JEG: No second term - The Nation

It is just as well that President Goodluck Jonathan has not formally announced that he will be seeking re-election next year.
He should not. In fact, he should go one step further and declare, today, in the manner of former U.S. President William Sherman, that he will not be a candidate for the 2015 presidential election; that if nominated, he will decline, and that if elected, he will refuse to serve.
More than any other incident in his accidental presidency, his shambolic handling of the abduction of more than 200 girls from the Government Secondary School, Chibok, in Borno State by elements of the nihilistic terrorist organisation Boko Haram, has called into serious question  his fitness for the job
It is not that he had shown the mental alertness and sure-footedness his office demands in handling many crises that have rocked his administration. But the Chibok abduction and
his manner of dealing with it has exposed his inadequacies as never before, and not just to his compatriots who always had their doubts.  Now, the whole world has a good idea of the leader of Africa’s most populous country and largest economy, home to the largest aggregation of black humanity.
Several days after the abduction, a spokesperson for the Nigerian Army, of which Dr Jonathan is commander-in-chief, announced to the relief of a traumatised nation that the girls had been freed. Only when challenged a few days later did the spokesperson take back the claim. The army, he said without remorse and without shame, has been “misled.”
The spokesperson is still at his post.  So, for that matter, is Abba Moro, the cabinet minister responsible for a recruitment test in which 16 job-seekers were trampled to death and scores suffered significant injury. So also is Diezani Allison-Madueke, who presides over the scandal-infested Ministry of Petroleum Resources. But that is another matter.
From the time the military said it had been misled, it has been one miscue after egregious miscue for the Jonathan administration.
For three weeks, Dr Jonathan could not rouse himself to make a national broadcast or even hold a news conference.  He did not meet with the distraught parents of the abducted girls to offer solace.
Instead, administration officials went into clumsy denial. They questioned whether the girls were actually abducted.  They sought to pin responsibility on the school’s authorities and the governor of Borno State.
When the President finally bestirred himself to address the public on the issue, it was through a staged Presidential Chat, with four handpicked journalists doing the questioning. The outing was a fresh disappointment.
Dr Jonathan said nothing that the public did not already know; no insights, only bland assurances that the government was doing “everything” to secure the release of the girls. The assurances rang hollow, especially when he admitted that the government had no idea where the girls were being held, nor indeed how many of them were in Boko Haram’s infernal custody.
So did subsequent claims that the government was “on top of the situation.”  How can you be on top of the situation when you are, by your own admission, utterly clueless as to what is going on?
It was Dr Jonathan’s opportunity to speak directly to the parents and relations of the girls, to empathise with them, to play comforter-in-chief.
He blew it big-time, before the attentive global audience.  He kept appealing to the parents to “co-operate” with the government in its effort to secure the release of their children. It was as if the parents somehow stood in the way of the effort.
Jide Ajani’s excellent reporting on the recent Presidential Chat and the atmosphere in which it was held (Vanguard, May 11) could not have reassured anyone looking for evidence that Dr Jonathan is indeed up to the task.  It shows a president overwhelmed by the office, disengaged, and tentative, not exactly basking in the fawning adulation and saccharine glorification of his retinue of court jesters, but not averse to it either.
It is an alarming portraiture.  It provides some understanding of the abject incoherence of  the Jonathan administration’s response to the atrocity that reverberated around the world.
And it confirms what a senior adviser to Dr Jonathan told me shortly after Dr Jonathan took office as acting president.  Was Dr Jonathan up to the task, I had asked the adviser, a discreet man not given to rash judgment or hyperbole.
“Without hesitation, No,” he had responded.
Dr Jonathan, he told me, would come to meetings without having mastered his briefing papers, and would sometimes doze off.
One of the worst-kept secrets in Abuja is that Dr Jonathan’s quarters in the Villa is a den, where he and a coterie of revelers carouse far into the night. This kind of routine leaves little time for serious reflection on issues of state, and for cultivating the mind and the intellect, and may well account for the detachment, the lethargy, that is the hallmark of his style.
Nor has his meddlesome wife, Dame Patience Faka, helped matters.  She staged a “public inquisition,” as a retired ambassador who brought the video of the event to my attention called it, during which she harassed and bullied officials and others in her inimitable way to blame everyone except her husband’s administration.
No matter how this crisis is resolved, Dr Jonathan is unlikely to emerge as a president who can be trusted to lead Nigeria through the challenges that lie ahead. To be fair, he never sought the position; he knew his limitations. It is not entirely his fault that he has proved unequal to the task.
But it would be selfish and unpatriotic of him to seek to continue to preside over the destiny of Nigeria when his term ends next year.  If the ruling PDP loves and cares about Nigeria, it should urge Dr Jonathan not to seek another term.  If he refuses, it should reject him decisively.
Nigeria deserves better.

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