Human rights lawyer Dele Farotimi has declared that the idea of former President Goodluck Jonathan returning to power is nothing more than a diversion from Nigeria’s deeper structural decay.
Speaking on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily on Monday, August 11, Farotimi dismissed any hope that leadership changes alone could fix the country.
“A thousand Goodluck Ebele Jonathans cannot solve the problems of Nigeria. They might as well go ahead to increase his brain powers by factors of a thousand for good measure.
“If we do not address our structural problems and tell ourselves the basic truths we owe to ourselves, nothing is going to change,” he said.
He recalled that Jonathan was once heavily attacked and ousted with promises of a better nation, yet the same failures still plague Nigeria.
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“They can recycle all these people as many times as they care. This was the same Jonathan that was horribly vilified and labelled.
“The press, the pulpit, and the mosque all said his removal would solve our problems, and here we are,” he stated.
Farotimi warned that replacing President Bola Tinubu without dismantling the corrupt system would simply recycle incompetence.
“If you removed Bola Ahmed Tinubu from office today, and you do not touch that evil system that has produced the kind of people who have ruined the country, all this talk about Goodluck Ebele Jonathan is just more distraction from the political ‘ruinning’ class,” he argued.
He insisted that Nigeria’s salvation lies in building institutions, not hunting for political “messiahs.”
“It’s about building enduring systems. How do you rebrand a failure of 2015 into a saint and saviour in 2025? Ten years have gone full cycle, and we’re back saying we were better off where we were,” he said.