Nigeria 2027: If I were Goodluck Jonathan, by Tonnie Iredia,
For the second time in this column,I am today attempting to reach out to one leader who has had the special privilege of serving as a first citizen of Nigeria. The first time I tried it was in May 2012, when this column featured an article titled “Nigeria: If I were General Buhari.” What influenced my write-up at the time was a statement credited to Buhari that the consequences of the rigging of future elections in Nigeria would be catastrophic.Buhari was correct, an election is a game not a war. It has its rules that every responsible citizen ought to respect. In Nigeria, it has never been so, it is still not so; and the probabilityof a change in the nation’s unwholesome political culture is hard to see.
But because Buhari was once a head of government who commanded large following, such a public statement credited to him appeared to me as provoking and I said so. Many things happened to me thereafter which established clearly that not many people are really allowed the right to free speech in our clime. Some friends cut off from me amidst several threat calls just as one newspaper stopped publishing my weekly articles.However, none of those reactions changed the pattern of elections in the country which continued to be characterised by rigging and all forms of electoral malpractices. On its part,the government of the day did nothing about what I thought was Buhari’s intemperate statement. Instead, some awkward official statements were directed to all politicians to desist from the use of self-indulgent language in political communication.
The next presidential election some two years later was won by Buhari. Was the election free and fair? Many politicians hailed it despite the malpractices which marred the event. Of particular importance was the role of the temperamental Card Reader introduced by the Attahiru Jega-led INEC to stop election rigging in Nigeria. It was used only in the South while free accreditation etc. held sway in the North. The then incumbent President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ) as a patriot conceded defeat thereby stopping what would have been a national political conflagration.Only last week however, the same GEJ whom we thought had moved on decided to lament at a private event in Benin City over all that was done to remove him from office in 2015.
GEJ reminded us all how the then newly designed electoral technology was manipulated to even deny himself, his wife and his mother, an opportunity to vote. At the occasion, the former president was reported to have described Nigerian politics as one defined by disloyalty adding that in our political landscape it is”difficult to see somebody who will say the same thing in the morning and say the same thing in the afternoon and in the evening.”Listening to GEJ last Thursday I was happy to hear him underscore so many basic truths about our politicians. But I became uncomfortable when he tried to identify one politician that could take a bullet on his behalf. It was at that point I decided to write today’s article to draw attention to the fact that there is hardly any Nigerian politician that could take any type of bullet on behalf of another political power seeker.
If that was GEJ’s mindset, could it then be true that he is really being persuaded according to media reports into believing that he is the man Nigerians want for 2027? If so, the former president has not learnt enough about Nigerian politicians and elections. Indeed, he is yet to know that nothing has changed in that sector since he left office in 2015. First, what is worrying our people right now is high cost of living, not election 2027. Second, Nigerians do not know the difference between the nation’s political parties. All Nigerian politicians want to be in government irrespective of an electoral outcome.Based on these two points, it is politicians who are telling the poor masses the person they should support while deceiving different political leaders that each of them is preferred by the people.
Let’s begin with electoral technologies that politicians have been manipulating since 2015. The case of the Card Reader is already known to GEJ. For the next set of elections in 2019, we paid heavily to procure another set that became popularly called the Server. At the end of the contest, there were many conflicting statements. The first was that there was no Server in response to claims by opposition politicians that they had copies of the results posted to the server. If INEC didn’t have a server what about the huge funds allocated to it and why did the commission train one set of officials for manual collation of results and another set for electronic collation? It was in response to this that INEC eventually said it had a central server but did not use it in 2019 notwithstanding that it was used the year before as an experiment to conduct elections in Sokoto, Anambra and Osun states.
In 2023, the popular technology was known as BVAS-the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System. It was used for the Presidential and National Assembly elections. The system worked well and produced results for only two of the three elections that day. The system had problem with only the Presidential election which INEC attributed to glitches.No one seemed to know why there were glitches which never occurred to the process for the Senate and the House of Representatives election for which there was simultaneous casting of ballots by voters along with that of the presidential election. No one knew where, when and how the glitches occurred. GEJ probably knows better than the rest of us based on the insights he has shared from his experience as an election observer across Africa in which he praised only Ghana, Sierra Leone and Senegal.
One reason why Nigeria’s case may be hard to resolve is the fact that the introduction of technology notwithstanding, elections cannot be free and fair if those managing the process are themselves partisan. In July 2022,former President Buhari forwarded the names of 19 nominees to be appointed as Resident Electoral Commissioners (REC). A coalition of Civil Society Organisations including the Director, International Press Centre, objected to some of the nominees who were clearly partisan.The objections were ignored. As at today, the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), BudgIT and 34 other concerned Nigerians are in court against President Bola Tinubu over “the appointment of at least four members of the All-Progressives Congress (APC) and allies of high-ranking politicians as new Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs).”
In a democracy, it is unheard of that supposed referees of the game of elections are members of the competing teams. In fact, the wordings of Section 14(2a) of the Third Schedule of the 1999 Constitution as amended are clear enough that “a member of the electoral commission shall be non-partisan and a person of unquestionable integrity.”Therefore, when we hear that GEJ is holding meetings with some political groups to become their presidential flagbearer, we begin to wonder if the reports refer to the same Goodluck Jonathan we used to know. As far back as 2010, GEJ dropped General A. B. Mamman and Ambassador Muhammed Anka from the list of his nominees to be appointed for INEC because people objected to them.
Now, here are some questions for Jonathan and his admirers. Is it GEJ that really wants to return to the Villa or is he being teleguided by persons pushing a private agenda? Is it his own PDP or other groups that are urging him on? We hear a court has said GEJ is under no legal disability to contest in 2027 but is that what the higher courts will hold later? GEJ once obeyed the courts and withdrew the military from election venues; now that they are everywhere, what willhe be allowed to do?Indeed, how will GEJ feel when two opponents are claiming victory from the same court verdict? If the former president becomes president again, will he be allowed to rule or will he be dissuaded from doing the needful by using security advice to stop him from pragmatic governance such as visiting the Chibok community whose children were abducted?
Will GEJ for security reasons be kept inside the Villa instead of Eagle Square on our independence anniversary? Again, will he be allowed to make as much as two naira increase to fuel price without a nationwide protest?I certainly do not have the perfect answers to these questions but I have no doubt whatsoever that there is no better time than now for the ex-president who became president through divine intervention and not the human machination of politics to undertake huge introspection and tell himself the truth.
The post Nigeria 2027: If I were Goodluck Jonathan, by Tonnie Iredia appeared first on Vanguard News.
,
For the second time in this column,I am today attempting to reach out to one leader who has had the special privilege of serving as a first citizen of Nigeria. The first time I tried it was in May 2012, when this column featured an article titled “Nigeria: If I were General Buhari.” What influenced my […]
The post Nigeria 2027: If I were Goodluck Jonathan, by Tonnie Iredia appeared first on Vanguard News.
, , Emmanuel Okogba, {authorlink},, , Vanguard News, September 7, 2025, 1:02 am
