WHAT IF PRESIDENT RUNS

It is no more an idle guess: President Goodluck Jonathan will pitch with his good luck in the 2011 election. Take my word for it, this president will run. Anyone too distressed about that prospect might as well eat out his own heart now. He is constitutionally eligible, strategically positioned and evidently interested. Forget the familiar orchestration of fighting shy, and playing reluctant catch-up on whether to have a go at it. Actually, it isn’t that Jonathan is still undecided and is being pressured by some allied interests to take his chance; rather, he already has his eyes firmly set on the sprint and is building up, subtly but steadily, for it. Nothing underscored this prospect better – at the last count, that is – than the ascension last week of former Kaduna State Governor Namadi Sambo as the Vice-President. Sambo was a first term governor, who had kicked-off the ground work for a possible second term as provided for by the Constitution, before the call up to the vice-presidency. Commonsense teaches that for a politician with legitimate chance for term renewal, even the attraction of that higher office couldn’t be strong enough if it would all be packed up in just about a year – unless, that is, there was tacit assurance of the prospect of term renewal in the new office.

And why, anyway, shouldn’t Jonathan have his day at the poll? His political ‘family’, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), isn’t exactly unanimous on the purported zoning convention that has willed the presidency to the North until 2015. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who explicitly serviced that convention in 2007 by installing the late Umaru Yar’Adua to succeed him in a do-or-die electoral contest, over and above more engaging contenders from other parts of this country, recently told the Voice of America that nothing of the sort existed in the party’s books. Conservatives and regionalists in the party like Obasanjo’s one-time ally, former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, cried foul; insisting that the formula was inviolably congenital with the PDP. But they could well be pushing a narrow view of history. PDP’s pioneer national chair, Solomon Lar, said the formula was nothing near as sacrosanct. He told journalists on Tuesday, last week, that "the much talked-about zoning formula in the party is, after all, not a permanent issue as the party leadership is at liberty to consider President Jonathan’s 2011 ambition should he declare interest." Besides, he spooned in some icing, saying: "No zoning formula anywhere in the PDP constitution bars the president from contesting if he so wishes. The party will give him all the opportunity as a full-time party member to contest."

There are hawks in the party ranks calling time on the Jonathan presidency, ostensibly in deference to the purported zoning formula. But as Reggae icon Jimmy Cliff once sang: the harder they come, so they fall. Some in the party hierarchy like the immediate past national chair, Vincent Ogbulafor, have been muscled out of reckoning in circumstances that reek of intolerance and an ‘ethnic cleansing’ of conventionists. Strictly, Ogbulafor stepped down to face trial for sleaze he allegedly plied some decade ago; though cynics would wonder what on God’s earth the accuser-agency, ICPC, had been about all this while until the party hack voiced his preference for retaining the presidential ticket in the North in line with convention. Also, there is the deputy national chair Bello Haliru Mohammed who presently has his neck hanging in the graft noose; and that is against the backdrop of his being forthright in canvassing the sanctity of the purported formula. Still, there are others in the party ranks prophesying doom over the prospects of Jonathan’s candidacy in the 2011 poll. One of such is an ‘elder’ Bode Mustapha, reported by the Nigerian Tribune last week to have said Nigeria risked breaking up at the mere eventuality of Jonathan contesting, far less winning the presidential election. Meanwhile, there is the growing chorus of anti-conventionists within and outside the PDP urging the president to run and accusing him of bad faith should he decline.

But the real issue, if you asked me, isn’t whether or not Jonathan should run, but how he runs. Ever since fate threw him up at the helm, he has made the pledge of credible elections in 2011 his most strident mantra. Theoretically, the best chance he has in the world to walk that talk is to be a dispassionate non-participant umpire; such that he would ascetically set the ground rules for contenders and follow through on keeping these rules with Catholic rigidity. In other words, he has the self-sacrificing but history-reckoning option of laying the strong foundation of a positive society by dispassionately installing the most credible – and hopefully, competent – leadership that Nigeria ever had. Notice that I said ‘theoretically’. The records of history show that Obasanjo, as military ruler, had that same chance in 1979; yet he blew it in the desperation to pre-empt what he feared could be seen as a nepotistic precedent of allowing his ethnic kin, the late sage Chief Obafemi Awolowo, into power. Another military ruler, Gen. Abdusalami Abubakar, had a similar chance in 1999 and blew it in the generally perceived quest to cover up the military’s tracks in power. So, it is not a matter-of-course for Jonathan to seize the chance unless he is historically minded and strongly resolved to.

Current indications, however, strongly suggest the likelihood of Jonathan throwing his hat in the ring for the 2011 sprint for the presidency; and there is really no prior reason why he shouldn’t, since the Constitution allows him. The catch is: how fair can this president be as a participant-umpire? There are, of course, some countries where that wouldn’t even be an issue because of the strong ethical base of their electoral systems. Only two weeks ago, Gordon Brown presided over the British general elections in which his Labour party was trounced, and he has since quit the prime ministership for the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition of David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Former United States President George Bush umpired the 2008 election in which his Republican Party was ousted to pave the way for incumbent President Barack Obama from the Democratic Party. Even within the shores of Africa, ex-Ghanaian President John Kufour watched over the poll that his New Patriotic Party lost to usher in incumbent President John Atta Mills of the National Democratic Congress. So, it is not in itself an anathema to be a participant-umpire.

Yet, the signs are overly inauspicious for a fair weather contest in this country next year, with a Jonathan candidature on the ballot. Already, on-goings in the PDP suggest designs to root out opposition on the path of re-writing the zoning formula to accommodate the president. And that isn’t good news for the prospects of a level field when the various parties test strength at the poll. That is why the proposed electoral reform can no longer be held up as a dream deferred – not, indeed, with time increasingly in short supply. Specifically, that is why the counsel last week by the Conference of Nigerian Political Parties (CNPP) that the president should avoid appointing the next chair of INEC is more than the rant of opposition. It is wise counsel, deriving from the wisdom of the Uwais panel that made the recommendation in the first place.