Tuesday,
August 14, 2007
Mr. Umar Yar’Adua seems to have developed an astute instinct for
garnering some popular appeal. At every opportunity, he appears to be selling
himself, in words and deeds, as the opposite of Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo. It is,
it appears, a winning recipe.
Yar’Adua’s most winning move
is to make clear that he does not regard himself as a god. Nor does he presume
to be on (daily) speaking terms with God.
Last week, a day after his office
announced that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) had been stripped
of its prosecutorial mandate, Yar’Adua reversed himself. He knew that his
initial decision had reverberated terribly in Nigeria and elsewhere. He recognized
that he had sent a doleful message that official pilferers of public funds would
be shielded.
Yar’Adua’s initial decision to checkmate the
EFCC was cowardly and shameful. He came across as malleable, a man susceptible
to manipulation by some ex-Niger Delta governors and their agents determined to
escape prosecution by weakening the EFCC. Days after hosting former Governors
James Ibori (Delta) and Peter Odili (Rivers), Yar’Adua seemed to have buckled
and caved in to pressure. Attorney-General Michael Aondoakaa, who apparently championed
the denudation of the agency’s prosecutorial function, has started his career
on an unimpressive note.
An attorney-general who has represented former
Vice President Atiku Abubakar as well as some governors accused of corruption,
should not so brazenly make a grab for prosecutorial monopoly. His haste was inelegant
and leaves his motives open to question. Certainly a lawyer of his standing deserves
stern censure for exhibiting such cavalier disregard for the principle of (perceived
as well as real) conflict of interest.
Nigerians wasted little time in
unleashing their hue and cry. It was hard not to discern that the public sentiment
was in favour of empowering the EFCC to prosecute, but within the rubric of the
rule of law.
To Yar’Adua’s credit, he mustered the courage
to change his mind. By restoring the EFCC to its full powers, he signaled that
under his watch, the corrupt won’t be given a wink and a pat and permitted
to get away with their treachery.
Yar’Adua’s handling of
this mess marked him out as not Obasanjo. Obasanjo would have stuck to his decision,
no matter how unpopular and regardless of the current of public opinion. He saw
himself, and insisted that others hold him, as a deity. An infallible deity, nothing
less.
He envisioned himself as a majority of one. It meant that whenever
his opinion clashed with that of the vast majority of Nigerians, he always bent
the nation to his position. One hundred and forty million serfs had to defer to
Emperor Sesegus Busunjus.
Yar’Adua is looking good thanks in part
to a measure of his personal decency and in part to the monstrous legacy of his
predecessor. First, Yar’Adua had the humility to admit that the electoral
process that produced him was flawed. Even though his admission was couched in
the tamest, most euphemistic terms, it still struck a chord with some Nigerians.
Obasanjo would have looked the world in the face and boldly proclaimed the wuruwuru
of an election as God’s doing.
Yar’Adua’s bread, to state
things in Nigerian parlance, has been buttered by Obasanjo.
By this one
means, not the well-known fact that Obasanjo orchestrated the do-or-die rigging
that put his man in Aso Rock, but that the former president has left his protégé
a bequest of such poor vintage that it takes little to look good.
Yar’Adua,
in his faltering fashion, is relishing his buttered bread. He has not quite dismantled
his predecessor’s culture of impunity. But he seems to be operating with
far more caution, circumspection and dignity than his sponsor. He spirited the
Kaduna and Port Harcourt refineries from the grip of Obasanjo’s cronies
who got the assets at a huge discount. Nigerians applauded.
He knew that
Obasanjo had abused presidential power in ordering the closure of Ibeto Cement
factory located in Bundu Ama in Rivers State. Conventional wisdom saw Obasanjo’s
action as driven by a desire to create a monopolistic environment for Alhaji Aliko
Dangote, the ex-president’s billionaire pal. Yar’Adua saw the wickedness
and injustice in his predecessor’s decision. He ordered that the plant be
immediately reopened. The plant’s owner, Mr. Cletus Ibeto, has since been
singing praises.
Yar’Adua would do well to turn his attention to
Sosoliso Airline, another casualty of his predecessor’s whimsical policies.
For several years, when other airlines had abandoned the routes, Sosoliso made
a commitment to ferry passengers from Lagos to the major Southeastern hubs of
Enugu and Port Harcourt. It was one of the most professionally run airlines in
the country, despite the unfortunate crash of one of its planes while landing
in Port Harcourt two years ago.
The first official report on the crash
absolved the airline from blame in the tragedy. Even so, Obasanjo’s regime
rusticated the airline, after getting a second report to blame the carrier for
all manner of unfounded infractions. Curiously, the banning of Sosoliso coincided
with the arrival on the aviation scene of Arik Air, allegedly owned by interests
close to Obasanjo.
Alas, the former president’s grounding of Sosoliso
has given Arik a monopoly of the eastern skies. That unjust decision deserves
to be revised.
Yar’Adua has pledged to show the utmost respect to the
courts, even when their rulings go against the government.
He’s
yet to be tested where it counts. Even so, many were impressed by the alacrity
with which he acted when the Supreme Court, last June 14, swept Andy Uba from
the governor’s seat in Anambra. Yar’Adua asked acting Inspector-General
of Police Mike Okiro to ensure the immediate execution of the judgment. Many noted
that Obasanjo would have used ludicrous ruses to maintain Uba in illegal power.
By acting in an un-Obasanjo-like fashion, Yar’Adua earned plaudits.
Over the last eight years, Nigerians were subjected to a cruel anomaly that usurped
the name of a democratic government. They saw the office of the Presidency thoroughly
debased, degraded and dragged through the mud by the man who occupied it.
They
were forced to watch, bewildered, as the nation’s most exalted office was
reduced to a haven for thugs masked as political godfathers. They saw the man
entrusted with running their affairs turn into a fiend of vendetta and vindictiveness.
The only thing that saved the nation from descent into absolute anarchy was the
hope that Obasanjo would find—or be shown—the exit door on May 29.
After eight years of the Obasanjo treatment, it would have required a perverse
kind of miracle to find anybody whose style was coarser, and whose ethical index
was worse.
Yar’Adua has been acting as a perceptive student of
Obasanjo’s legacy. He appears to reckon that the Obasanjo way is, as far
as most Nigerians are concerned, forever anathema. In Obasanjo, Nigerians desired
a leader whose words were in sync with his actions.
Obasanjo proved not
to be that man. He postured sanctimoniously but acted ignobly. For him, there
were two kinds of Nigerians: Those who deified him and were rewarded with plum
jobs and graces, and those who didn’t—because they were too familiar
with his foibles and limitations to mistake him for a god—and were placed
at the receiving end of his viciousness.
I once argued in a column that
the tragedy of Obasanjo’s presidency was not its incompetence. It would
be easy to forgive a merely incompetent president. The tragedy lay in the man’s
decision to lend himself, and the considerable prestige as well as resources of
the Presidency, to awful forces (such as the Uba brothers and Adedibu) and malignant
policies.
A few examples of the latter included: Incessant fuel price
hikes, a selective—and hypocritical—crusade against corruption, neglect
of the nation’s terrible roads, commitment to the emasculation of the National
Assembly, his unmonitored (mis)management of the oil sector and the NNPC, disdain
for the judiciary, and an abject failure, after squandering hundreds of billions
and making misleading promises, to improve the nation’s power supply.
Yar’Adua has so far avoided some of the snares and pitfalls of that preceding
dispensation. Still, he is surrounded by many of the same forces who made Nigeria
a hellish address. In fact, he is a product of those forces. As a man thrown up
by an irredeemably errant process, he won’t ever be able to shake off the
stamp of illegitimacy.
That is why, for all his promising moves, one still
hopes that the courts would do the right thing by ordering fresh polls. But as
long as Yar’Adua occupies the office of President, it would pay him to remember
that the right compass of action and deportment is the one that points away from
Obasanjo’s tracks.