Historians might be tempted to suggest that Goodluck Jonathan rose to power without lifting a finger. For 78 days, forces loyal to president-in-absentia Umaru Yar’Adua battled for the soul of the nation, bent on maintaining the status quo. Nonetheless, the clamour began to rise with calls for a handover of power to Jonathan.
The resolve in Yar’Adua’s own Cabinet started to crumble, most glaringly with Minister of Information and Communications Dora Akunyili’s incendiary memo, shot down by her colleagues. According to reports, when Mrs. Akunyili looked for support from the clear beneficiary of her memo, Mr. Jonathan merely told her to follow the process. He would not be seen to help Akunyili or any others calling time on Yar’Adua’s doomed presidency. He could not afford to be seen to be openly disloyal or to be unduly ambitious for himself. Yar’Adua and the totally discredited former ‘First Lady’, Turai – had clearly demonstrated their lack of trust in Jonathan anyway. Why reinforce the paranoia of the Yar’Adua camp? None of that for Jonathan. He kept it under his hat. He kept it cool.
Mr. Jonathan played a clever game, some would say. By why play a game at all when the inexorable march of history is on your side? Memorably, 24 governors went to Jonathan like the ‘Three Wise Men’ of yore and offered their goodwill to the man named Goodluck. They called him ‘Acting President’.
And so it would seem, that the man now declared Nigeria’s ‘Acting President’ did nothing to earn his momentous rise to the highest office in the land. He merely rode the tide. It was just his luck. A more serendipitously named President has never assumed office anywhere.
In just ten years (having joined the PDP in 1999), Mr. Jonathan has risen seemingly out of nowhere to prominence. As deputy to then Governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha in Bayelsa State, Jonathan finished off the former’s term of office after he fell from grace. He was only a compromise Vice Presidential candidate to the now ailing Yar’Adua after the dropping of Peter Odili. Now, yet again, Jonathan will finish off Yar’Adua’s presidency. How lucky can one man get?
Born November 20, 1957 to a canoe carver in the Ogbia Local Council of then Rivers State, Goodluck Jonathan had his Primary education in Otuoke and Oloibiri, places synonymous with the troubled history of oil-prospecting in the Niger Delta. He is the first Nigerian ruler to emerge from the Niger Delta, the first not to come from one of the major ethnic nationalities in the country. An Ijaw man in Aso Rock.
Jonathan attended the Mater Dei High School in Imiringi. After a two-year stint as a customs officer, he embarked on a Zoology degree at the University of Port Harcourt, graduating with a B.Sc in 1981. He taught at the Department of Biology at the Rivers State College of Education in Port Harcourt, leaving in 1993 to become Assistant Director in the now defunct Oil Mineral Producing Areas Development Commission (OMPADEC). He bagged a doctorate degree in Zoology in 1995.
It is noteworthy that all of the qualified zoologist’s academic and working life was played out in the area of his birth, in the festering sore of the Delta, where ordinary people may now view his ascendancy as their own. 52 years largely spent in one geographical area may suggest a man of limited travel and experience, but this should not mean that we have a George Bush on our hands. Then there is his wife, Patience, who was the subject of a $13.5 million seizure by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in September 2006. We will be hoping that the Acting ‘First Lady’ - who now prefers to be called ‘Dame’ - will engineer no further embarrassments.
Mr. Jonathan’s rise heralds a realigning of the traditional power blocks in Nigerian politics. Some of those now trooping to assure him of their ‘loyalty’ might have sworn just months ago that a South-South Nigerian President would not emerge in their time. None of their certainty holds in the face of so much luck contained one man’s name.
In a highly superstitious land, it is just the kind of story that gets the masses believing again. Just how much of a good luck it is for the Nigerian nation, will depend on Mr. Jonathan’s actions from now on.
