It was never supposed to happen, because as incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan was expected to win. How Jonathan lost the 2015 presidential election to Muhammadu Buhari is the tragic story of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The question has been asked repeatedly: how can you organize elections and lose? The answer is provided in a new book: “Against the Run of Play – How an incumbent president was defeated in Nigeria,” written by Olusegun Adeniyi, Editorial Board chairman of THISDAY newspaper. Although former President Jonathan has challenged some of the accounts in the book as “false and inaccurate” Adeniyi, media aide to late president Umaru Yar’adua, makes a compelling case that Jonathan’s 2015 re-election campaign was doomed. Buhari’s victory sent shock waves across Africa where there has been 96% victory and only 4% defeat of incumbents in the last three decades.
In this tell-all new book which chronicles events leading to outcome of the 2015 election, Jonathan was quoted as blaming his defeat on the actions of the United States government under former president Barack Obama. According to Jonathan, Obama and US government officials made it abundantly clear to him by their actions that they wanted regime change in Nigeria and were ready to defy all the odds to achieve that objective, including use of military force. Jonathan revealed to Adeniyi that the Obama administration even dispatched US warships to the Gulf of Guinea in the days preceding the Nigerian elections; a coded move widely understood in US intelligence community as “battleground preparation.”
Jonathan interpreted the Obama administration’s refusal to sell arms to Nigeria to help the fight against Boko Haram, as a well-orchestrated ambush to undermine his administration and portray him as weak and inefficient; thereby making him unpopular. Under a law introduced by Vermont Senator, Patrick Leahy in 1997, any sale of US military hardware to Nigeria was conditional on improved human rights protection in military operations. Jonathan made no secret of his seething anger towards Obama; whom he accused of not only blocking arms sale to Nigeria; but engaged in covert diplomatic maneuvers to ensure American allies around the world instituted the same arms embargo to Nigeria.
“I got on very well with Prime Minister David Cameron but at some point, I noticed that the Americans were putting pressure on him and he had to join them against me. But I didn’t know how far President Obama was prepared to go to remove me until France caved into the pressure from America,” Jonathan recounted to the book’s author. Recalling he had a very cordial relationship with French president Francois Hollande, who acted as interface between Nigeria and Cameroon on the fight against Boko Haram, the book noted that: “On one occasion, following an appeal by Jonathan, Hollande even organized a conference in Paris with all the French-speaking countries within the sub-region. But weeks to the election, he {Hollande} had also joined the Americans in supporting the opposition against me.”
Jonathan attributed the hostility of the Obama administration was informed by public perception that he supported corruption. “There was this blanket accusation that my body language was supporting corruption, a line invented by the opposition but which the media and civil society bought into and helped to project to the world. That was the same thing I kept hearing from the Americans without specific allegations.” Jonathan said there was a lot of pressure on him to scapegoat a few of his close collaborators to create the impression that he was fighting corruption, but he refused. “By virtue of being president of Nigeria, I have come to know so many things about so many people. Some of the most corrupt Nigerians are the ones who speak most loudly about corruption. Once you have access to the media in Nigeria, you have the liberty to accuse others of corruption regardless of what you are doing,” Jonathan said.
The book tells the story of a wildly dysfunctional and spirit-crushing campaign that embraced a flawed strategy that failed, repeatedly, to correct course. A passive-aggressive campaign that neglected to act on all sorts of foreboding signs and warning flares sent up by PDP political operatives on the ground in crucial Southwestern states, and that ignored the advice of PDP garrison commanders and other foot soldiers, who argued that the campaign needed to work harder to persuade ambivalent voters in the Middle Belt, instead of whipping up ethnic and religious sentiments and focusing insistently on turning out core supporters in South-Southern states.
But the former president thinks otherwise. In his view, he was betrayed by members of his own party, the PDP, especially those of northern extraction. “I felt really betrayed by the results coming from some northern states. Perhaps for ethnic purposes, even security agents colluded with the opposition to come up with spurious results against me. You saw the way the Inspector General of Police, (Abba); a man appointed by me, suddenly turned himself into the ADC to Buhari immediately after the election” He also expressed bitter disappointment with some of his erstwhile allies and singled out PDP national chairman, Adamu Mu’azu, accusing him of conspiracy and sabotage. “What happened was very sad not for me as a person, but for our democracy. Take for instance, the PDP National Chairman, Alhaji Adamu Mu’azu. I believe he joined in the conspiracy against me. For reasons best known to him, he helped to sabotage the election in favor of the opposition.”
Although the 2015 campaign was widely covered, and many autopsies have been conducted, the blow-by-blow details in “Against the run of play” and the observations made by PDP insiders, are nothing less than devastating, sure to dismay not just Jonathan but also his supporters, who were shocked by the outcome and momentous consequences of the 2015 election. Jonathan explained that his campaign was data-driven with analytics based on projections from the 2011 presidential elections and he knew what would happen in each zone in 2015 based on precision-targeting. Therefore, he was shocked by what happened in some states. “How could we have lost Ondo, Benue and Plateau States if our people were committed to the cause? If you examine the results, you will see a pattern: in places where ordinarily we were strong, our supporters did not show enough commitment to mobilize the voters,” he argued.
In fact, the portrait of the Jonathan campaign that emerges from the book is that of a Titanic-like disaster: an epic failure comprising a series of perverse and often avoidable missteps by an out-of-touch and confused candidate and his strife-ridden staff that turned a winnable race into a sinking campaign ship; placing an over-reliance on money and ethnic politics, and assuming INEC would cower to incumbency and deliver victory.
Jonathan refuses to admit that his campaign was poorly run. As the ruling party, PDP enormously outspent the APC, but its full spectrum dominance of media advertising and advertorials failed to win over sufficient voters. PDP messaging was inconsistent as a multiplicity of decentralized campaigns competed for attention. The APC, in contrast, repeated its simple message of “change” over and over again. There was a perfect storm of other factors, of course, that contributed to Jonathan’s loss. The author of “Against the run of play,” however, writes that even some of his closest advisers think that Jonathan bears the blame for his defeat, arguing that his actions before the campaign (feuding with OBJ, becoming entangled in the Nigerian Governors’ Forum, backing embattled PDP chairman, Bamanga Tukur and PDP governors defecting to the APC, insensitive handling of Chibok kidnapping), amongst others, hamstrung his own chances so badly that he couldn’t recover; ensuring he could not cast himself as anything but more of the same when much of the country had lost faith in the status quo.
“Against the run of play” underscores Jonathan’s difficulty in articulating a rationale for his campaign other than pointing out that his opponent was not a change agent. And it suggests that a tendency to value loyalty over competence resulted in a lumbering, bureaucratic operation in which staff members were reluctant to speak truth to power, and competing tribes sowed confusion, angst and infighting.
His campaign team’s convoluted power structure encouraged political jobbers to care more about their standing with him, or their future job opportunities, than getting him re-elected.
The book reflects Adeniyi’s access to the former president as well as his closest advisers and scores of other sources, whom the author interviewed on background. And while it’s clear that some of these people are spinning blame retroactively, many are surprisingly candid about the frustrations they experienced during the campaign. The campaign frequently spun its wheels in denial and evolving a core message to highlight Jonathan’s achievements remained a continuing struggle, leaving PDP campaign coordinators in battleground Southwest states frustrated as the campaign headquarters made the strategic mistake of limiting Jonathan to grand rallies, as opposed to more old-fashioned methods of retail politics on the ground to persuade voters. Change was in the offing but the Jonathan campaign was clueless on how to respond, until it was too late. And despite the realigned electoral dynamics from the defection of PDP governors to the APC, which left the PDP in relative minority, no effort was made to expand the electoral map beyond PDP -held turf and traditional South-south states.
In chronicling these missteps, “Against the run of play” creates a picture of a shockingly inept campaign hobbled by hubris and unforced errors, and haunted by a sense of self-pity and doom, summed up when Mu’azu told Jonathan to look inwards in order to get at the root of his failure at the polls. Mu’azu said Jonathan’s campaign was mismanaged by people who “decided to introduce religion and ethnicity into the campaign in such a manner that not only hurt the PDP in the north but was actually helping to mobilize our opponents against us,” adding: “it pains me that anybody would want to pin a tag of ethnic or religious bigotry on me because that is what President Jonathan means by his accusation, even if he did not directly say it. I suppose my crime with him is that I am a Muslim and a northerner.”
Mu’azu also explained in the book that: “After President Jonathan had accepted defeat, congratulated Buhari and the whole world was acclaiming him, some of our party leaders now wanted me to make a statement that would ridicule me before civilized people and cause serious problems for our country. “Of course, I refused to do any such thing. If that was the sabotage President Jonathan is referring to, I don’t think I should apologize for that.”
