Like everything else about President Goodluck Jonathan’s approach to critical issues, his post-mortem of the general elections is as superficial as his shambolic reelection campaign. Last Thursday, while reacting to the post-election report presented to him by the head of his campaign organisation, Ahmadu Ali, a former minister and denizen of the PDP, the president attributed his defeat to anything but his failings and his party’s lack of great ideas and cohesion. “The PDP is still the dominant party,” the president boasted. “If you look at the results, the difference is just 2.5 million votes, and if you look at the areas where it is perceived that the PDP scored so low, the PDP couldn’t have got those kinds of scores. But the elections are over, so the country first.”
By narrowing his defeat to just one area out of the many-sided beatings he took on both March 28 and April 11, he gave the impression of a politician who liked to clutch at straws. What is obvious to everyone who has taken the pains to analyse the results of the presidential and other polls is that, far beyond the about 2.5 million votes that separated the loser from the winner, and far beyond the fact that he was beaten virtually everywhere and on all fronts, the country could not wait to angrily repudiate Dr Jonathan as leader. He was no longer liked, and the electorate blamed him for all the things that had gone wrong with the country, be it insecurity, declining economy, Chibok schoolgirls abductions, bad external image, etc.
Strangely, the president still manages to describe his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as the dominant party. Dominant where? Did he take care to look at the statistics of his defeat at all? He and his party lost on all fronts, and their dominance has been taken away from them so comprehensively that no one is left in doubt which is the dominant party today. In addition, Dr Jonathan disputes the margins by which he and his party lost in many states. Yet, it is precisely in the states where he and his party won that voter turnout was implausibly high, far above the national and even world averages.
The president was of course not done with deriving cold comfort from his quaint interpretation of the merciless beating he took. Said he while trying to encourage his demoralised party: “Our duty is to go back and identify areas of challenges so that the party will come up strong and play the role as a very strong party. The PDP is still the most organised party, is still the party that is not owned by anybody, is still the party that whatever you are, you can get to any level with your competencies and so on.” Here, the president again submits to very wild, unsubstantiated claims. There is no proof, in the face of the APC’s devastating electoral showing and tight organisation, that the PDP is the ‘most organised party.’ But the president makes the claim notwithstanding.
Dr Jonathan follows up by describing the PDP as not owned by anybody. It is not clear what he had in mind, whether actually he thought he did not himself dominate the PDP so brutally that those who could not endure his suffocating hold had no choice but to disengage themselves from the party. He confuses dominant party philosophy, as exemplified by the APC, with personal, idiosyncratic dominance, as symbolised by what he and a few others did to the PDP. For a party that precluded many aspirants from even contesting the presidential primary, and one that enthroned a few vicious, uncouth and ruthless politicians in key positions at the federal and state levels — men and women who had become gods that could not be challenged — it is surprising that Dr Jonathan talks of his party as not having a glass ceiling.
The president regrets his defeat, and is bitter at the manner he was humiliated and repudiated. He may not regret conceding defeat, for it saved him and his wife much trouble, local and international, but he has clearly not got over the March and April losses. His inability to reconcile himself to his new status has led him to vicious retribution against some of his appointees, including the Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Suleiman Abba, whom he recently fired. If he and his party will continue to live in denial and blame others for their defeat, they will be unable to do the clinical post-mortem required to understand why they failed and how to recover lost grounds. Judging from Dr Jonathan’s reaction and his party’s uncoordinated assessment of the debacle, the PDP will need new faces untainted by defeat, hearts and minds not shattered by the terrible electoral losses, and judgement not coloured by face-saving rationalisations. None among those who lead the PDP today has shown the kind of depth, dispassion and sobriety the party requires for the politics of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.
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