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IT didn’t take a long time for me to accept to participate in the Third Presidential Media Chat, when Reuben Abati, Special Adviser on Media to President Goodluck Jonathan, called on Friday evening.
I had just escaped the 24HR curfew in Kaduna, still shaken from the experience of the week in the city; the bombings in the churches; reprisal killings and the uncertainties and rumours which followed in their wake. Locked behind the gated house I live in, I couldn’t stop thinking about the traumatic effect these events will have on patterns of life our children will be obliged to live in the years ahead.
How can children brought up in this atmosphere flower? This atmosphere of uncertainties; fear of violence; a nation suffering the ailments ours carries like an emblem and the lack of surety even about its future! These were thoughts I personally wrestled with during the curfew and the boredom I broke with doing the internet and playing football with my children on the one hand.
A house on fire
On the other hand, I knew that Nigerians were very disappointed that President Jonathan still left to attend the Rio plus 10 summit; they were not amused, that our president acted rather like the absurd man in the proverb, whose house was on fire, but chose to run after bush rats; I think it was Chinua Achebe that made that apt usage of the proverb.
The heightening violence of Boko Haram and the new trend of reprisal killings was threatening to lead Nigeria on the road to hell; and as has become usual here, forces seeking to dismember the country are emboldened, while normally rational priests like Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah became sufficiently worried to publicly fear that the killings of recent days point in the frightening direction of a religious war.
The glaring absence of leadership in the country was made even clearer by the gratuitously insulting statement from the Information Minister, Labaran Maku, that the President could run Nigeria from wherever! So Goodluck Jonathan joined his erstwhile boss, the late Umaru Yar’adua as well as Saminu Turaki the maverick former governor of Jigawa State, in governance by disappearance, at a time when visibility of leadership was precisely what we need in the country!
This was the backdrop to my acceptance to be part of the media team that was to interview President Jonathan on Sunday. And by the same Friday night, the dramatic background was further heightened, with the sacking of the Minister of Defence, Dr. Haliru Muhammed and the seemingly untouchable National Security Adviser, Andrew Owoye Azazi! With hindsight, it seemed clear that Azazi’s days were numbered.
Last week, I made a reference to the media campaign which he or circles around him had launched, against Northern groups that were allegedly working to ensure his removal. As was usual in such things in Nigeria, an effort was made to mobilise a regional/ethnic constituency to save the NSA’s job.
The campaigners even reminded us that since the NSA was responsible for the safety of the presidential fleet of aircraft, Azazi was the best person to safeguard them, apparently because he was from the same area as the President! That is the level of degeneracy of the social space in our country today.
The campaigners could not save Azazi’s very lucrative perch atop the security apparatus! In truth, the man was a goner! He had said controversial things about the PDP’s role in the emergence of violence. Similarly, the man carried on as if he was an alternate president of Nigeria, and as I have noted on this page in the past, might have been a brilliant military officer, but was obviously deficient in his understanding of the social context which gave rise to the Boko Haram insurgency. He became the symbol of a security complex that increasingly became discredited in its handling of the security threat.
Many people, especially in the North, increasingly believed that the security forces had become sucked into the problem and were in fact participating in the violence themselves! They needed to justify the huge sums appropriated for security in the budget and therefore had very little reason to end the country’s security crisis!
So by Sunday afternoon, the team of interviewers met for the first time, to examine the various areas we would like to interrogate with President Goodluck Jonathan.
We were very clear in our minds that the main topics were the security issues around Boko Haram; corruption; the economy, especially issues of youth unemployment; the scandal in the NASS woven around the oil subsidy probe; issues of politics, especially the 2015 election; the refusal by the President to publicly declare his assets; governance challenges and we also decided to incorporate questions from the online news outfit, PREMIUM TIMES.
We were also aware that there was the need to find out why the President decided to travel to Rio De Janeiro, while the country burnt!
The more things remain same
I had participated in these presidential chats, during the Obasanjo presidency and the details about security clearance; the attention to details; the possibilities that some technical detail might be lost, etc. have remained the same.
In Nigeria, the more things changed, the more they remained the same. As usual a coterie of officials was around the president: ministers, aides of all descriptions and when the programme ended, like the choir in one of the mushrooming evangelical churches, all chorused that the President had done very well; it was a fantastic performance, and so on!
Governance is all about flattery and the hypocritical massaging of the ego of the big man; it happens in all political cultures but the Nigerian variant is particularly sickening! But I have gotten ahead of myself. A few minutes to the broadcast hour of 1900HRS, the President walked into the set.
The last time I saw the man was during Ramadan last year, when I had been invited, along with other media people, to break our fast with the President. As it turned out, the interview went on schedule and in the end the president’s responses to some of our questions have become a talking point in the media, including in social media circles.
President’s labour
Many people have asked me what I thought of President Jonathan, after the close encounter of a two-hour interview. Naturally enough, I tried to gauge the man’s emotional responses and general ‘body language’, a phrase which almost became the theme of our engagement.
I think the President laboured honestly to put across his ideas but he didn’t succeed in convincing me of his understanding of the complexity of the issues he has chosen to tackle on behalf of Nigerians. Take the Boko Haram issue, for instance, I think he was locked in a mindset, about “Boko Haram and their sponsors” which he repeated severally; yet, there hasn’t been any meaningful effort to unmask these “sponsors”. The social context of the rise of the insurgency is clearly lost on him!
And I was bemused by the way he defended the overbearing influence of “Government Approved Billionaires”, like Femi Otedola and Aliko Dangote, in the process of politics and governance in the country. Jonathan just couldn’t see the need for the necessary detachment of the apparatus of state from the interests of the multibillionaires that donate handsomely to presidential and PDP fund raisings!
He was also unconvincing on reasons why he has refused to go the Borno and Yobe states. The most scandalous aspect of the responses for me was the way he seemed to allow an overflow of emotions, when I asked why he refused to publicly declare his asset. Nigerians were appalled by that performance especially!
I left the set, believing that ours is a very modest president and a likeable individual, stripped of his role in the process of power. But the problem is that we are not dealing with the persona of an ordinary individual, but the manner that a politician impacts on our lives as a country.
From that perspective, there is a lot to be worried about. I came to the conclusion that Nigerians must collectively help the President to succeed for the sake of all of us, because the alternative of failure cannot and must not be contemplated. The whole idea is not to let this mammy wagon conveying all of us, to run into a ravine, with our, well, very challenged driver!
