Perhaps someone other than yours truly is beginning to be seriously concerned whether this Nigerian project is working or will continue to work. The recent concern has to do with the former president, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, and his book, “My Transition Hours.” It does appear that Jonathan is shaping up to be the other “Olusegun Obasanjo.” That would be a misfortune wrapped in a calamity inside a tragedy.
One Obasanjo is already a handful of problems – enough trouble for the entire country, if not the African continent. This country is certainly not big enough to contain two Obasanjo’s and any such attempt to foist on us another Obasanjo should be seen as a dangerous and imminent national security risk. Every security measure should be put in place to stop such a treasonable event. All the labour unions should resist and preachers must warn people from their pulpits. Another Obasanjo would be like adding stomache ache to migraine.
Do not laugh O! This is a very serious matter. How did Obasanjo evolve? Exactly the way Jonathan is going. The handsome “Frankenstein monster” we now know as Obasanjo was sowing thorns in our garden while the nation snored in sleep. Obasanjo toiled in the night and wrote a book titled, “My Command.” The book sought to tell us about a command no one cared about nor wanted to know about. Obasanjo commanded an army division during the Nigerian Civil War. He was one of the commanders in the war.
He did not do anything spectacular in the war, except got shot in the leg by a hapless Biafran sniper. But he, apparently, saw himself as a war hero, just as you see yourself as the uncrowned Oba of Nigeria. But unlike you, he decided to go public with his “inner turmoil.” So he massaged his ego and told Nigerians his story anyhow, whether Nigerians wanted to hear his story or not. Bang! A book.
After that he went ahead to write other Onitsha-Market-literature level stuff about himself “Not My Will,” “The Animal Called Man,” and sundry other stuff. As you were told when writing your academic project, when the subject is not interesting, the book’s content cannot be engaging. But to be fair to Obasanjo, as my former president and an elder statesman, his books could, of course, win him the Nobel Prize in the unlikely event of a post-nuclear bomb world with 99 percent of the world wiped out (and all the writers gone in the 99 percent). Otherwise his books deserve a pride of place and glory in a certain farm in Otta. The brutal truth is that that because OBJ is in love with himself and his good looks, he does not write about anything else apart from himself – so his writings are monologues.
Now along comes Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, with a swagger, and a book about his transition hours. Another damned monologue! Who, on God’s green earth, cares about Jonathan’s transition hours? The transition has been enough pain already without anyone attempting to open the scars again. The country was transiting and we all had our transition hours. Everyone could remember what he or she was doing or thinking in the aftermath of the 2015 election. Jonathan did not have the copyright on transition hours.
The young man who had a heart attack in his newsroom when it became clear that Buhari had won the election had his own transition hours in the hospital. He did not need to call Buhari because he did not have his number. Personally, I would have called Buhari, if I had his number, and begged him to do Nigerians a favour and reject the result. I had a premonition that he would not stop the insecurity, that he would not fix the economy, that he would not par the dollar with the Naira…etc. At the same time one also knew that Jonathan had to go… because he obviously had lost grip with reality and the ship was adrift. Nigeria was between the King Cobra and the Anaconda, between poison and strangulation.
Jonathan had managed by a dint of hard work and commendable ingenuity to patch together the most incompetent media team in the checkered history of the world. It was a ragtag team of adventurers who knew as much about government information management as dwarfs know how to play professional basketball. As the campaigns intensified, his media team’s incompetence got quoted in the nation’s political stock exchange. By the time they drafted in Femi Fani-Kayode so salvage the flagging campaign, Buhari was way out front and not in sight in the race. Though Fani-Kayode succeeded in bridging the gap somewhat with some brutal campaigning, “Bayelsa bridge” was already falling down.
Therefore, one would have been interested in finding out Jonathan’s reasons for failing to win the election in 2015. One would have wanted to know why he did not rein in his lieutenants who were involved in grandiose pick pocketing of the nation’s wealth. Instead of this, he is telling us what was in his mind when he lost the election. We know what was in his mind. Anyone who has failed an examination before knows the feeling and what is usually in the mind when you fail. That was what was in his mind – failure.
All the talk about thinking of whether to concede or not is an attempt to put the moral icing on failure. What would have been his reason for annulling an election that he organized? What wonders what Jonathan hoped to achieve with this monologue. His attitude reminds me of the child who came back home and boasted to his parents that even though he failed his examination, he did not cry like his friends who did.
We never expected Jonathan to cry but we do not also want him to boast that he did not cry. Okonjo-Iweala et al had their transition hours and should not be brought into Jonathan’s transition hour stuff. Jonathan should learn to carry his cross straight without swinging it to hit the crosses of other people. Someone close to him should remind him that “there is God O!” and advise him against writing another book about himself. One Obasanjo is enough trouble!
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