Former President Goodluck Jonathan is a good man. That is how history remembers him. That is how he comes across in person.
I have sat with him. I have looked him in the eye. He is gentle, thoughtful, prayerful — a rare combination at the top of African politics.
In US interviews, I have called him an “accidental Christian president,” because that is what he was. The token Southern Christian vice president in the Yar’Adua administration.
When the president died in May 2010—a year before the next election—the constitution put Jonathan in the chair. The powers that be never intended for him to be the top man. That is not to diminish him. It is to explain why they unleashed hell to get him out.
During his tenure, Nigeria was more peaceful and her people more prosperous than they are today. It was the only nation on earth where radical Islam was being pushed back.
Boko Haram was on its heels. Christian villages and churches still stood. The Plateau still had farmers on it. There was real progress. Real hope.
Then Buhari claimed victory in 2015—with Obama’s full backing and election results that were very much open to challenge.
Jonathan made a famous concession. He walked away. He said, “My political ambition is not worth the blood of one Nigerian.”
That line has burnished his stature as an elder statesman. It is the line every news anchor quotes when they introduce him. It is the line that has earned him standing ovations at every African Union summit since.
It is also the line that gives me pause. Because here is the truth, said plainly and without disrespect: The fight was not about his political ambition.
It was about life. It was about liberty. It was about whether a Christian Southerner could lead Nigeria out of the darkness that has smothered her people for generations. It was about standing in the gap when the gap was open.
And by walking away—by treating the fight as if it were about him—Goodluck Jonathan did not save Nigerian blood. He let it spill.
Since 2015, More than 185,000 Nigerians have been killed. 125,000 of them Christians. 60,000 of them, peaceful Muslims, slaughtered by the same machine.
More than 19,000 churches destroyed. 10 to 12 million Nigerians displaced from their ancestral lands. Mass slavery. Mass starvation. Mass forgetting.
That is the cost of one man’s decision to call life-and-death a question of personal ambition.
I do not say this to wound him. I say it because the same darkness that took the country in 2015 is more powerful today than it was then. It has had total control of Nigeria for going on twelve years. It has metastasized.
It has bought generals. It has hired Washington lobbyists. It has filled the mass graves of the Middle Belt and the IDP camps of the Northeast.
And now His Excellency has signaled he may run again in 2027. So here is my question for him and I ask it with the deepest, most genuine respect.
Mr. President, now more than perhaps any time in Nigerian history, your people need a fighter.
A champion. A man who will stand in the gap and wage war on the darkness—the bloody foreign hands, the radical ideology of death, the corrupt and complicit leaders, and the brutal system of submission and silence that is smothering the land.
A man who will champion the displaced generation — 10 to 12 million innocent Nigerians traumatically driven from their ancestral lands — and get them back home. Safe. Restored. Where they belong.
Are you that man? What did you learn from 2015? What will you do different or is this, once again, about your political ambition?
Because, sir, with all the respect a man can give to a man, Nigerians can no longer afford a leader who lays down the fight in the name of peace.
The blood is already on the ground. The peace has already been broken. The only question left is whether the next time they come for your people, you will stand or step aside?
