TAN Fraud and President Jonathans Ambition by Erasmus Ikhide

T HERE is every reason to be apprehensive as the 2015
presidential election approaches. Not mainly because Nigeria as
we know it might shrink on the pages of the world map as has
been loudly predicted, but because a certain group like
Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) is poised to
rewrite the electoral law on the auspices of the presidency. A cursory look at TAN as an organisation, its agenda and the
forcible pimpernels who drive the group cast a slur on the
dithering state of affairs on the presidency.
TAN’s banal, lawless and propulsive avowal to continue its
campaign for the reelection of President Goodluck Jonathan in
2015, against the grains of electoral laws which stipulate 90
days period of open campaigns, clearly corroborated earlier
indices that President Jonathan values his Aso Rock tenancy
than the security of Nigerians and the safety of the
adducted Chibok girls.
The foul-mouthed Methuselah or Olisa Metuh, the PDP
propagandist Secretary, barely belabored his vanquished self
that his party, the PDP, and the presidency have no hands in
TAN’s reelection campaigns for the president. How evasive can
that be?
The fact that key government officials, including the
Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the PDP
Governors and serving ministers such as Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-
Iweala, are part of the jamboree, moving from one geopolitical
zone to the other collecting signatures, suggests that TAN is an
organ of the PDP and President Jonathan’s campaign
machinery.
The presidency is not alone in the revolting TAN saga. The
Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), which has
a responsibility to regulate all electoral activities, including
political campaigns has seemingly capitulated. INEC has become
a pathetic aberration, a helpless umpire, driven primitively like
a puppet by its master.
With its compulsive silence, INEC has squandered the public
trust it enjoyed. Just look at its role in the Ekiti and Osun
elections.
The cynicisms arising from INEC’s inability to rein in TAN, the
PDP and the presidency to play by the electoral rules is such
that it dampened INEC’s assurances that it is capable of
securing and guaranteeing a level playing field for all political
parties as the 2015 elections approaches.
INEC must rise to the occasion, and responsibly too, through
official pronouncements and other punitive measures as a
precursor towards the disbandment of any violating political
parties or outright disqualification of erring candidates from
contesting in the 2015 election.
Nigerians are at a loss as to why INEC has not invoked the
relevant electoral laws and bringing sanctions to bear on TAN,
PDP and president Jonathan for unleashing violence to the rule
of the game and the nation’s constitution he swore to protect.
President Jonathan owes it as a duty to Nigerians and the
Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to uphold every
letter in the statute book. He owes it as a duty to disentangle
himself from TAN’s falsehood, repulsive insults and the open
mockery of the people’s sensibilities.
Given the enormous resources at the disposal of the
presidency, and its robot TAN, the people’s future and hope
have been mangled by needless propaganda and violation of
the ethical foundation of integrity – the bases of democracy.
Our freedoms from all forms of political manipulations are not
guaranteed unless all democratic institutions perform their
functions well. But these institutions are unable to do so
because there is no independent check on the Presidency’s
violation of democratic rules.
The malfeasance and gross abuse and barefaced aggression
against the electoral laws by president Jonathan and his
hirelings is highly proverbial. Any further doubts that TAN’s
campaigns and president Jonathan acceptance and funding of
the group has not blunted the edge of the taunted rule of
law?
The absurdity in TAN’s campaigns for president Jonathan’s
reelection is multifarious. Aside, the illegality of the campaigns
whose time is premature, the falsehood of president Jonathan
outperforming his predecessors, even his equation with the like
of Obama, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, among others
in TAN’s bizarre, comical and desultory advertisement; it is
the dramatization of Jonathan’s failure to rescue the Chibok
girls whilst proceeding to use the same “#” tag and slogan as
an anchor for his presidential restoration beyond 2015!
Is anyone conscious of the #BRING BACK JONATHAN 2015
banners donning TAN’s campaign venues across the country
and its desecration of the struggle to free the Chibok girls
held hostage by the Boko Haram militias over the last six
months?
Is it not possible for perceptive Nigerians to see through the
facade of the wall of deception mounted by the president and
the cacophony of voices represented by TAN?
Can’t we root out this obscenity that has spiraled,
intermittently, with us since the beginning of this Fourth
Republic?
It is safe to say that the attempt by TAN and their incredible
followers to make a caricature of the nation is propelled by
president Jonathan’s relentless funding of the roughish and
irritable group.
This captures Karl Marx’s exposition on materialism; that class
interest, greed and hidden motives are the driving forces of
vaunting ambition. For as Marx said, ‘It is not the consciousness
of men that determines their existence, but their social
existence that determines their consciousness.’
This is one of the clearest exposition of Marx’s materialist
conception of history since most modern day philosophers
agreed that economic factors play a crucial role in the shaping
of social, cultural and political life.
Briefly put – there is another anecdotal and ironical angle to
TAN. The sponsors of TAN are majorly peopled by Southeast
extraction of the country.
Sadly enough, there is no road to Eastern Nigeria! A trip to
Anambra State recently to pay the last respect to the Great
Agulu, Dr Dora Akunyili invokes the 2012 River Niger horror
flood and exploitation of the Eastern people’s emotive
consciousness.
The death toll from the flooding after heavy rain and the
release of water from a dam in Cameroon rose to 70, with some
120,000 people displaced, resulting in some 61,000 quartered in
30 camps across the state.
After spending six hours on the same spot in a stretch of less
than 50 metres before River Niger head bridge and overlooking
Onitsha, you could see property damage and how human
suffering laid bare along the river course before entering the
city.
I was struck by the squalor of those forced by poverty to live
near River Niger and the shantytown hugging its banks. It was
a descent to hell! The misery in all its horror and destitution
engulfing countless homes did not sufficiently attract the
attention of TAN and president Goodluck Jonathan’s
administration.
This degree of deprivation which the people are grappling with
are the consequences president Jonathan’s miss-governance
and anti people’s policies.
To make the case more harrowing for the denizens, there is
already serious squabble over the non-payment of
compensation by the government without which construction
works on the second Niger Bridge will cease.
Yet, TAN in daily advertisements in virtually all television
stations anchored by Chief Zebrudia, continued daily deception
by inundates Southeastern people and Nigerians at large with
denuding falsehood. This deceit is further justified by the
inclusion of Azikiwe and Ebele amongst the leader’s name.
Painfully and pitifully, this is the Charlotte and hogwash
Eastern Nigeria, and other ethnically blindfolded Nigerians,
celebrate as governance. To make matters worse, the TAN
campaigns are propelled by dishonest characters, whose sources
of stupendous wealth are questionable.
Also, from available evidence, some of the key personalities
from the private sector associated with TAN at the highest
levels are facing one case of corruption or the other with the
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). This is one
of the absurdities of president Goodluck Jonathan’s
administration that makes a mountain out of the anti-
corruption molehill.
There is nothing wrong with president Goodluck Jonathan in
seeking to elongate his tenancy in Aso Rock, as long as the
Constitution of the Republic allows it.
But everything is wrong when such elongation is prated on
deceptive premises; roughish permutations of ethnocentric
manipulation, exploitation of the people’s emotive weakness,
and the oppressive greed of the oligarchs.

The writer, Erasmus Ikhide, is a public affairs analyst writing
from Lagos, Nigeria.
Tel: 234 80562 25515