1. Alhaji Bamanga Tukur
His disastrous tenure as PDP’s national
chairman was the biggest game changer for
the PDP from which it might never recover.
Bamanga’s tenure also coincided with the
period when three major opposition parties
were consolidating into one mega
opposition party, but the chairman failed to
recognise the emerging threat. Instead, he
encouraged the Party Leader to settle
personal scores within the party. It was a
cover for Bamanga to also settle personal
scores of his own. He suspended a state
governor for refusing to answer his phone
call; he watched askance as seven governors
formed a faction called ‘the new PDP’ (nPDP),
and he didn’t care a hoot when 5 governors
jumped ship and joined the APC.
2. Chief Edwin Clark
As soon as Dr. Goodluck Jonathan rose to the
presidency, this Gowon-era Information
Minister created for himself a position
hitherto unknown in Nigerian politics, that
of the president’s ethnic godfather. No
Yoruba potentate occupied this post during
Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s eight year rule
and even the feeble President Umaru
Yarádua had no such godfather. Rather than
use his extra-constitut
ional position to
steady the president’s position, Clark used it
to create numerous enemies for Jonathan
through his use of intemperate language
and regular assaults at dissenting folks.
3. Mrs Diezani Alison-Madueke
No one gets to sit atop Nigeria’s oil industry
without making many enemies. Mrs Allison
Madueke’s beauty, fluent English and
polished manners gained for her a lot of
mileage, but the sleaze in the oil industry
ultimately caught up with her. Most
damaging have been the scandalous rip offs
in subsidy payments, the botched attempt to
remove the oil subsidy in 2012, Sanusi’s
allegation of the missing $20 billion and the
reported N10 billion spent to hire private
jets, not to mention the failure to pass the
PIB bill.
4. Mrs Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
The first ever Coordinating Minister of the
Economy fancies herself as an economic
wunderkind at par with the German
Chancellor Konrad Adenauer or the Japanese
Prime Minister Sato. While most Nigerians
thought economic conditions were harsh,
Mrs Okonjo-Iweala bandied figures and said
it is among the best-managed in the world.
This sharp discrepancy between the official
claims and people’s feelings did much
damage to the administration’
s credibility.
Nor was there any preparation of the public
mind for the steep fall in oil prices, the sharp
drop in external reserves and the
precipitous decline of the naira.
5. Dame Patience Jonathan
In the last five decades Nigerian First Ladies
have often been mired in one controversy or
another. Mrs Patience Jonathan however
stands in a class of her own by making many
gaffes and ill-advised actions that badly
affected the public image of her husband’s
regime. Worst of them all was her
intervention in the Chibok girls’ saga and her
futile attempts to prove that her husband’s
political enemies orchestrated the whole
affair. Her quarrel with Rotimi Amaechi, the
governor of her home state, also resulted in
PDP’s most impactful loss of a political figure.
6. Mujaheed Dokubo Asari
This ex-militant’s coarse manner,
intemperate language and his open threats
against whole regions of the country
supposedly in Jonathan’s service did much
political damage. Asari was later joined by
more ex-militant leaders to threaten war
against the country should Jonathan lose the
election. Their joint threat greatly
antagonised non-partisan opinion all over
the country.
7. Chief Olusegun Obasanjo
If remarks must be matched to records, this
former two-time ruler has no moral
authority to criticise anyone but the wily
Obasanjo re-launched himself back into the
reckoning of Nigerians by spearheading
attacks against the Jonathan regime in the
last two years. Many people suspect that his
motives are ungodly. Yet Obasanjo’s
devastating attacks against Jonathan,
sometimes through letters, at other times
through public lectures have taken a heavy
toll. The Jonathan Presidency never quite
settled on the best way to tackle Obasanjo.
Sometimes it answered his letters; at other
times it tried to ignore him and at still other
times it sent seven PDP governors to plead
with him to keep quiet.
8. Governor Godswill Akpabio
The ambitious Akwa Ibom State governor
rapidly moved very close to President
Jonathan and soon installed himself as the
president’s top gubernatorial enforcer. At
one point he went about the task wisely,
such as when he talked Bamanga into
reversing Governor Aliyu Wamakko’s
suspension. Other times he handled matters
with very damaging crudity, such as the 16
is greater than 19 affair, which effectively
destroyed the Nigeria Governors Forum.
9. Alhaji Adamu Mu’azu
When he replaced Bamanga Tukur as PDP’s
chairman, the former Bauchi State governor
was proclaimed by his partymen as the
game changer. It turned out that he
underestimated the fall in PDP’s esteem and
total political stature. Even though Mu’azu
toured the country trying to lure back
members who defected and though he
refrained from creating more problems by
not trying to settle personal scores, the
damage had been done and he was unable
to reverse it.
10. Vice President Mohamed Namadi Sambo
Many of Jonathan’s kitchen cabinet members
would sit back and say that the Vice
President is to blame for failing to stem the
tide when the country’s single largest voting
bloc, the far North, turned completely against
the Jonathan regime. Some northern PDP
governors encouraged this belief in the
hope of replacing Sambo on the ticket.
Sambo has nothing of the political drive and
ambition of, say, Atiku Abubakar. His affable
and non-controversi
al nature did not add
to the regime’s problems but it did not stave
off the decline either.
11. NSA and military service chiefs
The top security chiefs have contributed to
President Jonathan and PDP’s problems in
only three ways. One was their failure to
tame Boko Haram despite repeated claims
that they will do so. Second was their timing
the operation to end Boko Haram once and
for all with the date set for presidential
election. The third, final damage inflicted by
the service chiefs was their asking for the
election to be postponed while they attack
Boko Haram.
12. Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan
The President contributed to his party’s
current predicament in only three ways that
I can think of. They are his lack of adequate
knowledge about Nigeria, lack of adequate
preparation before becoming the president
of Nigeria and lack of rapid catching up
study when he became the president of
Nigeria.
His mistake in choosing Bamanga Tukur; his
overreliance on Ngozi, Diezani and Akpabio;
his initial misreading of Boko Haram as a
political plot; his inability to manage
Obasanjo, Edwin Clark, Aminu Tambuwal,
nPDP and ex-militants can all be attributed to
those three inadequacies.
How can a match be won with 12 players
scoring own goals?
