PRESIDENT JONATHAN'S LOST ELECTION 2015, THE AMERICAN INVOLVEMENT?

Icheoku says but for America's intervention, possibly Muhammadu Buhari would not be swearing in as Nigeria's next president on Friday May 29, 2015. But the Americans threw out every diplomatic caution to the wind and stepped right into the fray of an otherwise purely internal affairs of Nigeria. They  stood steadfast behind their anointed candidate Muhammadu Buhari, ratcheted the tempo, harassed and intimidated the soon to be ex president, using all manners of threat and other NGOs including their sponsored 'Bring Back Our Girls' as well as their international media, until Jonathan could no longer take the heat and decided to step out of the kitchen.   Needless to add that President Obama's political adviser David Axelrod provided consultancy services to the APC in addition. The Americans crafted a desired outcome and worked so hard to achieve it and it came to fruition. As a result, today President Jonathan has been forced out of Aso Rock and in his place their preferred candidate Muhammadu Buhari will be sworn within the next few days as the next president of Nigeria. So how did this ever happen, Icheoku may ask? 

Icheoku says never in the history of elections in Nigeria or anywhere else in Africa or any other place else has Western countries inserted itself frontally into influencing a particular predetermined outcome. They became so obsessed with achieving their objective that they forgot they were meddling in another country's internal affairs. Their crass partisanship and bias became such that the United States of America Ambassador to Nigeria was physically present at the final result collation center in Abuja, giving press briefings and making veiled threats. Icheoku asks would America similarly tolerate this and accept such a foreign meddling in their own elections? Recall the debacle that was Gore V. Bush 2000 wherein George W. Bush's 500 votes margin over then Vice President Al Gore, secured from his then brother Jeb Bush controlled Florida, decided the election. America told a curious world to back off and shut the fuck up as it is a purely internal affairs of the United States to decide who governs them and how? Moreso the same America's Democratic party of the current President Barack Obama, who are at permanent state of war with the Republicans over the later's insistence that voters should at least have a state issued identification card to be eligible to vote, while the Democrats insists that such requirement will be an abridgment of right to vote; yet the White House wanted and encouraged INEC to suppress Nigeria's own voters turnout by insisting on the use of the PVC and fingerprinting of would be voters? A double standard or what? 

So in Nigeria, it is okay for the same United States of America which will not tolerate any foreign country having a say in their election, to not only meddle but to directly intervene and influence the Nigeria's presidential election. Icheoku says what a country of many intrigues America really is, where different things apply to different people differently? A country that preaches one thing and does the other? A country that sees nothing wrong in Saudi Arabia regularly beheading people, including gay people and drastically suppressing women's rights, yet will readily jump into the fray of other countries for merely baning gay marriages? So aided by their internal collaborators, led by Ahmed Bola Tinubu and Olusegun Obasanjo, the United States continually fired threatening salvos of messages and ominous warnings that unless President Jonathan goes, Nigeria will see trouble. From Vice President Joe Biden who made series of calls to Aso Rock to Secretary of State who personally visited to deliver a message of loss of confidence of the White House on President Jonathan, with repeated statements through the American ambassador in Nigeria who literally became partisan and joined forces with the opposition to ratchet the tempo to get President Jonathan out. It was a sort of political lynching and regrettably, they succeeded and now their preferred candidate, President-elect Muhammadu Buhari is gearing to be sworn in as the next president of Nigeria. 

Icheoku says the injustice that forced President Jonathan out of office has never been witnessed anywhere in the world and only God will avenge it at the appropriate time. The piling up was extraordinary and the rabid intensity such that only a resilient and cool-headed Jonathan could have weathered it and survived as  long as he did. But like every mortal, there is always a breaking point at which resistance becomes futile and he cracked and threw up his hands in surrender. The president could not take the pressure any more and decided to throw in the towel. He yielded the seat of power to them as a bargain for peace and order in Nigeria and in order for them to let him live. Icheoku says giving up power by President Jonathan was the safest option in the circumstance as the same blood hounds would have literally extinguished the president's life if it came to that rather than have him continue to run affairs in Nigeria. It was an international conspiracy fueled by geo-politics, money and commerce as well as spheres of influence. Regrettably the peoples and countries that were involved are always eager and ever prepared to go to any length to maintain their vice hold on their regions of influence; including snuffing out life of anything that comes in-between them and these things or which threatens its influence and economic interests. 

Icheoku asks but did President Jonathan see this grand conspiracy brewing or did he merely underestimate them and their vicious capacity to visit calamity to his second term ambition? Did the president instead of fighting back, make a smart calculation that the array of amassed forces against him can only force the issue one way, if he continues to resist, and decided on an option that will at least keep him alive? Did the president peremptorily get out of the way of the moving locomotive train by conceding the election? Many of the answers to some of these questions will however have to wait until the president eventually writes his memoir? But until then, Icheoku can only second-guess the intricate conspiracies that saw President Jonathan out of power and out of Aso Rock. It must have been a heart shattering experience to watch as those returns were called in only to realize that his foot soldiers and lieutenants failed or did not deliver their precincts as expected. So stranded, the president threw in the towel with a hasty congratulatory call that went out to the incoming president. Now as he prepares for a possibly lonely life in Otuoke, the president will find some wisdom in what Obasanjo once told him that all those people flocking around him are not his friends, but are flies which are attracted to the honey of his office. Icheoku concludes that a strong president would have achieved a different outcome by resisting this obvious foreign intervention in Nigeria's domestic election. In addition to other measures taken to checkmate it, he would have threatened to expel and indeed expelled any country's ambassador who dared intervene in Nigeria's domestic affairs matter. But unfortunately, not Jonathan of Otuoke, who was heavily compromised by people supposedly working for him and checkmated by very powerful forces massed against him. What a lesson for history books on how not to be a Mr Nice Guy president of Nigeria.