Jonathan’s desperate forays into Southwest - Idowu Akinlotan

It was largely the activism of the Southwest that made his ascension to the throne in 2010 possible, and he could not have won as fluidly as he did in 2011 without either the Southwest’s indifference to the Buhari presidential campaign of that year or their tacit cooperation.



 Yet more than five years after that momentous poll success, President Goodluck Jonathan has exhibited nothing but contempt for the Southwest, passing them over for top appointments.


In-between, during the 2012 fuel price hike protests largely inspired by the politically conscious Southwest, Dr Jonathan again showed nothing but scathing disdain for the highly critical region, describing the Lagos elite as enervated and pampered, and their children spoilt brats who wastefully rode two or three cars, guzzling a disproportionately huge portion of the country’s oil resources. And in Ibadan, while campaigning at Mapo Hall in 2011, he described the Southwest progressive leaders as rascals from whom the region must be delivered. In particular, at the 52nd Independence anniversary lecture in Abuja, Dr Jonathan made shockingly ignorant remarks on the fuel subsidy protests, which in distorted logic he said were sponsored.

Dr Jonathan has never been at ease with Lagos, though he now courts them. During his 2011 campaigns, he tried to rouse ethnic hatred by suggesting openly to non-natives that if they banded together they could defeat the candidate of the ruling party in the state. The campaign failed, but it has not stopped him from pursuing that same horrifying tactics, nor discouraged him from again reaching out to ethnic groups within the state as well as wowing Lagosians themselves with promises of future projects. Perhaps he is even secretly appalled by how easily members of the Southwest elite can be compromised by contract largesse and other forms of inducements.

Throughout his first term, he never did anything major or strategic for Lagos, but he is back expecting the state to vote for him in March. Worse, other than fixing a few roads, he has done nothing concrete for the Southwest, but he has spent nearly the whole six weeks extension of the electoral timetable appealing to the region to support his reelection. Indeed, it was only a few months to the elections that he appointed a Yoruba official as his chief of staff. Otherwise, citing his displeasure with the region’s critical view of his government and the rebuff of PDP’s Mulikat Adeola-Akande as Speaker of the House of Representatives, he ensured no Yoruba appointee was among the top 15 positions in his government. After all, the region is a den of opposition, and its pungent media, with their fumigant tentacles spread all over the country with sanctimonious lack of grace, too unfriendly, too imperious, too acerbic.



If he had appointed Yoruba men and women into key government positions on his own volition, and had cited key projects in the region, he could justifiably campaign on the bases of these friendly and statesmanlike gestures to wow the region for votes. With no achievements to hawk, and with beggarly outstretched hands, he has embarked on a furious electoral drive targetted at the region’s grovelling traditional elite using the false face of Yoruba leadership and cashing in on the divisions and power struggles going on in the region. He has reportedly seduced Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC) leaders who, in exchange for pipeline protection contracts, have promised him support, as if the region could be sold and bought so cavalierly in transactions masterminded by half-wit and unprincipled traders masquerading as politicians and cultural icons. And those whom he cannot seduce, he has unleashed defamatory attacks on their persons in the hope that he can alienate them from their supporters and party support base.

Dr Jonathan’s Southwest converts have thus deliberately refused to focus on his weaknesses, which are legion and alarming, and on his absolute lack of finesse, diplomacy, intellectual depth, and sound judgement, not to say his abiding suspicion and even hatred for the Southwest elite and their many organs such as the media and democratic structures that define their essence, persons and history. The converts are not discomfited by the unsavoury fact that Dr Jonathan is unreasonably promoting militant groups and other ethnic militias to usurp the functions of military and paramilitary organisations.

In spite of all these depressing manoeuvres, the real Southwest is likely to see through the Jonathan shenanigans. They will recognise that voting for Dr Jonathan is endorsing incompetence, and that voting for, say, Jimi Agbaje, no matter their unhappiness with the progressive leaders of the region, is in fact enthroning the likes of Bode George and Adeseye Ogunlewe and other scoundrels. The region is likely to recognise that should Dr Jonathan be reelected, he would enact the worst economic policies ever seen in these parts, for his government has already crippled the economy and is barely struggling to cover the mess until the elections are over. Wiser counsel is likely to prevail, for the prohibitive and burdensome cost of reelecting Dr Jonathan far outweighs the discomforts of voting Gen Buhari with all his chequered history.

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