A striptease does exactly what its name suggests: it stimulates your emotions through gradual revelation. The dancer stands in front of you, slowly and seductively removing their clothing while some soft, sweet music plays. Now, picture this: the music is tight, the light is dim, the anticipation is building, but this dancer just never reveals anything. Yes, that’s how I feel about the rumoured presidential ambition of former president Goodluck Jonathan, who has refused to confirm or deny his interest. Nobody knows for sure if he will be running in 2027, and he seems to be getting a kick out of watching us only partially aroused. Even more irritating, we played the same game in 2023. This year, we are back at the same spot.
A PDP faction named him as their presidential candidate, offered him a certificate of return (collected on his behalf by a proxy), and left everyone still speculating. In all of this, the man himself has not spoken decisively on what he intends to do.
We have been talking about his presidential ambition since 2021 or so. First, it was all the legal hurdles he needed to overcome to be qualified to contest. Then came the season of electioneering when people ran around for him while he stayed in the shadows. At that time, the story was that he would only contest if he did not need to go through the PDP party primaries and just offered a ticket. The election came and went without him saying anything. The only thing close to a confirmation of his stance came from his wife, Patience, who vowed in 2024 that she was through with politics forever. From his aides, all you ever hear is a rebuke of those who speculate on his ambition, never a confirmation nor a denial.
What exactly does Jonathan gain from playing this game of hide and seek? I understand that he could be irritated by the unsolicited advice he is getting from some partisans and feels no obligation to respond to anyone, but why turn the people promoting you into clowns of sorts? If you are uninterested, tell those running around for you to stop, or publicly shut down the insinuations once and for all, and move on. And if you wish to contest—which is well within your rights—then declare your ambition and start rallying your supporters. Either way, be bold enough to state your position. It is this kind of diffidence, disguised as meekness, that jeopardised his presidency.
Let me admit that I am not in any way enamoured with the possibility of his return, but I do understand what is driving the call for it. In 2023, the “run, Jonathan, run” campaign was understandable in light of our political realities and the need to balance geopolitical/religious interests in the calibration of the candidacies of presidential and vice-presidential contestants. Then, some political elements who badly wanted power to return to their region found a practical chance in Jonathan. For those, it would have been too much of an entitlement to ask for the north to retain power after eight straight years of Muhammadu Buhari’s ruinous and nepotistic rule. It was necessary for presidential power to make the perfunctory return to the South first, then return to the North as soon as possible. Who could guarantee that but Jonathan, who, constitutionally, had no more than a term in office? No matter what any presidential contestant might promise in the heat of the passion of their public acceptance, nobody is foolish enough to believe that anyone who manages to make it to the presidency will have enough integrity to leave after just the first term. Unless one is prenatally accursed, who spits out a morsel of meat that the gods have put into their mouth?
So, everyone knew that for a southerner to get power in 2023 meant that the South would keep it until 2031. The only person who has been the president and still has enough goodwill to run again is Jonathan. Beyond the legality, he is also not bold enough to try to motivate the national assembly to change the law to extend his tenure. He is the kind of person who will mark time for four years and leave when the calendar says so. In that sense, he was a perfect choice for the permutation. But for 2027, that calculation has changed. Most of his ardent supporters have morphed into the Obidient army, and the best he can hope for now is a divided house. Also, the political cabal that wanted him to run in 2023 must have come to terms with the possibility that a southerner will serve out their eight years. The only reason anyone would want Jonathan now is that he is a neutral choice for those who hate both Bola Tinubu and Peter Obi equally. I do not know how many votes that would tally into in 2027.
The other part of that attraction is that Jonathan can also ride a massive wave of tribal sentiment, nostalgia, and buyer’s remorse, especially from those who ousted him, for the corrupt and clueless buffoon that Muhammadu Buhari turned out to be. People who felt they were too hard on him have since become remorseful; some of them will vote for him as an apology of sorts. Because, truly, everything Jonathan did wrong pales in significance when set beside the failures of his successor(s). Was his administration corrupt? Yes, but look at the scale of the many heists perpetrated under Buhari, who was supposed to be the anti-corruption man. Their administration was supposed to be a combo of an old soldier and a pastor, but it was a team that turned out to me a confederacy of thieves and hypocrites. By the time Buhari left, Nigeria was haemorrhaging from a series of wounds inflicted by a doctor who combined sociopathy with gross incompetence.
If Buhari was a disaster that we walked into with our eyes open, his successor is the Ten Plagues visited on people on the same day. On the economic front, Nigerians have been strained by a series of policies deliberately designed to squeeze out the lifeblood that Buhari forgot to drain from us. Insecurity is at an all-time high, and what worries Bola Tinubu is that his opponents will “weaponise” his failures against him. The plight of the people does not bother him; his concern is how it affects his ambition. On the issue of corruption, you take one look at Tinubu himself and genuinely wonder where one even starts narrating the woes.
When you put together all the pains that we have endured and all the disappointments we have faced, Jonathan’s tenure starts to look somewhat appealing. Through the lens of nostalgia, his shortcomings look manageable. We console ourselves with the memories of a pain that we tolerated well enough, forgetting the cumulative damage it did to our body system. Nigeria is like a person who has moved through a series of abusive relationships, and they have no perspective of what an ideal life should look like. The basis of calculating a good life has been reduced to comparing one abuser to the other, rather than an outright rejection of toxicity. We do not know what normal should be anymore. We keep looking back to when it was less bad, because there really is no hope of better.
Finally, the way Jonathan has left us hanging is exactly what we deserve for ever imagining in our little minds that someone like Buhari would better him. Since we did not let his presidency achieve the closure that he would have wanted, our punishment is to watch his strip dance without achieving the climax we seek.
