Dare Babalola
Human rights activist and lawyer, Dele Farotimi, has stated that former President Goodluck Jonathan is the solution the country needs.
During an interview on Channels Television on Sunday night, Farotimi faulted recent agitations of fielding Jonathan against President Bola Tinubu in the forthcoming presidential election, noting that Nigeria’s problems are systemic.
He said, “If we do not address our structural problems and if we are incapable of telling ourselves the basic truth that we hold to ourselves, then nothing is going to change. They can recycle all these people as many times as they want. This was the same Goodluck Ebele Jonathan who was vilified and labelled. The media went into overdrive in this country, the pulpits and the mosques said Jonathan’s removal would solve the problems of Nigeria, but here we are – we’re going back into the past to dig up the past. That was how we dug up the one that just expired.
“I don’t believe that our problems are going to be resolved because we changed personnel. The problems we have in Nigeria go beyond people. If you remove Bola Ahmed Tinubu from office today, if you do not touch that evil system that produces the kind of people who have ruined this country, all this talk about Jonathan is just more distraction from the political winning craft.
“We’re not looking for saviours; it’s about building systems, building a country. How do you rebrand the failure of 2015 into a saint and a saviour in 2025? After 10 years, we’ve gone full cycle, and we are back at a situation where we are saying that we are better off than we were in 2015. We should focus on building the system.”
In recent times, there have been calls for the former president to contest against President Tinubu.
The most recent of the calls came from a group in North-East, under the auspices of “Bring Back Our Goodluck,” who apologised to the former president for the “damaging narrative of sponsoring Boko Haram terrorists that was used in removing him from office in 2015”.
The group, therefore, promised to stage a one-million-man march to the former President’s country home in Bayelsa to prevail on him to contest for the 2027 presidential election after their tour of the whole regions in Nigeria.
