These Issues Don’t Concede Defeat

Shortly after Presi­dent Goodluck Jonathan called up his opponent in the March 28 elections ,Major General Buhari, to concede defeat, someone on the social media a poi­gnant statement which read: “My son asked me why were youth corpses jubilating that Jonathan did not win this election and I told him he is too young to understand why they are thanking God”.

That, to me, was so loaded and it speaks a lot to the very issues that have shaped the contest for power in our nation,country, I meant.

Jonathan should be saluted for not taking the country through any bloodbath by walking his talk that the ambition of any politician should not equal the blood of any citizen .

There were many rea­sons for him to make statements or suggestive body language that would have inspired his sup­porters to create a festi­val of blood.

He could have insisted on truncating the process when it was discovered that the man who printed the PVCs is a member of the opposing party, if he was a “do-or-die’ man.

What of when he got to the polling unit and the card reader could not ac­credit him?Or when Jega discarded the card reader after accreditation time was over in some part whereas he never used the machine in the other part? He was aware the results we were being tak­en through an orchestra­tion was already on the website of the opposing party but did not resort to the Harrison mentality of someone we used to know.

By conceding in spite of the obvious was a sign of a man who would not want his country go up in flames just because of power,

In one moment, he moved from being presi­dent to occupying the va­cant stool of a statesman which one Baba missed eight years ago over his inordinate ambition .

Jonathan obviously had his mistakes but did not miss it when history beckoned!

Congratulations to the winner of the election, Buhari.

With Jonathan on his way to Otuoke, it’s now time to interrogate the “change’ that has arrived.

I’ve gone through the promises of the APC cam­paign and identified a few items that would create burden of expectations.

There is one about mak­ing one Naira exchange for one dollar. This obvi­ously won’t be achieved through a bill to the Na­tional Assembly but in­creasing the productive capacity of our economy to back up our currency in the face of falling oil prices.

Poor parents would now expect one meal in school per day but ex­cept sawdust will do, the current National Budget cannot sustain the cost of that.

Ultimately, the new men of power would be confronted with the real­ity of the systemic nature of the Nigerian crisis.The current structure of Ni­geria is not conducive to good governance and all misplaced expectations are bound to shatter,

The very folks trumpet­ing now would be hooting with the impossibility of any change for as long as we run away from struc­tural changes.

And the earlier they had a rethink on the is­sues some of us raised in the build-up to the elec­tions those basking in praises now would depart in four years time in tat­ters,

The issues of nation­hood have never been defeated at any elections and never have they con­ceded defeat anywhere in the world except they are addressed. That was why Britain was still doing referendum in Scotland in 2014, the year of our National Conference