Nigeria and its hijackers
By okey ndibe (E-mail: okndibe@yahoo.com )
Tuesday, January 05, 2009

Nigeria is in danger of entering an unprecedented stage as a hijacked entity. In fact, the polity is in the throes of what ought to be called its proper name, a coup-in-progress. A small but desperate cabal is surreptitiously consolidating its illegitimate power grab.
Nigeria has been reduced to Umaru Yar’Adua’s private toy, a plaything reserved for the sole pleasure of the man and his cronies.

As I write, Mr. Yar’Adua (whose self-appellation as servant-leader has become the cruel joke it was designed to be) has been away from Nigeria for more than forty days. Apart from his wife, and a tiny circle of associates, few Nigerians can swear that they know for certain where Yar’Adua. All we know for sure is that he’s not in Aso Rock, the official residence of the Nigerian president. Most Nigerians imagine, of course, that the man is in a hospital in Saudi Arabia – not because it’s proven fact, but it’s simply the official line. It’s impossible to vouch for any information that comes from a government that’s raised deception to the level of art.

Forget, for a moment, that Yar’Adua’s “presidency” still reeks – despite the shameful verdict of the Supreme Court – of illegality. Worse, before our very eyes, a cabal hitched to Yar’Adua is usurping the sovereign will of Nigerians. That group is acting in the name of an enfeebled man who (at this writing) has absconded from his post.
Michael Aondoakaa, Yar’Adua’s Attorney General, may not be at the center of this usurpation, but he strikes me as chief coordinator of this orchestrated conquest of Nigeria.

It no longer startles Nigerians to hear it said that Aondoakaa is the worst attorney general in his country’s history. Nigeria has had some pretty unimpressive attorney generals, but Aondoakaa stands in a class all his own for mediocrity and crassness. Now he’s adding something even more dangerous and troubling to his resume: a facility for defending the degradation of the Nigerian constitution.

It is a constitutional anomaly when a man who presumes to be Nigeria’s president disappears indefinitely to a foreign address without handing over the instruments of governance. If an American president has to be sedated briefly for a medical procedure, he usually hands over to the vice president for an hour or two. Not Yar’Adua, who seems to subordinate Nigeria’s interests to his desire to bottle the “presidential” seal and steal away with it to any hospital he visits for usually prolonged treatment.
If Yar’Adua doesn’t know better, it’s Aondoakaa’s job to tell him that it’s not permissible to proceed on open-ended medical trips without inviting his deputy to act in his absence.

Yet, it’s either that Aondoakaa knows just as much as Yar’Adua does, which is little, or – scary as it is – even less than the man he’s supposed to be advising on legal and constitutional matters. That, or Aondoakaa thrives from encouraging Yar’Adua to affect disdain for the Nigerian people and the constitution.
At any rate, when Nigerians began to bemoan the vacuum created by Yar’Adua’s absence (a vacuum, by the way, that is just as pronounced even when Yar’Adua is embedded in Abuja), Aondoakaa remained nonchalant. When he stirred at all, it was to tell Nigerians that Yar’Adua remained able to govern from any location in the world.

Then, in a curious twist, the attorney general reportedly forwarded a letter to Goodluck Jonathan asking him to act as “president” under a rather shady, even illegal, arrangement. Several Nigerian newspapers reported that Jonathan suspected a nefarious plot, and refused to be entrapped.
It appeared that the concession that Jonathan rejected was necessitated by two looming crises. One had to do with the signing of N353.6 billion supplementary budget; the other with the swearing-in of Justice Aloysius Katsina-Alu as chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Those who mistake Nigeria for Yar’Adua’s private possession soon discovered that they didn’t need to cede control to Jonathan, however briefly, in order to avert what appeared to be imminent constitutional perils.

In a stunning maneuver, the cabal that’s hijacked Nigeria caused it to be announced that Yar’Adua had signed the budget from his hospital bed. Pronto, one constitutional headache was erased by that signature stunt performed by a “presidential” magician who once threatened to thrash those doubting the vibrancy of his health in rounds of squash. Then, the resourceful cabal persuaded outgoing Chief Justice Legbo Kutigi to swear in his successor.

Here, then, is how things stand. It’s looking good – very good – for the cabal that’s stolen and is bent on ruining Nigeria. With the supplementary budget “signed,” they have secured the cash to operate as they wish – for the next two or three months. They have also established a precedent, namely, that future budgetary requests could be sent from Yar’Adua’s unknown hospital address and “signed” with the same secrecy.

A sickly Yar’Adua and his cartel have morphed into a foreign power, and Nigeria is their conquered outpost. No Nigerian need ever set eye on Yar’Adua any time soon; his inner circle has proven that the man can govern with the same effectiveness quotient as when the man is ensconced in Aso Rock. Since he has always been a disaster when resident in Abuja, odds are that he would continue with the same distinction for ineptitude from his secret foreign fortress.

This new arrangement effectively ensures the permanent silencing of those (disgruntled) elements demanding that Yar’Adua pass the baton to Jonathan. Aondoakaa and his sponsors need never break a sweat from now on. Even if Yar’Adua becomes incapacitated, that fact would be conveniently withheld from Nigerians. He would continue to rule – that’s the operative word, rule – by the say-so of his trusted confidantes who best understand seven-point agenda and know what’s good for the subjugated colony called Nigeria.

Given the new set-up, it would be possible, if not easy, for Yar’Adua to blitz the competition and win a second term without making one appearance at a campaign rally. All that’s needed to secure him a victory is to exercise his right, under his notorious electoral “deform” plan, to appoint the new chairman and commissioners of the electoral commission.

With the cloud hanging over Katsina-Alu’s investiture as chief justice, the Yar’Adua cabal may well have paved the way for the entrenchment of a spineless judiciary, one willing to rubber stamp any electoral verdicts, however disreputable in the eyes of domestic and international observers.
It’s safe to say that Nigerians have never had it quite as bleak as under the Yar’Adua dispensation. Until now, we’ve had a succession of rotten rulers, but never one surrounded by a coterie of such primitive mindset, animated by a determination to hold on to power even from a hospital’s intensive care unit.

It’s heartening that many Nigerians are speaking up, and taking legal action, against this imposition. Yet, one worries that Nigerians are, on the whole, still far from recognizing the nature of the challenge before them. It is this: we’re witnesses to a coup-in-progress. Every citizen must decide whether to let this play out, or to resist the bunch designing a peculiar hell for the rest of us.