As Jonathan Pushes His Good Luck to the Brink 

By Ogaga Ifowodo 
 

It is my sincere hope that by the time this article is published, the Vice President, Mr Goodluck Jonathan, would have acceded to popular demands and, emulating his boss, published his assets declaration. In short, it is my hope that by doing so Mr Jonathan would prevent this article from making it to print. I have another hope: that in his private moments, when his Christian heart holds conversation with his conscience, the vice president acknowledges just how barren are the grounds of legalism on which he has chosen to pitch his tent. It is supremely perplexing that a man who claims to have absolutely nothing to hide by way of illegal enrichment in public office should resort to sophistry and even blackmail as answers to the simple demand on him to publish his assets. Given the sense of indignation that has pressed tons of words from Mr Jonathan in the hope of persuading us to value the letters of a law in urgent need of reform above the ethical philosophy that should be its fulcrum, one would think that he has been asked to commit a crime. And that President Umar Yar-Adua, in exercising what his deputy has generously informed us was a private choice, has somehow endangered public morality. 

The vice president’s recent defence, issued by his media assistant, Ima Niboro, is entitled “Before cant overwhelms commonsense.” It was a shoddy job of damage control. Evidently the vice president has different definitions of his keyword, “cant”  —  never mind commonsense  —  from what any good dictionary will tell us. Of the three definitions for cant as a verb that my Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, tenth edition, offers, the closest one to ours and presumably Mr Jonathan’s purposes would be the following: “to talk hypocritically.” As a noun, of four entries, two might be of interest to the vice president: “the private language of the underworld” and “the expression or repetition of conventional or trite opinions or sentiments; especially, the insincere use of pious words.” I have supplied the emphasis, but I do hope that the vice president isn’t suggesting that it is the public that stands in danger of falling within the ambit of the above definitions. Perhaps it bears pointing out that the word public—now that we have been led into the realm of definitions—connotes far more than a statement made to a government agency to which the general public has no unfettered access. The same dictionary has this to say of “public” among several meanings: “of or relating to people in general,” underscoring the sense with the words, “universal, popular.” 

Thus, if the seven declarations that Mr Goodluck has made to the Code of Conduct Bureau till date are not universally accessible to the Nigerian public, then to all intents and purposes they are secret documents. In the result, his commendable but inadequate acts would be deemed to have been done more out of a sense of legal obligation than of a personal commitment to lead by example. Yet, leading by example is the putative credo of the presidency under which he serves. As the vice president no doubt knows, the jury is still out on the question of the shamelessly rigged elections that brought him and his boss to power. While Yar’Adua strives to earn conditional legitimacy for their dubious ticket, it seems his supposed comrade-in-arms feels it is the Nigerian people who ought to strain every nerve to gain his confidence! It surely cannot be lost on the vice president that without unrestrained, universal access to assets declarations, the public cannot effectively play the role required of it: providing information useful to the ratification of claims.

Is Mr Jonathan really unable to see the discrepancy between his claim that he has “nothing to hide” and his obdurate insistence on a “secret” declaration? Speaking for the vice president, Niboro asserts: “We boldly declare that the Vice President has nothing to hide. We also insist if there were inexplicable and amazing gains in the Vice President’s assets portfolio in the last eight years, it would have been quite difficult, if not impossible, to have been nominated as running mate to President Yar’adua. We maintain that the Vice President has fulfilled all requirements of the law by declaring his assets before the code of conduct bureau.”

The statement as a whole was an exercise in cant and humbug, but additionally this passage highlights the unwholesome intent that might have motivated it in the first place. We are called upon by the vice president to accept that his personal selection and imposition by the Generalissimo of the PDP and former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, was in itself an act of beatification and absolution. And we are supposed not to mind that his absolver himself wouldn’t pass a good conduct test, nor remember that Mr Jonathan was once sober enough to describe the process that led to his selection as “this kind of arrangement that is done by the PDP.” The logic is this: had Mr Jonathan any skeletons in his cupboard, he would never have passed through Obasanjo’s moral crucible unscathed! The vice president cannot be unaware that the PDP’s internal affairs are neither open to scrutiny by the public nor even its disgruntled members  — as the courts have recently informed us in the case of Celestine Omehia on the Rivers State governorship race. If it is this private, tainted and totally untenable standard of morality the vice president would rather be judged by, then his is worse than a case of cant overwhelming commonsense. And to seek to browbeat any former public servant who calls him to moral accountability by asking such an interrogator to first dislodge the mote in his own eye before attempting to remove the speck in another’s is to go beyond hypocrisy to blackmail. No public officer, however high his office, ought to be allowed to enjoy such an abuse of power and privilege. One is not exempted from the legal or moral strictures of public service by pointing to the wrongdoings of others.

What, it must be asked, does the vice president wish to suggest to a reasonable mind in so petulantly refusing to put himself above suspicion through the mere expedient of publicizing  —  since the vee pee is so offended by the word “publishing” — his assets declaration? Certainly it is not that he has nothing to hide! What then is the mighty principle he seeks to valorize? Surely, not that the letter is mightier than the spirit (morality) of the law. Is it then the immense trouble of issuing a press statement giving a precise summary of his material assets? Not by any chance, for we have seen the vice president and his staff expend far greater energy and resources on statements and oral elaborations. What then am I, a reasonable citizen of sound mind, bearing no preconceived malice or ill will towards the vice president, allowed to think? I will be plain with it: that Mr Jonathan has a lot to hide! If he thinks I do his reputation gratuitous wrong thereby, he must hasten with a different press statement to the nearest media establishment  —  one that includes his seventh asset declaration. Nothing else will do.

On a last note, it matters even more that the person of whom this conduct is demanded is a former governor of the state in which oil was first discovered in our country. If Oloibiri as the Niger Delta stands as a mournful reminder of the opaque and systematic dispossession of the nation, then anyone who has had the good fortune of governing not only an oil state but has become the deputy president in charge of efforts to bring peace, development and fiscal accountability to the oil creeks must be seen to be above board. Action, they say, speaks louder than words. If, however, Mr Jonathan thinks he can disprove the wisdom of this time-worn adage by turning spin-master, then the pity is his that he should insist on pushing his luck to the brink of self-destruction. Unless he lives a charmed life, he is better advised to heed his own suspect counsel and resign his office immediately.