By BOBSON GBINIJE

“I define tenacity of office as a political Monstrosity whose characteristics are an Inordinate and shameless love of power

For its own sake and a morbid tenacity for public Office even when all the legitimacy for continuing

In such public office has completely disappeared” -Chief Obafemi Awolowo (VOICE OF COURAGE)

POWER has a scandent and transilient potential, but it brings out the theriomorphic proclivities in man. Hence, realising the transitoriness and ephermerality of power, the Sage Chief Obafemi Awolowo in his allocutus delivered on 11th September, 1963, when Justice Sowemimo declared him guilty on charges of treasonable felony, said:

“But after darkness comes the glorious dawn. It is therefore, with a brave heart, with confident hope and with faith in my unalterable destiny that I go from the twilight of power into darkness, unshaken in my trust in the providence of God that the glorious dawn will come on the morrow”.

Power has the instinctual edacity, and ambrosial trait of insatiety in the life of its holder. In Homer’s Odyssey the Lothophagis, a people living on the northern coast of Africa lived a life of indolence and forgetfulness induced by eating the fruit of the lotus: some of Odyssus co-travellers in search of the Golden Fleece eat with them and forgot their friends, homes and native land. So too are the mental escapades of those in power.

Power is authority and dominance. It has a perceptive, cognitive and volitional nature. It is the right to control, command and enforce obedience. It comes in hydra and protean formats. It could be political, economic, domestic, social and traditional format etc. It could have democratic, despotic, monarchical, hegemonistic and plutocratic colourations. But in whatever template it comes, it has a tendency to be intoxicating, unputdownable, the chameleonic faeces syndrome and tantalizing on most people. Hence, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

In the light of the approaching 2015 elections in Nigeria, power is currently undergoing political osmosis, social calculus and strategic dynamics. All with a view to appropriating power to various interest groups and individuals. The question therefore arises, Will President Goodluck Jonathan contest the 2015 presidential election?

Does he have a constitutional right to contest? What are his chances? Will the PDP stand by him if he chooses to contest? Will the miasmatic and multidimensional cleavages of the North stand by him and will the totality of the Niger Delta and the South–South geo-political zone, his major constituency stand in a political Indian file behind him?

Any law, edict, provision, ordinance, statute and decree etc, barring President  Jonathan from contesting the 2015 presidential election is not known to the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. He is therefore free as the wind to contest the 2015 Presidential election. Indeed, this is rooted in the 1863 Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

LEADERSHIP is an esteemed position of service, demanding high standards of discipline and integrity. Leadership demands self-denial, self sacrifice. It requires a vision and a mission in service. It must be able to combine administrative astuteness, political shrewdness with moral uprightness.

In Richard Nixon’s Profile and reminiscences of men who have shaped the modern world, he said “Great leadership is a form of art, requiring both force and vision to an extraordinary degree, the leader necessarily deals to a large extent in symbols, in images and sort of galvanizing idea that both persuade and move them. The manager thinks of today and tomorrow, but the leader thinks of the day after tomorrow. The leader represents a direction of history”.

But plinthed on the Aristotelian groundnorm of leadership and service, which is the pursuit of the greatest good for the largest number and the groundswell of good and altruistic governance can President  Jonathan say he has the moral, political, socio-economic justification to contest the presidential election in 2015?

There will be as many opinions in this matter as there are individuals. But I know that his PDP bedfellows, tribesmen and women, co-political travellers and bootlickers etc will descend upon me with their verbal pyrotechnics, grammatical and Machiavellian sledge hammer, as I dare say that “President  Jonathan has no leadership credentials (I do not mean a PHD from the University), verve, and moral locus to re-contest the presidential election come 2015”.

Nigeria is a nation formed as a result of the agglomeration of different heterogeneous groups of people locked in the parenthetical placidity and horrendous cesspit of psychotic corruption. Corruption is the cancerous bane forestalling the growth and development of the Nigerian nation right from independence till date and the political cabal have apotheosized corruption and made the fight against prebendalistic graft and corruption antediluvian history.

President Jonathan has shown by his style of  leadership that he is not the Grand Commander of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. He is not in control, but only fronting for clandestine political cabals and goons. In the fight against corruption, in the education sector, in the provision of shelter, good roads, water, light (Discos and Gencos power anarchy), security (Laughable), peace, medicare, transportation, etc, we have very infinitesimally little to write home about. Indeed, there is consummate and cardinal infrastructural decay and poverty has become the  body guard of 90 percent of Nigerians. What a shame!

The level of corruption and lack of transparency in the Jonathan administration is so proverbially unprecedented that it cannot be swept under the carpet and wished away, if Nigeria must take its rightful place in the comity of Nations and make reliably tangible impact in terms of political, socio-economic progress. President Jonathan cannot do a rethink and renaissance in terms of constructive ideas and implementational bravura because he has crowded and appointed weird people into his cabinet.