President Goodluck Jonathan in an interview at the State House, Marina, Lagos, spoke about burning national issues: his relationship with Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, Boko Haram and the 2015 general election.
Excerpts:
Mr. President, in recent months, there have been several scathing statements and remarks from former President Olusegun Obasanjo against your candidature in this forthcoming election and there have been so much scathing criticism of you on the fact that you agreed that you will just spend one term in office. Also some days back, he alerted Nigerians to a grand plot whether by people acting on your behalf or you also working in concert with them to foist the Gbagbo option on Nigeria. How do you react to this. What exactly is the problem between you and former President Obasanjo?
Thank you. First and foremost, Obasanjo is a father to me. By divine providence and the Grace of God I am the President of Nigeria today. It is not by my strength. But God uses human beings to actualise His own blessings on human beings. And He used so many Nigerians, including former President Obasanjo to play one role or the other for me. I became the deputy governor of a state, became the governor, the vice-president and president. I have no issues with him and I really don’t want to join issues with President Obasanjo.
I think it is not necessary. But I will use this opportunity, because you asked, to just plead with my father that he is a leader, a former president of the country. He has led the country more than anybody; eight years of democratic governance and almost four years of military governance. No other person has that kind of record. The stability of this country is critical in terms of the economy of this country. Rating agencies downgrade countries that are going into elections, because the feeling is that there would be crisis. When you paint the colour of instability for your own nation, you are doing so much injustice to the country, because it affects the economy of the country, not just in terms of security and social issues alone. It affects the economy directly. So, I plead with very senior citizens to remember that Nigeria is dear to us. We don’t have any other country than Nigeria. So actions and inaction or utterances should be guarded so that we don’t expose our country to the International community as if it is a country in danger and one that is about to collapse. You are frightening the investors, especially those who invest their cash, who may begin to pull out their money from the country and that would affect the stock market and it would affect the economy.
For one reason or the other, former President Obasanjo may disagree with me as his first political son; you can even disagree with your own biological children as a human being, let alone disagreeing with your political children. So he can agree or disagree with me, but the utterances have to be managed in a way that they do not affect the economy of this country and the security of this country.
Comparing me with Gbagbo is quite unfortunate, because I spearheaded the push by other African countries to fight Gbagbo. Then I was Chairman, Heads of States and Governments of ECOWAS and I knew some of my colleagues were a bit worried about the fate of citizens of their countries in Cote D’Ivoire. But I said no, the right thing must be done.
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