By EMMANUEL AZIKEN

Members of the opposition who fret about what they claim to be the poor vocal articulation of the President would have been clearly shamed last Friday. At the formal presentation of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, PDP gubernatorial candidate for Bayelsa State, in Yenogoa that day, President Goodluck Jonathan was at his oratorical best.

Dressed in his native Ijaw attire, fresh-faced as ever and surrounded by the home crowd, some of whom knew him when he could not afford a pair of shoes, the President had no scruples leveling with his people about Mr. Timipre Sylva, the immediate past governor of the State.

Sylva had been barred from contesting the PDP gubernatorial primaries, and became the second governor in the PDP fold to be so treated since 1999. Dr. Chinwoke Mbadinuju who ruled Anambra State between 1999 and 2003 had the distinction of being first in that class ahead of the 2003 contest when the Uba brothers used Dr. Chris Ngige to supplant him. The subsequent action of Ngige in devouring the Ubas remains a perpetual lesson in political subterfuge for political godfathers and their wards.

The Sylva administration, the President said to a roaring applause of a massively anti-Sylva crowd in the Samson Siasia Sports Complex, was a monument to disgrace as he said Sylva was undeserving of a second term in office having failed to perform in the five years he held sway in office.

President Jonathan was to further assert that the former governor was stoned last year by Bayelsans on account of the alleged poor performance in office. It was a reference to the stoning incident when elements in the crowd pelted Sylva during a home-coming reception for the President on October 22, 2010 at the same Samson Siasia stadium.

The governor’s men at that time denied any such occurrence and it remained a fact that only eye witnesses could confirm. Remarkably, last Friday’s speech which some claim to be the President’s best speech is now turning into a signpost of his own political garrulousness, while others say it is another indication that the President does not keep to his promises.

Of course, ex-governor Sylva is a man with very few friends outside his immediate political circle; many accuse him of lack of seriousness in the art of governance, some allege arrogance, and yet many others insinuate indiscretion in his habits.

But it was the same man that the President just over a year ago raised his hands for a second term in office.
What could have happened between then in January 2011 and now to have radically altered the President’s perception of Sylva?

When the ambush against Sylva started to unfold in the last quarter of last year, the former governor tried his best to distance the President from his troubles going the extent to hailing his wife, our own Dame Patience Jonathan, as “our mother.” All that, it seems could not atone for what some allege to be Sylva’s past misdeeds especially at that time when Jonathan did not have comfortable shoes to walk through the power matrix in the polity.

But given the President’s quietness and claims of non-involvement when the ambush against Sylva was being laid, it is surprising that the president could now openly expose himself in the conspiracy. It is not as if anyone seriously believed at that time that the President was not involved.

Certainly, the dismantling of the State’s security force, the removal of the PDP state chairman, the removal of the State Commissioner of Police all happening about the same time could not have happened without the President’s authorization. But it remained presidential for Dr. Jonathan to be distanced from such.

With Sylva now stripped to his political bare bones, many thought it an overkill for the President to be rejoicing after the kill. Certainly, not after enjoying Sylva’s prop during the last presidential election and his support in quieting the militants in the Niger Delta. It is certainly unpresidential.

Clearly, without the apparatus of governance Sylva perhaps would not pull any sizeable following in the state, but our President should be a man of his words.