by Mohammed Dahiru Aminu

Those who still ask questions regarding Goodluck Ebele Jonathan’s poor performance as president, and still wonder why he was such a bad leader are obviously very poor learners of the rubrics and schema of power in post independent Nigeria. Jonathan was a failure from the onset. Only a cursory study of the history of Jonathan’s ascent to power informs how he was selected to deputise for Umaru Musa Yar’Adua because of his inherent disabilities about governance.

In other words, Jonathan’s competitive advantage which landed him the job was his utter cluelessness. Jonathan became vice president because Olusegun Obasanjo, who helped to pick him for that post, didn’t wish for Yar’Adua an Atiku-type deputy. At that time, the selection criteria for a vice president was to bring in a candidate who was everything Atiku was not.

If Atiku was a mean, overtly ambitious deputy who had the willpower to consider dethroning his boss, his successor should be a person who was not at all ambitious, or at least not to be seen to be ambitious. If Atiku was a promising politician with right skillset, experience, intelligence, and other requisite instincts that was—and still is—required for political maneuverings and success within the chaos that is Nigeria, his successor should be found in a person who is outstandingly unskilled, superbly inexperienced, supercalifragilisticexpialidociously unintelligent, and generally impractical as regards the workings of power, and more so, as regards life itself. No one in Nigeria, marched these set of criteria, at the time, better than Jonathan. He was unskilled. He was inexperienced. He was unintelligent. He was a generally unworkable dimwit. You only need to take a good look at him to see these smashingly superlative qualities in him.

In any event, if Atiku was used as a standard on how to and how not to cherry-pick a deputy, Jonathan was a perfect successor—of course, on the condition that, for the good of the nation, the person for whom he is deputising does not die! But when luck ran out for Nigeria, the lead died, and alas, Jonathan became president. At the time Jonathan became president, those, like me, who were conversant with the history of his emergence as vice president were aware that the country was done for.

Thanks to Professor Okey Ndibe, who recently reminded us in one of articles entitled “Junaid’s Jeremiads, Buhari’s Burden” of Dr Junaid Mohammed’s declaration of Jonathan: “even if Mr Jonathan’s father were given the task of evaluating his son’s presidency, the verdict would still come back as a failure.”

But while Nigerians will remember Jonathan as a terrible president, the same Nigerians will also remember a different and more gracious Jonathan who elegantly conceded defeat to Muhammadu Buhari when he lost his re-election bid. Jonathan chose the exemplary path of civility by supporting his successor and handing over power peacefully. This singular act of Jonathan symbolised Nigeria’s maturity in what could be described as the arithmetic democracy.

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Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija

Mohammed Dahiru Aminu wrote from England

Mazi Emeka