It is said of parliamentary democracies that all political careers end in failure. Many would argue that Nigeria's former president Goodluck Jonathan never even began with success. As deputy president, he took power in May 2010 when Umaru Yar'Adua died. Maybe it was his first name or his eccentric affection for a trilby hat, but his arrival in office was greeted with extraordinary hope. Nigeria's public life has long been disfigured by corruption that has pauperized what ought to be one of Africa's most prosperous countries. Jonathan's pledge to at last crack down on corruption was taken at face value. There was a real sense of a new broom about to sweep the country clean. Thus in April 2011, he had an emphatic win in the presidential election, in part because of his promised Transformation Agenda which complemented his power sector reforms announced when he first took over from the ailing Yar'Adua. In the event little changed. Nigeria continued to be plagued by power failures caused in no small measure by the failure of management to ensure the proper maintenance and servicing. Brand new power plants often went offline within less than a year of being commissioned. Moreover, the Transformation Agenda ran into the sand when Jonathan and his circle resisted reforms that would have introduced some degree of transparency into government business. The head of the program was sacked. Jonathan went on to suspend Central Bank governor Malam Sanusi after he revealed a $20 billion fraud at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. However, the event that completely wrecked Jonathan's reputation was the 2014 Boko Haram kidnapping of 276 girls from a state secondary school in Chibok in Borno State. Jonathan appeared to ignore this tragic crime for almost a fortnight until domestic and international clamor forced him to address the issue. It is now being claimed that foreign intelligence services that had been monitoring Boko Haram as part of the international drive against Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS) and all its offshoots, knew the location of the schoolgirls in the immediate aftermath of their abduction. The Observer newspaper in London has reported that British special forces were offered in a rescue operation. Jonathan reportedly refused. The girls were thereafter dispersed and the chance of saving them in a single operation was lost. This week the former president denied any such offer was made. But even if the report is wrong, Jonathan's handling of the Chibok abductions was still deplorable. The Boko Haram insurrection that came to the fore at the very start of his presidency was a considerable challenge that overwhelmed the badly equipped and trained Nigerian army. Jonathan's response was to fire a clutch of top generals when in fact root and branch reform of the armed forces by way of considerable financial investment was what was really needed. The full extent of Jonathan's political failure was made the sharper by the considerable hopes that his arrival in office had produced. It really did seem as if in 2011 Nigeria was turning a corner. In the event the country was treated to more of the same venal bad governance. The only thing that could be said for the failed president was that when he lost the presidency to Muhammadu Buhari in 2015, Jonathan became the first Nigerian leader to hand over office peacefully.
