A former President of the country, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, has described his political journey from the position of obscurity to the office of the first citizen of the country as a miracle.
Jonathan, however, attributed his emergence to another former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, whom he said made it possible. Jonathan disclosed this in Lagos at the official presentation of three books written by his former media adviser, Dr. Reuben Abati, as part of activities marking his 60th birthday anniversary.
Speaking as the Guest Speaker, the former President lauded the celebrant for his contributions to the media profession as well as the country at large.
He lauded Abati for writing the books, particularly the one that chronicled his emergence as the president, titled, How Jonathan Became President. “I’ll be very, very interested to read how Goodluck Jonathan became president from back to back, and I need to do that in the next couple of days.
When you talk about how I became president, the man who made me president is right here. “I hope you properly reflected on that role. I hope you captured his role. As a journalist, you followed up on my stories even before you joined me in the State House. So thank you for that.
“There were a lot of ups and downs in my political journey, but actually, my political journey looks like a political miracle, from deputy governor to becoming the president of this country in less than four years. “It was a miracle. It’s only God that made it possible. So, I have to thank you for documenting it.”
The former leader ex- pressed hopes that the book would provide an unbiased chronicle of his political journey, adding that only an observer would do justice to it.
“When you tend to write about yourself, probably there’s this tendency to paint yourself in too many bright colours that probably you don’t deserve, but when people write about you, it makes more sense.
“And I know your scholarly competence, and this will be one of the best collections if somebody wants to read about Jonathan and the State House. I sincerely thank you,” the former president said.
Addressing the gathering as the Guest Lecturer, the Catholic Archbishop of Sokoto Archdiocese, Archbishop Mathew Hassan Kukah, blamed the seeming underdevelopment of the country on what he termed a lack of consensus building.
In his lecture titled, Nigeria: Time to Reload, Archbishop Kukah lamented the fact that the country had never produced a leader who sees the country as his constituency. “Well, you ask yourself now, who are the prominent Nigerians, Nigerian statesmen whose names resonate across the length and breadth of Nigeria without punctuation.
“You will find that the Yorubas had their leader in (Obafemi) Awolowo, the Igbos had their leader in (Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe) Zik, the Northerners had their leader in Sardauna, Ahmadu Bello. We who are children of a lesser God have no idea, we don’t know where to turn, we can only look for people who are going to adopt us,” he said.
While drawing a nexus between development and consensus-building, Archbishop Kukah drew inspiration from other countries where they have worked on building internal cohesion. He lamented the prevailing politics of identity in the country.
“When you talk about the Americans, the Americans will tell you that there are people that they call the founding fathers, and they’ve become literally sacred monuments in the sense that their names are constantly being evoked, either to justify or to reprimand certain actions.
“The question for us in Nigeria, because Americans were committed in 1776, when they issued the Declaration of Independence, we are committed to the proposition that one, we hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” he said.
“So if you find us being such a chaotic, quarrel- some, angry, whatever, as we are in Nigeria, we lack a means, we lack a culture, we lack the institutional, the moral inspiration to establish a kind of equilibrium,” he said.
