A President’s Unpardonable Gaffe

President Goodluck Jonathan drew the ire of Southwest political leaders, especially the governors in the region, when he described them as rascals during his presidential campaign in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, Southwest Nigeria last week. According to the President, “I can assure you that we will take back Lagos, Ekiti and Osun.  We will control the entire Southwest, Lagos is important to us. The entire Southwest is too important, too sophisticated and too educated to be in the hands of rascals.”
Rather than apologise for the gaffe, presidential spokesman, Ima Niboro said rather tongue-in-cheek that the president did not refer to anyone in particular and that whoever appropriated the unsavoury comment to himself was at liberty to do so. Niboro was forced to make his own rather warped clarification following the barrage of criticisms that trailed Jonathan’s verbal assault on Southwest political leaders.
Even a kid knew who the president was referring to without clearly pointing fingers at anyone in particular.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo caused an uproar when he said politics was a do-or-die affair and vowed to capture Lagos during the months leading up to the 2007 general elections. That comment pitched him and his Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, against the Action Congress (now Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN), and the animosity it generated between the parties’ leaders outlived Obasanjo’s administration in 2007.
Now Jonathan has toed the ignominious path of Obasanjo with his reckless statement that has stoked the embers of the disagreement and suspicion that had long been in existence between the two parties.
Even ordinary Nigerians are wondering why the president could descend so low as to call leaders and governors in an opposition party ‘rascals’. It also beats our imagination that a president as educated as Jonathan could anchor his campaign on mudslinging and denigrating opposition governors in the Southwest. His campaign should be issue-based and not a resort to chasing shadows.
That remark in Ibadan may haunt Jonathan and his party in the coming election in the Southwest if the electorate capitalise on it and vote for another party and its presidential candidate.
In case Jonathan has forgotten, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown lost his election last year when he called a woman who had asked him a question during his campaign “a disaster” and “bigoted”.
The British press made a meal of the uncomplimentary statement and Brown was forced to apologise to the woman, Mrs. Gillian Duffy. But the apology didn’t change anything as the damage had been done before the election.
Jonathan’s gaffe is worse than the one that cost Brown his re-election. His supporters may not care about the use of the word ‘rascals’ to describe Southwest leaders in the leading opposition party but the supporters of the leaders he has denigrated will wait for him and his party at the polls in April.  What Jonathan has failed to appreciate is that the office of the president is too exalted for him to ridicule it in the manner he did in Ibadan last week.

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