Is Goodluck Nigeria’s Bad Luck?

Osun Defender

22 March 2011

Is Goodluck Nigeria’s Bad Luck?  

By Moses E. Ochonu

President Goodluck Jonathan’s presidential ambition is built and sustained partly on blackmail. A beleaguered nation, held hostage to a PDP oligarchy that knows only waste and incompetence, is being asked to vote for Jonathan as a price for unity.

The implied threat of disunity in the event of Jonathan’s rejection is not very subtle either. It is part of an elaborate script being advanced to make Jonathan seem inevitable and synonymous with Nigeria’s survival.

Blackmail politics kick in when a political cause lacks merit and logic, when a candidate’s record should earn him a dismissal, not a new tenure. Jonathan comes from the oil producing Niger Delta, which admittedly has given much more to the nation than it has gotten out of it. In terms of sheer national sacrifice, I can think of no other region that has given more and lost more in this troubled union of ours. The extraction of wealth from the region is accompanied by enormous and perhaps irreparable environmental damage.

There is a sense, then, unspoken but deeply embedded in the Jonathan presidential project, that his election would compensate the region for its sacrifice and recognize its fiscal centrality to the evolution of the modern Nigerian state. Certain strains of this thinking have even mutated into a sense of entitlement. And this is the danger. It is this strain that carries an undeclared threat meant to emotionally blackmail voters into embracing the candidate of the party that engineered their current misery.

The problem with this argument is that the presidency is too big an office to be parceled out as compensation, and Nigeria is in too dire a state for voters to succumb to the crude politics of mere representation and recognition. Nigeria needs deliverance and reclamation.