After wide publicity about his world press conference in Geneva, Switzerland on Wednesday, former president Goodluck Jonathan let down even his most loyal supporters. Expectations were high that he would talk about his role in, and rationale for, the national outrage of the moment: How $2.1 billion earmarked for arms purchases for Nigerian Armed Forces to fight the dreaded Boko Haram insurgents ended up shared like Christmas gift. It was a shameless looting of the treasury by his appointees, party associates, cronies and hangers-on. Official statistics say, so far, 21 individuals and companies looted up to N55bn.
His explanation at the Geneva Press Club for keeping quiet over the boiling national problem is because any comment he makes could undermine the judicial process initiated by the current administration. He said: “I would not like to comment now because the matter is in court. Definitely, I will speak. My comment now may affect witnesses and the judicial process. I should not be the one undermining the process.”
Understandable in principle, yes. But in practice, every informed person knows he was the Number One citizen, the fons et origio at the helms of both the government and the ruling party. Needless to say, as the cliché says, the buck always stops at his desk.
However, in order not to be swept away by the gathering stormy winds over the national shame and its consequent outrage, we would advise the ex-president to spill it all now. The underlying bad governance is currently accelerating the momentum of the stormy winds which would likely make him reap the whirlwind in prison otherwise.
Unknown to him or not, public perception sees him as the fall guy for all the hideous corruption revelations coming out of both the Presidency where he presided or more specifically, the once all-powerful Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA). And the public perception is justified: For the President is the Number One citizen in any country, socialist, democratic or communist.
Conversely, all his appointees, be they ministers, advisers or assistants know that he is their employer. He is at liberty to promote, demote or sack them at will based on his approval or otherwise of their performance. Once he did not sack any of them for any infraction, it follows that he endorsed whatever action or inaction they have taken. The same applies if they take bad actions like looting the treasury which elicit setbacks to the advancement of his policies and programmes.
Now in the public domain are the accusations and counter-accusations revolving around two of the most powerful and trusted aides of his. They were the former NSA, Col. Sambo Mohammed Dasuki and the former BOT chairman of the party, Chief Tony Anenih.
Some critics say Jonathan is buying time with golden silence because the gathering storm may propel him into the dock one day. Like the Miranda principle, anything he says now may be used against him in court if he is docked. And his silence also ensures he does not step on big toes now in power.
Others say he is stalling to hear more of what once trusted aides would say to exculpate themselves – or ditch their boss. By waiting, he would think up plausible excuses he would use as sweetening palliatives to sound euphonious soothing balm for frayed nerves of Nigerians because of the unspeakable national shame. While tardying, he is still identifying the traitors who would betray him so that he would upstage and ditch them first.
Others still believe he is dillydallying to buy time in order not to antagonise any loyalists he may still have. So that no wrong word would antagonise them to erode his increasingly denuded support base. As such, silence is still golden.
But we see ex-president Jonathan’s silence as too wooden for comfort. As at now, the two most powerful and credible persons in his government, Anenih and Dasuki said separately that they were only following presidential orders sharing the arms’ purchase money. Consequently, he has a huge credibility deficit to redeem. In the revelations corner into which he has been boxed by his associates, even the best reasons could be rationalised as plausible excuses if he tardies further.
Otherwise, we all know how Nigerians deify their leaders, especially those holding executive positions with the power of the treasury they command and dispense at their whims. Some employees may jeopardise their jobs by defying their chief executives. But hardly anybody defies the President wilfully if he still values his job, contacts or contracts a head of state might have endorsed directly or indirectly by remote control through any of his minions.
We endorse those who ask Jonathan to talk now or hold his peace in future. It sounds cowardly to us that he cites judicial contempt as excuse for preference for silence. There is always a thin line between facts presented unadorned in court and those presented to prejudice a judge which elicit contempt charge.
He would save the country all the gripping tension if he comes out boldly as the former number one to accept responsibility for the mind-boggling corruption folly.
For, every passing day, when the 219 Chibok girls remain captives in Boko Haram-contrived marriages, when children endure the inhospitable climes of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps or the adults die of privation in the camps for the 2.6 million persons, they remember that someone,
somewhere authorised diverting arms fund into political campaign with reckless abandon. That one was Jonathan.
As such, it is in Jonathan’s interest to talk now; it is in the interest of the country that the anti-graft agencies accelerate their arrests, trials, convictions and retrieval of looted property to take the country off the bad media image headlines. Above all, it is in the international community’s interest to know how the epitome of bad governance with the huge treasury looting was perpetuated by a president they considered a paragon of democracy. Now, he has bequeathed a rotten legacy to a successor they are now hailing near-simultaneously for fighting the evil his predecessor perpetrated.
Like the fabled Franco Nero who fiddled while Rome burnt, ex-president Goodluck Jonathan should not be jetting around the world preaching only his successes his media handlers had extolled during his time in power. We have heard all before. Now, the problems he masterminded deliberately or inadvertently, into mega-treasury looting have opened the nation’s prison gates previously shut to him – now wide open on conviction for his unspeakable corruption and pauperised populace legacy in a collapsed economy.
