Former president Goodluck Jonathan had all along been known as a very cautious man, politician and president. His last assignment observing the November 24, 2025 Guinea-Bissau elections, and his incredibly perceptive and strong reaction to the coup that upstaged the polls, however, suggested that either Nigerians didn’t quite know the man or he had undergone an incredible metamorphosis since his misadventure into president election politics in 2022 and last October. Dr Jonathan had led the West African Elders Forum Election Observation Mission to monitor Guinea-Bissau’s presidential and legislative elections. The election pitted incumbent president Umaro Embalo, candidate of the Madem‑G15 party, against leading opposition candidate Fernando Dias, candidate of the Party for Social Renewal (PRS) and his coalition partners. But on November 26, a day before the results were officially released, the unimaginable occurred. The results were annulled, a coup was declared in the most unusual fashion, first by the president himself, and later by the coup leaders who were the president’s military allies, while a supposedly one-year transition regime was emplaced.
The problem with the Guinea-Bissau polls is not just that the now ‘deposed’ president connived at a coup that subverted the elections, or that his military allies led the coup, or that he had in fact lost the election and needed an excuse not to hand over to the presumed winner, Mr Dias, or that this would be the third time he would flirt with coups d’etat, having assumed office on the back of a forcible claim to the office in 2019 via a 54 percent runoff vote. Or even that he repeated the evil ploy midway into his presidency in 2022, years before the latest chicanery. In fact, hapless Guinea-Bissau can have all the tragic drama it wants, and perhaps with a little help from outside can find a resolution that would power their democracy and lift the country out of the developmental doldrums years of leadership incompetence and corruption, and a national reputation as a drug courier hub, had sentenced the country. Furthermore, many commentators have made one or two uncomplimentary remarks about the lousy change of guard in Guinea-Bissau, including the increasingly impotent United Nations castrated and rendered spineless by the warmongering and apoplectic United States president Donald Trump.
The problem is that former president Jonathan, who has seemed to acquire new political and leadership clothes, is giving Nigerians tough bones to chew and wearing odd clothes. The clothes are paradoxically fitting, but they were revealed by the Guinea-Bissau polls and the coup which trapped the former Nigerian president for a day in that country. Soon after he was evacuated from the coup-prone nation, Dr Jonathan unleashed a fusillade of denunciations against the ‘deposed’ President Embalo and the coup leaders. Though used to waffling, on this occasion, Dr Jonathan minced no words in damning the chicanery he believed the exiled Guinea-Bissau president had disreputably enacted. And he was quite assertive in his opinion, indeed very definitive.
Hear him at length: “What happened in Guinea-Bissau is quite disturbing to me, a person who believes in democracy. In fact, I feel more pain than the day I called Buhari to congratulate him when I lost the election as a sitting president. It is painful for me that President Embaló was the one announcing a military takeover of the government. It is totally unacceptable. What happened in Guinea-Bissau, I would not call it a coup; it was not a coup. For lack of a better word, I will say it was a ceremonial coup because it was President Embaló who announced the coup before the military later came up to address the world that they were in charge of the government.”
Still animated and angry, he added: “Embaló had already announced that there was a coup, which is strange. Not only announcing the coup, but Embaló, while the coup took place, was using his phone and addressing media organisations across the world that he had been arrested. I’m a Nigerian close to 70, and I know how they keep Heads of State when a coup takes place. They cannot be playing pranks; nobody should call others fools. There is no way there will be a military coup at a time when they were about to announce election results, and the president was the person who announced the coup. It doesn’t happen anywhere.”
Though there were a few moments in his denunciations when his characteristic inclination for excessive caution peered out, on the whole, however, he pulled the peroration off admirably. It was a relief to hear the former Nigerian president declaim convincingly on a subject dear to the hearts of many Nigerians and West Africans who had endured decades of terror under military jackboots. He was not as definitive after the 2023 presidential election despite its cleanness and fairness, and he inexplicably and unwisely tried to re-enter the 2027 presidential race for an office that obviously continues to tantalise him. But on the occasion of the Guinea-Bissau poll and the concomitant coup contrived against it, Dr Jonathan was firm and brilliant, in fact elegant. Nigerians will hope his new self is not an aberration, a caricature of his old self, or a gargoyle imitating his ambitious self.
