For many Nigerians the new realisation by the Senate is no news at all. If anything, what the Senate position is telling everyone is that this body of ranking law makers can no longer deny the very obvious.
Having lived in denial for so long the Senate now sees it can no longer run away from the truth. Perhaps soon, President Goodluck Jonathan would come to the same realisation. He is, it is obvious, more interested in covert campaign activities, the kind of backhand politicking that Sani Abacha engaged in while on his wild goose chase of changing his khaki for civilian clothing.
Then the soldier, Nigerians were told, was being earnestly asked for by a group of misguided youth. In a curious playback of history, it is some transformation ambassadors, so-called, that are today beating the roads for Jonathan. Our dear president is so uncreative that all he has to kick-start his campaign for another four years in office is the discarded script of a military adventurer.
But I digress. My point was that the President is yet to share the truth that has dawned on the Senate rather belatedly, that Nigeria is at war. He goes about his activities as if all is alright. He seems content to be president of a country that is being riven apart by religious outcasts bent on foisting their control on the rest of the people.
We have said it times without number that Jonathan's glaring lack of leadership initiative when it really counted was a factor in the growth of insurgency. His hand-wringing helplessness when he should have been more decisive emboldened the insurgents that have since become grand masters of anarchic politicking.
So helplessly frightened did he appear that he claimed his very administration had been infiltrated by members of the sect that has so far given his administration a bad name.
But what many Nigerians never reckoned with was the possibility that the President could be undermining himself by the company he keeps.
Since every issue becomes political for President Jonathan and his supporters, he sees nothing wrong with the fact that one of his principal supporters and associates today is somebody that has been variously fingered for his active patronage of the same insurgents that have made Nigeria ungovernable for him.
Modu Sheriff has for long lived under an ominous cloud of suspicion over his relationship with insurgents in that part of the country where he was once governor, specifically in Borno State.
Stephen Davis, an international negotiator with long relationship with the Nigerian state, has mentioned Mr. Sheriff as a sponsor or sympathiser of the terrorists whose killer machines have ravaged many parts of the North and the north East in the last five years.
Even before Dr. Davis's disclosure, Sheriff had been indirectly implicated in the past on account of his links with persons suspected of working with the insurgents. Jonathan did nothing with him or others suspected of similar connections even while holding high offices in the country.
Modu Sheriff has since changed membership of political parties, switching allegiance from the APC to the PDP. And now that Nigerians are again asking questions about the suspicious activities of this former governor and the company he keeps, it has become convenient for supporters of the President to claim that Sheriff is being accused by opposition elements because he is no longer a member of the opposition APC.
President Jonathan obviously shares this view. His detached attitude to the question of prosecuting Sheriff, to say nothing of his open association with the man to the extent that he was part of a party that welcomed the President to Chad, proclaims Jonathan's total lack of concern for the matter at hand.
The President does not seem bothered, to borrow his own memorable words in another context of inept mouthing- President Jonathan does not 'give a damn' about what Nigerians think of his association with Sheriff. Every issue, as I said, is for him political. So if the APC could condone Sheriff, so could he. It does not matter a bit that his is the administration currently under the onslaught of Sheriff's purported terror merchants.
The foolish irony of a president making fast friends with an alleged sponsor of terrorists making life unbearable for Nigerians and Nigeria ungovernable for him is entirely lost on a President Jonathan whose kinsmen claim is being hounded by opponents, especially Northerners, opposed to his victory at the last presidential election and uncomfortable with his continued stay in office post 2015. Blinded by a desire to continue in office, Jonathan cannot distinguish between his true friends and enemies of both his person and all he stands for as the president of this country.
To be thus, Macbeth says, is nothing but to be thus safely. Jonathan fails to see that to be president is nothing but to be president safely. His presidency, indeed his very life, is only safe to the extent that he has control over the territory over which he rules. With large swathes of the North East falling under the control of insurgents, the President can be assured that his presidency, should he win the next election, would be more crisis-prone and insecure than it presently is.
Nigeria once fought a bitter civil war whose wounds are not yet healed. It was a war, we are told, meant to keep the country one undivided whole. With the increase in insecurity in the North East and his own lack of perception or appreciation of the situation before him, President Jonathan might yet go into the records as the president under whom Nigeria went to pieces.
The disintegration that will follow the final victory of outcast islam as we see in the North East of Nigeria will be far from orderly. It would be a long tale of human misery and disaster. Nigeria would be in complete shreds.
That would be the only legacy of a presidency that is presently floundering like a lost ship. Goodluck Jonathan's lack of perception is threatening the safety of Nigeria and Nigerians. He may claim not to have a hand in how the present insurgency began or in how Nigeria came to find itself increasingly under the control of strange elements, but President Goodluck Jonathan, given his avoidable failings as president, may have built his presidential legacy on quicksand. — with Goodluck Jonathan and jane onuoha
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