n the run up to the presidential election on March 28, 2015, figures obtained from the protocol department of the Presidential Villa indicated that more than two thousand visitors visited President Goodluck Jonathan on the average in a week. This figures do not include visitors that met with the president in his official residence in the Villa. Neither do they include those he met outside the official residence but within the precincts of the Presidential Villa. It was perhaps the number and quality of people who thronged to the Villa on daily basis and the assurances they gave the president during the run up to the presidential election that informed the confidence he displayed as the election drew nearer that he was going to win.
But on the Sunday after the presidential election when collation of votes had begun and it appeared that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was not doing well and was, in fact, trailing behind the All Progressives Congress at the polls, less than 30 persons, apart from some security personnel and aides of the president, attended the Aso Rock Chapel which had hitherto been a beehive of activities every Sunday.
The above scenarios represent the reality at the Presidential Villa since Jonathan lost the presidential election to the candidate of the APC, General Muhammadu Buhari. Although official engagements of the president are expected to slow down as he prepares to hand over to the incoming government, what many observers find very curious is the sudden abandonment of Jonathan by people who, some months ago, were frequent visitors to the Villa and some even reportedly vowed to swim and sink with the president.
But there are precedents to this kind of swift switch of loyalty. Shortly after General Sani Abacha died in mysterious circumstance in 1998, many of those who dressed him in the robe of infallibility and urged him on to transmute from a military ruler to a civilian leader did a 360 degree turn around and condemned him in the harshest of terms.
So, though Jonathan was said to have been stung by the sudden abandonment of people he had considered his friends, he was said to have recovered from the betrayal and accepted his fate with stoicism. One of the earliest callers to the Villa shortly after the president made the telephone call to Buhari to concede defeat told Sunday Vanguard that, at that moment, the president appeared downcast.
“When former Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, led a delegation from the National Peace Committee on the presidential election to visit President Jonathan shortly after he called General Buhari, the president the committee members met was not someone who was pained by his defeat but he was more devastated by the betrayal of the people whom he called friends. He kept making reference to how treacherous human beings are and vowed that, as a zoologist, may be he would go and study animals more and see whether they have the same level of treachery as human beings. He was so passionate about it so much so that a member of the Peace Committee was led to tears”, a member of the committee in attendance at the meeting told Sunday Vanguard.
Having overcome the shock of the betrayal, Jonathan set the ball rolling with the task of winding down his administration. At the first Federal Executive Council meeting after his defeat at the polls, the tension that enveloped the Council Chambers could be sliced with a knife. The president, who was used to wearing a smile on his face almost perpetually, carried a very serious mien comparable only to the day he assumed office as Acting President following the long absence of the late President Umaru Yar’Adua. The conviviality that pervaded the Council Chambers was absent. It was one Council meeting that no member was seen with smile on his face and no banter was exchanged.
Sack out of the blues
But Jonathan’s shrinking presidency is not without some actions. Against all expectations, t
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