pleasure and torpedo any effort by the north to reroute its way to power after another Jonathan term, since he will not be able to run the country for more than four years. He fulfilled a mandatory four-year term in his first coming.

The Buhari loyalists have been out of their depth over who succeeds him in 2023. The clamour has been it should come to the south. The north has had its share of eight years. They also have seen the futility in the mathematics about how many years the north has had the seat since 1999. It is a mischief of numbers. They also are not at peace with the appeal to the northeast. They are therefore in a geopolitical trap. They have to come south, and if they do it must be a person of their choice. Jonathan they think they know. So Jonathan should have it. They think by doing so, they can coalesce the Jonathan followers, the Azikiwes in the southeast, the militants and their kin in the south-south and the southwesterners who saw a shoeless hero.

Sam Omatseye is The Nation's Newspaper Columnist

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