If - and this is a very big if - my employers at Sahara Reporters are right, that it is to say if this news is true, then President Jonathan has made an excellent and a commendable move at two levels.
Level 1 Commendable move: President Jonathan is a study in personal development after office. I like what I have been seeing in terms of his resumption of ordinary citizenship and humanhood. He has learnt to stop listening to the marionettes who deified and destroyed him. I keep saying this: no history of the Jonathan presidency would be complete without chapters written on the rise and evolution of the most irresponsible followership ever known to the African continent - especially his social media caterwauling hordes who are even still at it, claiming superhuman infallibility for their hero as I write.
If you believe, like your followers, that you are infallible; that you did not one single thing wrong in office; that Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, and Martin Luther King are inferior to you in the province of moral and ethical capital; that you deserve the Nobel Peace Prize and the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Good Leadership in Africa, you'd fear no probe for a probe would not yield a dent on your integrity. If, however, you are making moves to avoid a probe, it means you have stopped being carried away by the stupidity of those who destroyed you with the mythology of your infallibility. You now know that you are a man who might have done a lot of things wrong in office.
Level 2 Commendable move : President Jonathan could not have sought a better intercessor than Chief Emeka Anyaoku. Towering moral and ethical capital. One of the most powerful, most captivating, most brilliant speakers I've ever met. There are few Nigerians who are as credible as Chief Anyaoku. President Jonathan is wise to have gone to him.
President Buhari and Chief Anyaoku have two paths to the resolution of this matter. Both paths are Yoruba.
Chief Anyaoku cannot refuse to go and deliver the former President's message. President Jonathan deserves that level of respect. As a former President, he should be able to send any Nigerian on an errand. Chief Anyaoku will have to do this on the basis of the respect accorded the owner and initiator of an errand. He should tell President Buhari: "eni ran ni nise lan beru. .." i.e no matter your personal opinion of a message you have been asked to deliver, you must accord respect to who sent you and deliver it. Leave judgement to the receiver of the message.
The receiver of the message also has a Yoruba outlet that can be recommended to him. When a Yoruba wants to exploit cultural licence to deny a supplication, he or she says: "won ni be yin lebe iya o." That is to say: may you never be the receiver of a worwor message and may you never be the addressee of worwor begging and supplication.
That way, President Jonathan's supplication would have been delivered by Chief Anyaoku under the cultural warrant of respecting the owner of the message and declined by President Buhari under the cultural warrant of rejecting a worwor supplication.
Everybody wins!
Let the probes begin!
But it must not be limited to the Jonathan administration!
We are waiting for Haliburton and Siemens!
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