GOODLUCK JONATHAN AS A METAPHOR
Peter Claver Opara

I am aware that not a few Nigerians were taken aback by the insistence of Goodluck Jonathan that he would not make his asset declaration public. I am also aware that most Nigerians are not surprised at the stance of the Vice President, which spites the much hyped mantra with which he rode to power in April; to wit, the sudden discovery of some men that touched power and were not corrupted by it. Except for those that elected to be enfooled, most of us knew that such cosmeticism tallied with former President Obasanjo’s determined intent to railroad his cronies to power. Most of us knew that the contention that both Umar Yar’Adua and Jonathan were not besmeared by the putrid stench of corruption that overwhelmed and awed Nigerians as the obvious contradictions of the Obasanjo years unraveled, was a grand fallacy that was concocted to rail home the personal wishes of a dubious feudal lord, his chariots and charioteers and his duplicitous cronies. 

I am not even surprised that Nigerians have not risen in solid protestation of Jonathan’s lame and tepid reasoning that he need not make his assets known to the people he pretends to preside over. In like manner, I am not surprised that Nigerians have supped up the monumental deceit that threw up the Yar’Adua/Goodluck ticket. The acceptance of such jeremiad is the reason why nothing will work in Nigeria and why we have not seen the last of macabre interventions; either in fraudulent neo-civilian tyrants or in military garbs, in the governance of the country. It is the reason why the Babangidas, the Abachas, the Obasanjos and their destructive ilk will always re-incarnate to rape and dupe the country at will. Truth is that we, as a country, are dead to shame, shock and other demeaning tendencies so we have adjusted permanently to a situation where we make do with all types of situation and all manners of treatment. At best, we retreat into the self-defeatist abyss of saying we have no choice. 

Back to the Jonathan asset issue, is the man that has been so much talcumed and freshened to warm up to a new role he least expected to assume, hiding something from the rest of us? Is he issuing a recant against the much hyped but highly hypocritical ritual his principal has basked in recently? Having realized that Nigerians are home with chasing such shadows as public declaration of assets, (I still insist it is an elusive shadow) even when the source of such declared wealth is not being questioned, Jonathan would only have been as black as a devil as not to tap into this futile ritual. If he knew that a certain Gbenga Daniel declared a whopping N4billion asset from running an elevator company (he said he lost another N1billion while governing Ogun State) and the nation has not erupted in a frenzy of protest, why is Jonathan that was presented as a pious teacher, a humble servant finding it so hard to tell the world what he acquired as a teacher? So bad for the man, he had veered so incredulously into shadow chasing, talking so annoyingly vacuous of how AC is funding terrorism in the Niger Delta, without letting us into how that vitiates his capacity to let Nigerians into his legitimate wealth as a teacher, a deputy governor and governor of Bayelsa State.  

I was on this article when I happened on Jonathan’s reply to the position of the AC that he should declare his assets, if only that would embellish the corrupt anti-corruption stance that threw him up in the first instance. His reply showed that Jonathan is thoroughly corrupt and seeking to obfuscate the issue on his assets, which has assumed a really controversial tenor in recent days, as the evidence of the grand looting of Bayelsa, under Jonathan unravels and as Jonathan tries to douse the conflagrating fire that may consume him and his highly pretentious run to the zenith of Nigerian political ladder through a combination of brazen fraud, naked duplicity and subterfuge. If Jonathan and his sparse spin doctors that authored that ill-tempered and infantile reply were trying to divert attention from his famed wealth as one of the saints the Nebuchadnezer primed to take the country’s political patrimony through the monumental vote-robbery of April, they have succeeded in deepening the larger credibility quagmire Jonathan has been trying to manage in recent as the news of the Byzantine plunder of Bayelsa filters from the very people Jonathan imposed on Bayelsa but who found themselves in a no-win situation with the empty treasury and burgeoning debt profile that stare them in the face.  

As a matter of fact, I have no much interest in this asset-declaration fad because it is cosmetic and have no real impact on the much-distorted war against corruption except that it provides another opportunity for Nigerians, stolen dizzy by their corrupt leaders to ventilate frustrating thoughts and wishes that something should give to restore a thoroughly plundered country to its people. My concern, as that of so many other Nigerians, is that in the last eight years, corruption has been so luxuriated and so cultivated that we are made to chase shadows while corruption is being promoted by those who make the loudest noise about fighting the demon. Our collective concern is that through the deliberate actions successive regimes, especially the one that afflicted Nigeria for the past eight years, corruption is promoted while gargantuan plunder takes place. Our concern is that all spheres of our national life are being made so amenable to the corrosive influence of corruption while the citizenry are made to chase placebos in form of the duplicitous conduct of their so-called leaders.  

But I really can’t fathom why Goodluck Jonathan is so scared of suggestions that a man that was just a teacher some light years ago should tell those he is lording over what he is worth, after a few years in politics. Greater wonder is why he betrayed so much anxiety that he launched into infantile rage by the simple suggestion of AC that he should make his assets public. One wonders why he had chosen this long track so early in the day. One wonders why he had elected deliberately to tow the paths of war mongering in so simple as an issue as making the people know how much he is worth. Would he sustain the guerrilla tactics he had chosen for himself? How long and how far can he run from this gathering demand for audit? How far can he run with his tails wagging riotously behind him? So long as he attempts dodging the demand for probity, so long would he be bogged with damning questions he would never run away from by adopting the kind of sparse approach he launched into with the AC challenge. 

Above all these however is that Goodluck Jonathan is an artificial creation of this perverse era. Fact is that if the dominant issue in leadership selection is probity, Jonathan would be the last person to become the nation’s Vice President because at the time the sudden spasm about his candidacy came from the fountain of corruption that had destroyed everything good in this country, Jonathan was having so many questions about his scruples trailing him. His wife was being probed for millions of dollars traced to her. In the light of the distorted war against corruption the EFCC was prosecuting, the charges were made to die an unnatural death and from the untidy ashes of that negative phoenix is arising such poor show as Jonathan is putting up presently.  This is the reason why nothing would change were Jonathan to declare an asset of N3 trillion with a loss of N1trillion, which may not be far from the picture of what he is trying so desperately to hide from Nigerians. The danger is not in what he has now, which would certainly be mind bogging but what he would be declaring in 2011 when he would have been sufficiently beatified to dream of an encore or in 2015 when he would certainly go for the real thing itself. The more reason why the real anti-corruption war must start now so as to avert a Rawlings experience in Ghana. It would be too costly for all of us.       
 

Peter Claver Oparah.

Ikeja Lagos. 

E-mail: peterclaver2000@yahoo.com