Goodluck Jonathan does not appear to be a man who enjoys being described as inexperienced, particularly by someone who has spent three decades trying and failing to become president.
The former Nigerian president pushed back Monday at an Abuja awards ceremony, responding without naming Atiku Abubakar directly but with enough precision that nobody in the room could have misidentified the target. Atiku had said on Arise TV that Jonathan was “a decent young man, but also inexperienced,” and that this inexperience had contributed to his inability to manage the country’s challenges during his 2010-2015 tenure.
Jonathan’s reply arrived wrapped in mathematics. “I became president in 2010 at the age of 53. I left in 2015 at the age of 58, and they say I was too young. Must it have been 100 years before I ran the affairs of the state?” He acknowledged mistakes — everyone makes them, he said, even those who promote themselves to deity — but rejected the framing that youth or inexperience was his defining characteristic in office. “I did my best,” he said.
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Speaking at the Association of Retired Career Ambassadors of Nigeria awards ceremony, he pointed to Nigeria’s election to the United Nations Security Council during his tenure as evidence of diplomatic competence that “naive” leadership could not have navigated. “I knew what I did for us to appear in the UN Security Council two times,” he told the assembled diplomats. The implication was clear: the record speaks, if one chooses to read it honestly.
The exchange is part of the early choreography of the 2027 presidential contest, in which Atiku — now running on the African Democratic Congress platform — is competing against Peter Obi of the Labour Party, former Transport Minister Rotimi Amaechi and former Kano governor Rabiu Kwankwaso for position and narrative. In the Arise TV interview, Atiku had also played down Kwankwaso and Tambuwal’s northern influence, confined Obi’s support base to the South-East and limited Amaechi’s reach to the South-South — a comprehensive attempt to shrink every rival’s geography before the contest has formally begun.
Jonathan used the diplomatic setting to pivot from personal defence to regional diagnosis, delivering an analysis of ECOWAS at 50 that was simultaneously a tribute to the bloc’s founders and a frank assessment of its unresolved tensions. Political instability, he argued, remains the ceiling through which West African economic ambitions cannot break. “We cannot progress economically if we are very unstable societies politically,” he said.
He identified the bloc’s core structural problem as a sovereignty dilemma — that enforcing democratic norms among member states requires interfering in their internal affairs, which member states resist in the name of sovereignty. “That means that ECOWAS must interfere with the internal affairs of the states, and the issue of sovereignty becomes a problem.” The observation has particular resonance at a moment when Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have withdrawn from ECOWAS entirely, and when the bloc’s ability to enforce democratic standards has been tested repeatedly and found wanting.
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He called on ECOWAS heads of state to work together on concrete stabilisation commitments, and urged Nigerian diplomats to document the country’s foreign policy experiences for the benefit of future administrations — a quiet acknowledgement that institutional memory is among the most undervalued assets in governance.
Former military head of state Yakubu Gowon, also honoured at the ceremony, reflected on the bloc’s 1975 founding with the humility of someone who knows how much of history is collaborative rather than individual. He described the formation of ECOWAS as emerging from post-civil war diplomatic tours of neighbouring countries — visits to say thank you that revealed patterns of bilateral agreement and sparked the question: why not build something collective? “This would not have been possible without the support of all the staff of the Ministry of External Affairs and the Ministry of Economic Development,” he said, insisting that the honour belonged as much to the civil servants who made the architecture possible as to the leaders who signed it.
ARCAN president Joe Keshi offered the evening’s most quietly penetrating observation about the profession being celebrated. “Diplomacy is one profession where success is often invisible, reflected not by news coverage, but by maintained stability, prevented conflicts, cultivated partnerships.” It is, he implied, a vocation whose greatest achievements are defined by what never happened — the wars that were not fought, the crises that were absorbed before they detonated.
Jonathan, for his part, left the ceremony having made clear that whatever history decides about his presidency, he will not be accepting Atiku Abubakar’s characterisation as the definitive verdict.