Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan is clearly God’s favourite. He is the only Nigerian politician to have been in power for 16 uninterrupted years since 1999. Whereas other politicians came and withered like the flower, Jonathan bloomed from embryonic stage through larva, pupa and adulthood in the nation’s political space. No Nigerian in living memory, not even Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, who was begged to come out of retirement to rule the nation, comes any close to Jonathan.

Curiously, in all the 16 years in the nation’s political theatre, Jonathan did not have to labour. Fortune, they say favours the brave, but Jonathan cannot be numbered among the brave in political sophistry. He never dared yet he kept winning. The only time he laboured and dared was during his aspiration to get a second term mandate, and on that count he failed. So, as it turned out, Jonathan was never created to labour, he was not configured to dare. He was meant to always profit from the fountain of Providential mercy.

To some, Jonathan was a failure; a man who could not rise to the occasion, a man given to flip-flops, a man too weak to lead, a man who came to war unarmed and unguarded thus making himself an easy target for the foe, a man who manifested monumental flaws in his acts and profound foibles in his inactions. To them, he was a man who did not know what to say at any point in time and how to say it even when what he said had any substance. He was a leader who could not lead, full of oratory clangers and bloopers; he was a man who promised so much hope yet gave little or no hope.

Yet, to others, Jonathan was a good man, a child of destiny, an epitome of peace and a classical all-time example of a man after God’s heart. He is seen as the bridge between the poor and the rich, between the aristocratic majority of the Nigerian state and the maligned and grossly marginalized minority eternally under the strain of a Rehoboamic majority. To them he is the living example of the fact that grass to grace is possible, a fulfillment of the Biblical didactical verse that the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong…but time and chance happens and determines the outcomes of man’s exertions.

But who really is Goodluck Jonathan, where can we place him in the nation’s political chronology? He is like John Tyler (1790-1862), the tenth President of the United States (1841-1845). Tyler just like Jonathan was the first vice president to become president upon the death of President William Henry Harrison. At that time, the Constitution of the United States was vague on succession of the President when he dies in office. President Harrison had died barely one month after he took oath of office and Tyler took it upon himself to be sworn in as president instead of considering himself acting president and calling for new elections. That action, though hugely controversial at that time, however set a precedent that has been followed ever since in the US Presidential system of government. Tyler, till date, is considered as one of the US minority presidents but his precedent has remained an enduring succession template of America’s democracy. Jonathan’s trajectory in politics has been hallmarked by precedents chief of which was the ‘Doctrine of Necessity’ that shooed him into the office of chief executive upon the prolonged sickness and eventual demise of his boss, Umaru Yar’adua.

In office, Jonathan struggled. Just like all previous Presidents of Nigeria, he could not fix the economy, he could not fix the deficit in infrastructure, he could not guarantee regular power supply nor fix the intractable fuel scarcity bogey. Worst of it all, he allowed corruption and insecurity to fester like gangrenous cancer under his watch. Jonathan though outperformed his predecessors in roads construction and rehabilitation, in ICT development, education, agriculture etcetera but all his sterling performances in these sectors were sullied by his obvious indecisiveness to deal with terror and its promoters.

Yet, Jonathan still occupies a huge swathe in the nation’s political history. Chroniclers of the nation’s history may denounce him for his laissez faire attitude, they may deprecate him for being too self-indulgent but they cannot deny him this one crown: he is the most democratic president Nigeria ever had; he submitted himself to the rule of law even to his own hurt. It is his unblemished democratic credential that compelled him to accept the outcome of a presidential election in which he was out-foxed. That singular gesture of conceding defeat and living with the historical misfortune of being the first Nigerian incumbent president to lose election has ensured the nation witnessed a peaceful civilian to civilian transition. He would be remembered as the man who sacrificed his personal ambition for national peace.

The man from Otuoke has every reason to retire home a happy man, a man who took the shame just so the lives of over 170 million Nigerians would be preserved. Jonathan has transformed from obscurity to become the benchmark of the finest democratic ideals in Africa, a continent where leaders manipulate polls and tweak the constitution to remain in power. His epigraph should be written in golden pen among the pantheon of noble men on a continent that reeks with the ignoble fragrance of dictatorship.

Author: Ken Ugbechie