Circus show
By Sam Omatseye


Sometimes when we contemplate this democracy, we fear the wrong things. We fear being out-rigged. We fear being misgoverned. We fear that the huge resources in this land will burst at the seams and everything, as always, will end up as a tragic anticlimax. We seldom focus on power as circus, which is the bottom of it all.

One recent event, the show of power in Bayelsa State, focused the nation on how power can bring out our sense of false ceremony. The President, Goodluck Jonathan, like an autumnal leaf in temperate zones, came out in true colours. It was the formal introduction of Seriake Dickson as PDP’s candidate for governor. President Jonathan opened a chapter about which he had professed ignorance and impotence. It was on the subject of the PDP primaries and the cold shoulder towards former Governor Timipre Sylva. He had shown cold shoulder towards governors, towards traditional leaders and host of other intercessors.

The man had said he wanted the party to do its thing, and that he knew nothing about what happened to the tall, lanky former chief executive of his state. On the stage, before national television, President Goodluck Jonathan was not interested in working in the shadows anymore. He wanted to bare the tooth and fang behind Sylva’s ouster as PDP candidate. It was himself.

He let the world know that he was the man behind it, and seemed to strut like a cock in those confessions. He explained why he led the plot against Sylva, and explained that he did not perform as governor. He also noted that a hotel he started was not finished. Sylva responded that Jonathan left the project at second floor, and he (Sylva) took it to the 18th floor and questioned Jonathan’s integrity about how much he paid the contractor, adding that the contractor is building his house for the president.

All of that made drama in the past week, and the Presidency has flailed and failed in parrying Sylva’s punches.

Impolitic as the theatrics was, what riled the common conscience was the President’s reference to stones. Some persons had pelted stones at Sylva at an event in which the president was present. Less than two weeks ago, Jonathan cautioned Dickson that if he does not perform as governor, he would join the people in stoning him. The turn of speech was unexpected. I tried to picture the president, adorned in the Niger Delta hat, among irate youths, his right hand aloft above his neck, hurling a stone. I did not want to accept it because it hinted at executive hooliganism. He probably did not mean the language in its raw manifestation of rage. He is not the type to pick up a stone.

So, you would say, he meant it as metaphor. That would be giving Jonathan a loftiness he or his lieutenants have never invested him with. He is not a poet, nor a man enamoured of metaphors. The last time he tried to use such images, he denied ever being a part of it. He said he was not a lion…If, for the sake of playing the devil’s advocate, we accept that he was trying to wax metaphoric, he was a victim of what some literary critics call mixed metaphor. So it did not work. If the event that inspired it was real, how come his extension of it can be called metaphoric? The stoning of Sylva was real, so his desire to stone Dickson could not be described as metaphoric.

If it were, how did he expect the crowd – mainly low-line, subaltern, ordinary folk with simple understanding of language –to see beyond that literal meaning? A man who uses metaphor must understand context. You don’t throw metaphors at fishermen and mechanics. Jonathan just fell victim to another unforced error in public speech. It is in line with other grandiloquent gaffes to which his public career, especially as president, has been prone in the couple of years.

Speeches like that are out of sync with the cathedral dignity of the Presidency. His speech is meant as models, not phrases of putrefaction. They should ennoble, not incite to violence, especially in the tempestuous setting of the Niger Delta. He should inspire, not obfuscate. He should sedate and not berate loosely.

The part that touched me most was the show of power. President Jonathan seemed to relish his show of power over Sylva, and that ostentation was what seemed to have missed most commentators. What I saw was the vanity of power. It is the circus show we have seen through the short life of this democracy. It is a sort of zero-sum game of ostrich where the man in power forgets that power is trust and should be handled with humility.

Jonathan will not be in power forever. He should know that someday in future, both he and Sylva could meet on the streets. Both of them would have been stripped of the glory in which they preened. We have seen too many examples, but our leaders have learned and forgotten nothing.

It was like yesterday when former President Olusegun Obasanjo seemed to live forever on the throne. He duelled with his deputy, Atiku Abubakar. Both of them seemed to be unflappable in public. They rode in the high places of the world. They were the glamour faces of power and costumes of cockiness. Today, both men cannot control anything except by feeble influence. They are, in a manner of speaking, yesterday’s men. Obasanjo has to write a letter to Jonathan or travel to Abuja to meet the President. Suddenly time has edged his Ota Farm out of the headlines.

A friend told me that Yakubu Gowon was sighted asking somebody to help him with his luggage at an airport. This was the man by whom Nigeria was defined once: Go On With One Nigeria. Ditto Shagari. In fact, Jonathan did not grant the entreaties of these two men when they interceded on behalf of Sylva. Sonekan, who took over power not to spoil anyone’s fun, did not enjoy much fun before he was ousted.

We all know about Ibrahim Babangida, who ruled this country for nearly a decade. He determined presidential candidates. Since this republic, he has tried to be president, but he has not been able to secure a place as presidential candidate.

Not long ago, we saw the story of Obasanjo and former Ekiti governor Ayo Fayose. The Ekiti man was once OBJ’s poodle. In fact, with Obasanjo behind him, he was able to restrict the movement of another governor visiting his state. Later, he turned Fayose into his footstool. I recall Fayose moaning in the interview about the vanity of power. He said a man who sleeps in the comfort of a bed should have a mat because someday he would need it. Obasanjo was the peacock then, a peacock without beauty.

But when both of them left power, Fayose unleashed words after words on his former master and Obasanjo’s response or non-response was tepid. Both men now know that power is transient.

A man like Napoleon loved power and he thought he would possess it forever. “Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take it from me,” he said. He did not get his wish.

That is how it feels on the throne. I have seen this all over the country, and our people whether governors, local government chairmen, commissioners, ministers or presidents live so large that they almost abolish God.

I was in Europe the other day and saw a former governor in a line waiting to clear his papers for his trip. It was a humbling moment. Our leaders should learn from a former British leader, Harold Macmillan, when he described power as a Dead Sea fruit. “When you achieve it, there is nothing there.”

The presidential system imbues a president with a lot of power. But as Chekhov noted in his play, A Cherry Orchard, a giant should not use power as a giant. Shakespeare crooned: “man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority…make angels weep.”

Obasanjo, Fayose, IBB and a whole lot of others now understand how pruned their powers are today. Everyone eventually does. So will the people in power today.


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