Shouldn’t
the left own Yar’Adua?
By ADAGBO ONOJA
Friday,
August 10, 2007
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Yar'Adua
Photo: Sun News Publishing |
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After reading the Sunday Vanguard edition of February 11,
2007, (p.15), I had cause to wonder aloud if candidate Sule Lamido had not gone
too far in being so positive about his presidential candidate, Umaru Yar’Adua.
I was concerned with where Lamido had said the following things about Yar’Adua,
"After he had been elected the PDP flagbearer and at the first conference
he had at the Legacy House, our campaign headquarters, he gave us an insight into
the person he is.
Even from the way he speaks, he is a very genuine and
sincere person. He is in total harmony with the environment in which he is operating.
He is extremely deep. He is coming from a clear, identifiable, trusted background.
Even though he is from a family that is rooted in the old northern caliphate,
he shares our leftist ideals bequeathed to us by Mallam Aminu Kano. His father
was the first and only Minister of Lagos Affairs during the First Republic. His
background has exposed him to what it means to be a leader.
He may have
what looks like an anonymous personality because he is not domineering, but he
has full grasp of the situation".
I thought it was not possible for
any one person to be so complete the way Lamido had described the PDP presidential
candidate. Beyond that was the problem of such a categorical commitment at a time
very few people were ready to proclaim candidate Yar’Adua that boldly. But
Lamido is usually unstoppable when it comes to promoting or defending party line
and so stuck to his daring views. But the rest is now history as candidate Umaru
Yar’Adua is now President Umaru Yar’Adua, confronting us with proving
the Lamidos right or wrong about the man and his concept of presidential power
and leadership.
This process of proving them right or otherwise regarding
their claims about Yar’Adua was actually inaugurated by Professor Olatunji
Dare, The Nation’s columnist when he charged Nigerian journalism with failure
of reporting in his May 15, 2007 column. The failure of reporting was such that,
for example, no one knew what sort of books Umaru Yar’Adua had read or read
last, much less his ideological traits, said the Professor of Journalism.
Contributing
to the poser as also columnist in The Nation then, I did argue that Dare had a
point, particularly in the unlikely event that either the tribunals or popular
pressures could reverse the results of the April presidential election and force
a re-run before May 29, 2007. More so as the personality of the President or the
leader, by whatever name/designation known, is always a factor in the politics
of progress, both in pre-literate and literate societies.
I, nevertheless,
saw a risk in Dare’s argument and I would crave the indulgence of the reader
to quote myself extensively here. I said the risk was that "the media could
also have misled the society with the power of details. For, the simple truth
is that no details will alter the basic element in Yar’Adua’s character
formation. That is the fact that Yar’Adua grew up in the palace of power
and his essential orientation is aristocratic.
And this manifests most
in the calm exterior that envelops Yar’Adua. Calmness rather than the expansive,
dramatic or celebrative ways, is what marks out the aristocratic sense of the
acquisition, consolidation and utilization of power everywhere in the world. This
basic character will not be altered by whatever books he has read or is reading
or whatever concessions he has made to alternative orientations.
My contention
was and is that the real issue in the case of Umaru Yar’Adua, is the extent
to which his orientations in favour of radical nationalism at some earlier point
in life still remains part of his political education with particular reference
to the high mindedness and altruism required of leadership in Nigeria NOW more
than ever before. That is the high mindedness that can enable him confront and
shed off this paradigm of auctioning national assets as recklessly as Obasanjo
has done in the past few years.
I have it on a very good authority of
an independent minded scholar in Zaria that Yar’Adua knows the direction
in which the world is moving. That suggests that he would certainly re-examine
this so-called reform. And I am certain that when he does so, he would most likely
opt for the developmental state, at least for the mild version articulated in
the Second National Development Plan. And above all, he would grab serious people
like Allison Ayida, if I must mention a name, into his cabinet after doing away
with all the boastful and exhitionist political liabilities who ran Obasanjo into
serious alienation, even though some of them are busy tendering calculated apologies
now to those they visited with violent policies.
I was forced to look at
this piece of mine again after reading Nnanna Anyim-Ude’s rejoinder (Thisday,
July 29, 2007, p.18) to an earlier piece by Dr. Sam Amadi titled "The left
should own Yar’Adua". This is in the sense that the two articles, in
spite of the poverty of Ude’s grasp of the politics of ideology in relation
to Amadi’s proposition, have brought back a debate whose history I traced
above from the Lamido assertions. That debate is the question of the strategic
direction of the Yar’Adua leadership.
And that debate can be reduced
to the ideological question, not in the claptrap manner of whether Yar’Adua
is a doctrinaire capitalist or a socialist but in terms of the basic patriotism
required to fire the transformation of Nigeria from an agrarian to an industrial
economy in the context of globalization.
And in answering that question,
there is a major assumption on the ground, epitomized by the Sule Lamidos that
although the President is from a family that is rooted in the old northern caliphate,
he shares leftist ideals bequeathed by Mallam Aminu Kano. There is a second assumption
popularized by people who schooled in the same university with the President to
the effect that Yar’Adua knows the direction in which the world is moving.
These claims add up to a thesis that the President appreciates what is
at the heart of the Nigerian project and has the intellectual, political and administrative
wherewithal to approach the task from an imaginative and systematic framework.
On
the basis of this and in addition to how Yar’Adua has progressed so far,
some people like Dr. Amadi think of him as a leftist and seek left validation
of Yar’Adua in the sense in which the Lamidos spoke of Yar’Adua as
a careful, mindful modernizer whose candour and ill-will to none makes him a rallying
point for the transition from primitivity to modernity. In other words, Amadi
and co are implying that any leader manifesting some of the traits that Yar’Adua
has manifested so far fits into a leftist bill in the context of the recent past
as well as the major issue of a leader who is not of a cloak and dagger disposition.
This
is a supportable position requiring no justification beyond the following random
listing of Yar’Adua’s last two months in power: reconciliation through
overtures to those critically wounded by the rampaging set that just exited from
power (victims of arbitrary and pre-emptive demolitions in Abuja, ex-PDP kingpins,
University of Ilorin academics, Lagos State, etc), reversal of sale of Kaduna
and PHC refineries, the suspension of pre-emptive retrenchment in the public service,
continuation of the anti-corruption war but not in the manner of hot pursuit of
selected enemies as before.
This list can go on but defining all of it
so far is a patriotic streak that has transformative potentials. In the present
context, there is nothing more leftist than reviewing economic policies along
nationalist lines. We are, therefore, talking of the left that accepts the primacy
of local capital in the politics of modernization and whose sense of accommodation
of local capital with foreign speculator/investors must be a matter of fair competition,
not dictation and subservience.
It is instructive that, at least and for
the first time in several years, we do not have a Finance Minister who has been
directly baked in the ideological ovens of the World Bank. Dr. Shamsudden must
have swallowed some of the technocratic fraud of the IMF/World Bank as Deputy-Governor
of the CBN but not so much as to be that willing and spineless tool for the continued
wholesale subjugation of our people to external economic interests.
If
like Lamido, I appear to have gone overboard in favour of the President, then
I have my hands on the ground to fellow compatriots. But even then, I would not
help going farther overboard if I see Yar’Adua seizing Ajaokuta in particular
from the current pretenders to its ownership. In fact, if that happens, I do not
see why General Buhari and even Atiku Abubakar should not take a political view
of their cases before the tribunal and instead, join hands with the President
towards a formidable patriotic re-alignment for the sake of Nigeria. After all,
the attraction of some of us to General Buhari is that he would certainly have
reviewed Obasanjo’s auction economics based on what he did in 1984 in response
to a critique of the report of Study Group on Privatization of State Owned Enterprises,
(SOEs), set up by the government then.
That critique was that "in
the absence of a twin proposal that the would-be beneficiaries of the "privatization"
of NET (as NITEL was then known) should also start a telephone company and build
their own earth stations, the extent to which "privatizing" NET would
defraud the Federal Government on a permanent, continuing basis, is too scandalous
and mind-boggling to be contemplated". The government then under him basically
accepted that selling NET would amount to "rewarding open theft". From
what has happened so far, President Yar’Adua is doing no less than Buhari
in this respect.
Abdulkadir Balarabe Musa has argued admirably that Yar’Adua’s
footwork is legitimacy buying tactics. But what if the legitimacy buying tactics
correspond with popular aspirations? Is it not such dialectical fusion of the
subjective and the objective that produces progress sometimes unintended by those
who may have been the protagonists? Methinks that the enlightened management of
capitalist modernization that Yar’Adua seems to be promising deserves the
support of all forces of economic nationalism.
Because that is where the
future of an African country like Nigeria lies, not in the speculative accumulation
model spearheaded by those Nuhu Ribadu once labelled as gangsters. This has been
further exposed by Jimoh Ibrahim’s confirmation of what all political economists
have been saying, that apart from the pioneers of the private sector in Nigeria,
the recent ones are nothing but pure speculators and buccaneer capitalists. The
implication is that we haven’t got the capitalists who have pondered over
a strategic question such as: which foreign investors took capital to China 20-25
years ago as for China to be where she is today?
•Onoja is
Special Adviser on Media Affairs to Gov. Lamido of Jigawa State. |
