The world has decided that, for saving it from the complications of deploying a peacekeeping mission in Nigeria after the anticipated breakdown of law and order in the aftermath of the March 2015 presidential contest, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, the immediate past president of Nigeria, deserves initiation into the club of African statesmen and women. He is heading the Commonwealth election observatory on the impending elections in Tanzania. This is notwithstanding the numerous carcases of his adventure in power. It is a very, very welcome decision, hoping that the former president would give a damn this time unlike when, as president of Nigeria, he didn’t give a damn. Out there, there are certain things that would not be accepted from people who do not give a damn.

Although the leadership of the Commonwealth Observatory on any election is more symbolic than anything else, it is in that symbolism that it is very demanding. And for someone brought up more on the metaphysical category of luck than the technocratic, professional or political background of the typical Nigerian president, both elected and self-appointed, this might be an important point to draw attention to. The leader of the observatory is not a job where unfavourable reactions might be interpreted as the actions of those who feel they are born to rule, whatever that may mean. It is apt to raise this point as it is still Dr Reuben Abati’s point of departure in the analysis of the Jonathan Presidency, the very silly analysis that fundamentally undermined GEJ and destroyed the PDP. Last week, Dr Abati was still rolling on that distinction in an op-ed in which he reacted to Edwin Clark’s detour from Jonathan to Buhari. That sort of analysis is the very anti-thesis of the PDP, a party formed essentially as a model of inclusivity.

But even more importantly is the point the late Chief Sunday Awoniyi emphasised throughout, that the Presidency is about conciliation and reconciliation. The president of Nigeria cannot afford to say that a certain part of the country hates him or her. If a particular part of the country actually has issues with a particular president, then reconciliation becomes an urgent task on that president’s agenda. The office of the president is a political office, not technocratic. It was unbelievable hearing a president murmur such things or to hear it straight from the mouth of his interpreters and gate keepers. What a dismal elementary political education! The point here is that unless GEJ turns on himself and reflects with a view to self-correction, he automatically runs the risk of failure in purposively instrumentalising his new statesman status for whichever cause, be it the Niger Delta, Nigeria, Africa, Blacks and humanity, and doing so in a way that would undo the uninspiring past he created or was fundamental to their creation when he had opportunity to be president of Nigeria.

His decision to accept defeat by congratulating General Buhari in the aftermath of the March 2015 presidential election has been smartly constructed into something iconic. Notwithstanding the smartness of that constructivism when linked to the many carcases of the GEJ Presidency, it makes sense to go along with it as a bail out upon which GEJ can enact a new beginning, by seizing the large heartedness of the world in taking the advice of the Hen mother that, in all situations, the way forward is to pick out the good and throw away the bad. It can only be in that light that the anti-corruption war would bypass GEJ, the head and grab a minister, the leg, for alleged graft. In principle, something is wrong with that but, politically, Nigeria is forced to put up with such compromises with reality. More so as GEJ escapes the shores of Nigeria and becomes our ‘luck’ again to escort him with geopolitical reasoning. What that means is that national interest now forbids any Nigerian from talking negatively about GEJ. He is now on a world stage and his failure there would be Nigeria’s failure. For that reason, his name is now Nigeria.

It is just that before we happily embark on that, there is this little point which remains difficult not to think about loudly. It is this suggestion by Odia Ofeimum recently that Goodluck Jonathan was chased out of power by the West because he was about to liberate Nigeria. Yes, that is what Odia Ofeimum said a week or so back in a media interview. I thought he was taking poetic licence too far to associate GEJ with the concept of liberation. GEJ did have the fantastic concept of Transformation Agenda, the best Cover Note as far as development strategy is concerned in the history of governance in Nigeria but the Goodluck Presidency ran completely in the opposite direction of anything that can remotely be associated with transformation, not to mention liberation. Liberation is generally too strong a word to be so casually used that way by an Odia who knows what it means. Amilcar Cabral will turn in his grave just as Patrice Lumumba, Nkrumah and even Mandela would be too shocked to hear that wherever they are now.

If someone else had made that statement, that would be tolerable but not Odia. Odia is knowledgeable. How could that level of knowledge come down to such a gargantuan statement? The West will always be a factor in power in Nigeria but fundamentally because, most of the time, we box ourselves to where outsiders have to save us from ourselves. If we have been serious, we wouldn’t be such a, well, banana republic that we basically are, open to every other actor’s intervention.

I suspect that Odia has only, therefore, gone away with such statement because he is Odia. Odia, in his own life time, survived a brush with power and lives to tell the story. He survived an allegation against him that turned out not to be true. That makes him an epitome of integrity. To come out of a situation in which it was your word against that of a sage like the late Chief Awolowo must be like engaging a lion that has not seen food for some weeks and then come out of such an encounter unscathed. His luck is that the Awolowo ‘family’ had in-built, autonomous mechanisms for detecting the multiple flows in that space. And they detected that Odia had done no such thing. And they were honest and sophisticated enough to reverse themselves. Otherwise, Odia would have been down and out today because no one would have ever trusted him again.

But Odia’s nobility and greatness lies beyond being cleared of that allegation. Today, he is the most reliable source of the doctrine Awoism. I think there is nobility in that: going back to the business of expounding the Philosophy of the one association that could have been the source of his damnation. It has nothing to do with whether Awolowo personally made the allegation or it was made by people around him. It had more to do with Awo being the most significant figure there around whom every other thing revolved.

For the reason of staggering but managing to stabilise after such an unequal blow from power and, thereby providing others a rich experience of how to respond to such, we cannot carpet Odia. In fact, Odia can experiment with poetic license, notwithstanding the more systematic power that he encountered and by which I mean the Awo family that could investigate itself. Others in his shoes were ruined, except where God took control. A victim of power can be hit from both expected and unexpected quarters, a hit from which the target might stagger without ever regaining balance if the contradiction is rashly managed.

It is easy to imagine ‘them’ when the allegation broke out: original ‘fikitos’, fraudsters, liars, emergency interpreters and gate keepers posing as loyalists of orthodoxy, some from surprisingly new quarters, all out to prove that they foresaw it happening, how they always saw that element of treachery in you, how sure of where next they saw you heading and the stuff. It is at such moment that you really get to know human beings, including a Lagos/Ikenne version of the Intellectuals for the Promotion of Education in Northern States, (IPEN).

Odia must have been lucky if he had a voice restraining him: don’t reply anybody. I can imagine Odia grumbling: but they are destroying my name” and the voice responding: You have no name than what God decides wishes. And then he resigns, accepting the Idoma concept of manliness as epitomised by the ram. To the ram is attributed the wisdom that a man doesn’t shout. So, even when the ram is to be slaughtered, it doesn’t even struggle with its torturers. All you see is the subdued trembling that runs across its body.

It is equally easy to imagine how when it was detected that Odia did not do what he was falsely alleged to have done, none of such characters came up to say, sorry, we were wrong. They won’t do that because all fake human beings are basically insecure, fearful and have an element of sadism inbuilt in them. So, instead of coming out to be honest, they start hoping that something would still happen to prove their perception of their victim right or they create new lies. They never give up but the rule is, bear grudges against no one. Most people are not worth begrudging anyway although they wear expensive dresses. Stand on nobility or be yourself. The guarantee is that if you are above plotting against anybody, you are safe against their own plots.

In the end though, it is important to bear in mind that truth is not a product of our honesty but of power. Professor Stuart Hall, a pioneer of critical cultural studies has a classic illustration of this relationship between power and truth in the book he edited with Bram Gieben titled Formations in Modernity. In there, Hall says truth is not a function of evidence or facts but of power. And he illustrates by pointing out how the straightforward fact that the Palestinians are fighting to regain their land earns them two different names. Some people call them terrorists while others call them freedom fighters. And yet, they are the same Palestinians.

We can see his point in the changing fortunes of the Palestinians. Yesterday, power was so powerful that its narrative of the Palestinians held sway. Today, the balance of power has shifted and, with it, the truth, in favour of the Palestinians as the terrorists of yesterday now have their flag in the UN. That is power and truth for you. This is the kind of situation our Muslim brothers would shout “Allahu Akbar” because God could, indeed, be great in terms of the ultimate mediation of this matter of the powerful and the powerless. The greatness of God is that, in His own time, that carefully fabricated information dropped in a well chosen outlet from where the actor calculates that the information would naturally spread comes crashing down stark naked as the lie it ever was. Sometimes, this happens very fast. At other times, it could take eternity but no matter how long it takes, the connection between power and truth is a very unstable connection.

In that sense, it is a thing of immense joy that there is an Odia Ofeimum who survived such experience and whose response to it is rather inspiring in its nobility. Nevertheless, this poet has to stop ‘lying’ by dressing GEJ in oversized robes. He is forgiven because his is not the sin that kills the soul. More so if he joins in the remaking of GEJ to be of a much more qualitative service to humanity rather than make claims that will sadden the spirit of those who perished in the struggle for the liberation of Nigeria – especially the student activists and the poor.

•Adagbo Onoja writes from Abuja. Photo shows Odia Ofeimun.

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