USA Africa Dialogue Series - THE TRIUMPH OF SENTIMENTS

D

THE TRIUMPH OF SENTIMENTS

by

Anthony Akinola

 

The 2011 presidential election has been generally acknowledged as a massive improvement on previous ones and who else to identify for praise other than Professor Attahiru Jega (and his team), the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), who has approached this assignment with meticulous planning.  Dr Attahiru Jega has demonstated  patriotism and integrity, thereby justifying the nice things my late friend, Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem said about him while introducing us about twenty years ago.  President Goodluck Jonathan also deserves our commendations for it was he who appointed Jega to his position and would appear to have given him  a free hand.

            The 2011 presidential election itself, and this  has nothing to do with Professor Jega per se, can be described as the convergence of sentiments and emotions that produced various electoral outcomes.  In a more sophisticated political environment, and if the groaning of Nigerians was anything to go by, the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP) no matter the humility and niceness of its presidential candidate, would have been made to say  a temporary goodbye to the presidency for its rascality in political governance.  Its leadership would have been asked to go and learn how to behave before being granted another chance.  The PDP leadership has been corrupt and clueless, with nothing to show for the trillions of naira in national income.  The PDP won the presidency for the fourth time of asking in as many elections, and who needs an elaborate explanation this time round when the name of the PDP presidential candidate is Goodluck.

            Luck, be it good or bad, is a phenomenon which defies rational explanation.  The 2011 presidential election may have been free and fair but the absence of rationality in our collective voting behaviour is one thing that will continue to worry the neutral.  The volume of money injected into the process of corrupting the voter must also continue to worry us and that, in itself, questions the assumption that the presidential election may have been as free and fair as people are made to believe.

            Be that as it may, the 2011 presidential election is a victory of some sort  to our collective primordial sentiments, more than anything else.  There are not just a few states  where more than 90% of the electoral votes went to the "ethnic" candidate.  Most of the states  in the South-South and South-East geo-political zones, for understandable reasons, voted en masse for Goodluck Jonathan.  The South-West geo-political zone is assumed to have become the bastion of support for the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN); its presidential candidate, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, must be bemoaning his luck of having to be involved in an election at a time when the tsunami effect of Jonathanism had become unstoppable.  Most people who would normally have voted ACN voted for the candidate of the PDP, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, for reasons not unconnected with him being the main southern candidate seeking the presidency against formidable northern rivals.  Of course in most of the northern states, ethno-religious sentiments and intra-ethnic squabbling determined the direction of votes for either the main northern candidate, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari of the Congress for Political Change (CPC), or Goodluck Jonathan. Party-ism and the perception of personalities did play some part but such considerations would appear to have become the exception in the 2011 elections.

 

  Of course our peoples must put the acrimonies and disappointments of the 2011 presidential election behind them and support Goodluck Jonathan in the assumption that he can succeed where his predecessors had failed woefully.  Nigeria is the only major oil-producing nation of the world where the supply of electricity has been an issue for decades.  Monies that should have gone into the development of our infrastructures, education system, health and other mundane aspects of human existence have disappeared into the pockets of perennial political termites in the corridors of power.  President Goodluck Jonathan is acknowledged for humility but he will need more than that to succeed as president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.  A great leader is one that is confident, decisive and purposeful.  Dr Jonathan must be prepared to fight the war against corruption because corruption is the single factor which has held our nation back since independence in 1960.  Goodluck Jonathan has not been all that convincing in his almost one year of leadership; maybe being an elected president would now arm him with the courage that goes with effective leadership.  Dr. Jonathan was like a timid boxer forced  into the ring by hardened promoters, but he  must now find the courage to engage in the contest. proper.

    One congratulates our compatriots who have been marginalised in our electional calculations.  Once there was a time in the life of our nation when a member of the minority ethnic group would not have been considered an electoral asset.  The presidency was assumed to be the exclusive preserve of the majority ethnic group, particularly that of the north.  This writer is proud to say he was one of those who vigorously challenged that assumption by arguing for a system based on leadership rotation in our type of divided society.  Goodluck Jonathan is where he is today via the route of the vice-presidential candidate of his Party, the PDP  zoned to the South-South geo-political zone in 2007.  We should not be dishonest about the relevance of "zoning" and "rotation" because the sentiments and emotions that conspired in producing Goodluck Jonathan as an elected presiodent have merely confirmed that we have been right all along. The politics of our nation will never be based on issues until we have found a way of cross-cutting our cleavages of ethnicity and religion.

    It will be dishonest not to acknolwedge that the strategic importance of the South-South geo-political zone as the region that accounts for our nation's wealth has rubbed off in the historic achievement of Goodluck Jonathan.  Jonathan's first name may be about luck but it is doubtful if there would have been much support for him to "continue" with the mandate originally given to the late President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua via the zoning arrangements of his party  if he had been a Vice-president from elsewhere.  The fear of what could happen to oil production in the event of him being denied the presidency was emphatically amplified by his campaigners in every nook and cranny of society.  It can be argued that there is now   what can  be called a "national consensus" in the relevance of a rotational presidency and that is what one would be admonishing Goodluck Jonathan about after he has been sworn into office in May.  He himself has expressed support for the idea of a "one-term" presidency, which is to say we belong in the same camp.

--  

Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station
Austin, TX 78712-0220
USA
512 475 7224
512 475 7222  (fax)
http://www.toyinfalola.com/
www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa
http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs
http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue