The Good in Goodluck Jonathan, By Jibrin Ibrahim

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For me, Jonathan remains a hero in the annals of the construction of Nigerian democracy and although we should not forget or forgive his criminal administration of Nigeria, we should grant his due on this issue.

It was the late strategy adviser to President Jonathan, Oronto Douglas, who told a mutual friend that all I had done over the past five years was to criticise and attack President Jonathan in my Monday columns. I have indeed spent a lot of energy, not every Monday as alleged, drawing attention to the terrible corruption and incompetence of the Jonathan Administration. Criticism is supposed to serve a positive purpose – encourage the person to change and improve their ways. That did not happen with our former President. Oronto Douglas died shortly after the victory of Buhari at the polls and must have come to realise that a broad range of Nigerians wanted change and were very critical of the Jonathan Administration, which had lost the respect of Nigerians. What are trending today are criticisms galore of Goodluck Jonathan, which is as it should be; let’s not however forget the good in him.

Goodluck Jonathan has a nice smile and he is generous with his smile even in the most difficult of times. I was impressed with his generous smiles throughout the ceremony for the inauguration of President Buhari. He had introduced that smile to Nigerians during his 2011 campaign for the presidency when he created a positive image for himself. Levels had changed for the boy without shoes, we were told. He had been to school and became the first PhD holder to seek to rule Nigeria, said the campaign. He was however presented as an ordinary Nigerian from a minority ethnic group accidentally finding himself in accelerated upward political elevation. He ran a good campaign in 2011, with the US style “neighbour to neighbour” methodology. He popularised the use of social media in political campaigning and secured the support of the youth who were looking for the “breath of fresh air” he promised. I saw hope in the action of so many young people who supported the Jonathan 2011 campaign. I suspect that he really wanted to give Nigeria the “breath of fresh air” but simply did not have either the will or the capacity. Within a year, the social media fans that actively campaigned for him without financial inducement became his greatest critics. It was interesting to see his campaign paying huge amounts of money for a social media campaign in 2015 and getting in return, maligning insults, derision and constant revelations about his incompetence, greed, corruption and moral decadence.

Throughout his campaign in 2015, he hardly said a word that was out of place. He repeated continuously that, “My ambition is not worth the life of a single Nigerian and no one should engage in violence on my behalf.” Of course his critics would say that although he did not use hate speech personally, his wife did but no one should be held liable for the sins of their spouse. What he could be blamed for was in hiring the two most competent Nigerian professionals in hate and dangerous speech, Femi Fani Kayode and Doyin Okupe to lead his campaign strategy, which was based largely on trying to destroy the credibility and image of his rival, Buhari. As my disposition towards President Jonathan today is a forgiving one, I would say that it’s the fault of his US campaign advisers. They had proposed that the best strategy to use to defeat Buhari was to go negative as they often do in US campaigns but they did it with such excess and so extreme a narrative of lies that they lost Nigerians. Luckily for Mohammadu Buhari, his own campaign advisers encouraged him to run a positive, hate-free, issues-based campaign, which, tied with his own reputation, became the winning formula.

As the whole world has been saying, the good in Jonathan was most eloquently expressed in his conceding defeat to Buhari on Tuesday March 31, before the collation was completed. The night before, those of us in the “Civil Society Situation Room” had received credible and concordant information that Goodluck Jonathan had lost the elections but instructions had been given in some key states to change results and declare him winner. We had released a strong statement that night warning that if the Jonathan hawks did that, they would be risking the survival of the country. The US and British governments had also released very strong statements that night. The issue then was, would Jonathan listen to the hawks in his camp encouraging the strategy of massive rigging or would he keep his word and accept the verdict of the Nigerian people? He did the latter and thereby became a hero for Nigerian democracy. Many people have argued that he only conceded because he had been warned of the Gbagbo treatment and was afraid – maybe so. Nonetheless, the fact that he conceded showed the good in him. There is no threat that President Nkurunziza in Burundi has not received about his third term ambition but he remains determined to go ahead, in spite of the risk of taking the country back to genocidal civil war. For me, Jonathan remains a hero in the annals of the construction of Nigerian democracy and although we should not forget or forgive his criminal administration of Nigeria, we should grant his due on this issue.

I believed there was a strong chance Jonathan could be convinced to concede defeat because it had been clear for a long time that he wanted a good legacy. From the early morning on March 31, I started tweeting and facebooking the following message: “Everybody now knows the winner of the election, the loser should ‪#concededefeat‬ and get massive respect from Nigerians & the int community”. I followed through with information that collation was ongoing in Senegal when President Wade was informed by security services that he had lost the election. He immediately called Macky Sall, conceded defeat and packed out of the State House. I argued that President Jonathan would gain respect, become a statesman and may even win the Mo Ibrahim good governance award and become a United Nations Peace Ambassador. Very many people of influence carried similar messages to him. We should all be grateful that he listened to those who carried this message to him, in particular General Abdulsalam Abubakar and his team, assembled by Bishop Kukah, the Professor Ibrahim Gambari team, President Sawyer and the African Union, and ECOWAS teams as well as the international community. What mattered at the end was that President Goodluck Jonathan heard the voices of reason and pulled back from the precipice, and that is the good in him.

Of course as democracy advocates, we had prepared for the worst. Radical civil society elements had established a front, Nigerians United for Democracy (NUD) co-chaired by Femi Falana and myself to start organising street protests and demonstrations in anticipation of the numerous plots by the Jonathan hawks to truncate our democracy. Maybe I am just glad he cut short our work by conceding defeat.