If I were President Jonathan, I would put a stop to these arranged lectures and talks until such a time my innocence would have been established
“Nigerians know that Buhari is not the architect of their pains, which he is doing everything to stop by stemming the bleeding caused by the rapacious PDP.. Whenever the condition in which we have found ourselves is discussed, it should be stated clearly that Buhari has got his teeth into clearing the mess of about 16 years during which PDP chiefs, at our expense, led a rollercoaster champagne life that would make Hollywood greats green with envy. They lived like kings and partied like movie stars. Nigerians said “enough”, kicked them out and handed Buhari the mandate to demolish the edifice of vices built by fraudsters, pranksters and gangsters parading as leaders. Now the rebuilding has begun. It will take some time and patience. –Gbenga Omotoso, Editor, The Nation, Thursday, 09.06.2016.
Looking at the duo of former President Olusegun Obasanjo and Mrs. Patience Jonathan the other day, smooching, hugging and dancing azonto, one question that raced through my mind was: what do the Jonathan’s now think of Obasanjo, the man who brought them fame, fortune and ultimately, perdition? You do not need to have known former President Goodluck Jonathan up close to appreciate the fact that he was a perfect gentleman, neither a Pharaoh nor a Nebuchadnezzar. But that was until Obasanjo, out of his utter disdain for the duo of Ibrahim Babangida and Abubakar Atiku alongside the slew of Northerners keen on contesting for the presidency in 2011, cajoled and ended up railroading a quiet, peaceful and easy going Jonathan into contesting the 2011 Presidential election, thus single-handedly tearing PDP’s zoning arrangement into tatters. The party recently attributed its shellacking in the 2015 Presidential election, majorly to that very incident.
I have read and heard a whole lot of Jeremiad coming from those the new media describes as the wailing wailers. I have read and listened to many say Buhari should stop whatever it is he is doing, pack, go and let corruption come back in all its fury, a wish God forbids. As I often say in this column, I am not here to eulogise Buhari as I do have reservations of my own about some of the things he did and those he left undone. For instance his appointments have been mostly sectional, rather than inclusive. Also, he ought, by now to have given the Fulani herdsmen’s menace much more attention than just asking the police and the army to handle it because undisputed research has shown that some top guns in these agencies are not uninterested parties. The President, we pray, will come back from his 10-day leave much more invigorated. He should therefore waste no more time in frontally and properly interrogating a problem that has left thousands of Nigerians killed for nothing. Another area of my being ill at ease with the President is how, a full year into his administration, he still sits pretty seeing the National Assembly remain a sink hole with legislators carting home multi-millions quarterly despite the country’s parlous economic circumstances. This past week, we saw them self-eulogising and back slapping regardless of how greatly Nigerians have come to loathe them. These are people who awarded themselves ridiculously huge allowances which were not approved by the Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission. I think the President should stop this illegality by whatever means he can , not minding the fact of the Legislature being a different arm of government since the appropriate government agency has severally denied approving such allowances. After all, the buck stops at his table.
I digress.
With what Nigerians now know about the Goodluck Jonathan era, the suffering we are presently experiencing be it power, foreign exchange etc and which the wailers never stop shouting about, even as they left a putrefying Augean stable for Buhari to clear, would have been nothing but a child’s play had the former President got re-elected. Indeed, by now, Nigeria would have become another Venezuela, that other country where oil boom has turned oil doom with its citizens queue-ing to have the lowest item needed for survival . The signs were all there as the Jonathan government has started feeding Nigerians on a daily diet of lies. For instance, MrsOkonjo-Iweala was serially denying the fact that Nigeria was broke even as they have already borrowed close to half a billion naira to pay workers’ salaries.
President Jonathan lost the election but certainly not for lack of trying. As Orubebe was busy ranting his inanities, tying to provoke Professor Jega, the INEC chairman, in order to precipitate a situation where their goons would teargas everybody and stop the announcement of the election results, Diezeani’s bribe money for the purpose of altering the Presidential election results nationwide was going round every part of the country. As God would have it, those to whom she shelled the money knew it was too little, and too late as Nigerians have put an ignominious end to the era of lootocracy. Rather than part with the money, most simply held to their own share of the loot.
Had Jonathan won, nobody would have heard a whimper about this humongous amount of money sourced, illegally by Diezeani from her rogue accomplices in the oil industry which she had dominated like a colossus.
With daily breaking news about the heist perpetrated under his nose , it is a shame President Jonathan is going round the world trying to burnish his name and claiming, tongue in cheek, that he fought corruption. So massive was the looting that his ministers very easily convinced him not to cooperate with the incoming administration as a result of which he could only give his handing over notes to his successor a few days to his exit. By going out making those claims are we to assume that he is unaware of many of his men who have confessed to looting the treasury one way or the other? Did his cousin, Robert Azibaola, just chanced on 40 Billion dollars for a contract which the EFCC describes as dubious, for the supply of Tactical equipment for special forces but details of executing which it says does not exist? What of how people around him turned a so-called negotiation for the release of the Chibok girls to a casino? While regaling his audience in a speech at the Bloomberg studio in London claiming he fought corruption by not making money available to people, was it that he had not heard what Hassan Tukur, his Principal Secretary, was reported to have told the EFCC about the 40 Billion dollars he, Jonathan, approved, and Azibaola picked from the office of the National Security Adviser which had by then become an automatic teller machine, for the release of the Chibok girls? Is it possible the former President has not heard that Tukur has confessed to diverting the money and sharing it with somebody? Or what corruption can be greater than authorising, as reportedly claimed by the National Security Adviser, the sharing of 2.1 Billion dollars meant for arms purchase for items not remotely related to arms? And what about the millions of dollars raked in from oil crude sales which should have gone to the federation account to relieve states, but was diverted and used by the oil empress for the purpose of altering the presidential election results?
If I were President Jonathan, I would put a stop to these arranged lectures and talks until such a time my innocence would have been established. Or hasn’t he just said he is being investigated?
Sir, this time around, silence will be golden.