If Umar Yar’Adua, the current occupant of Nigeria’s
First Address, has permitted us any glimpse into his
political soul, it is to reveal his paradoxical
quality. Last week, Yar’Adua publicly declared his
assets, telling Nigerians that he’s worth 850 million
naira. It was an unprecedented move—no Nigerian public
official at his level had ever made such disclosure.
The move became a masterstroke; it garnered
commendation from various sectors of Nigerian life.
Make no mistake: the man deserves to be garlanded. He
has acted with an openness and forthrightness sorely
lacking in fellow politicians.
Still, in extolling the man’s gesture, we run a grave
risk. In the rush to gush praise for Yar’Adua, many
appeared to ignore certain disturbing questions in the
man’s ledger of assets and liabilities. There is, for
one, the issue of an apparent gap in what Yar’Adua the
presidential candidate told reporters (which, if I
remember correctly, was that he was worth no more than
500 million naira) and what Yar’Adua now says he owns.
That gap needs to be explained.
Besides, why was nobody worried by the fact that
Yar’Adua counted campaign donations—of cash as well as
vehicles—as personal assets? Were those donations made
to him in a personal capacity? If so, then the gifts
amount to bribery. If they were made to his campaign
office, then the funds and vehicles, properly
speaking, ought not to find their way into Yar’Adua’s
asset declaration. They don’t belong to him but to his
campaign organization or his party. Another option is
to refund the unspent funds (and return the vehicles)
to the donors.
There are even trickier questions. One has to do with
how a man who spent most of his life as a lecturer was
able to accrue assets that are just shy of a billion
naira. True, the man comes from a privileged family.
Yes, he could well have made wise investments, but
still…
My point, simply, is that there is still an awful lot
that is still obscured in his asset declaration. The
document tells us how much the man owns, but shies
away from explaining whence the money and assets came.
It hardly amounts to a clear, seamless narrative.
This is more than a quibble. It would be relatively
easy, in the end, for public officials to publicly
declare their assets. A more rigorous standard is to
require them to offer a broad narrative of their asset
history over time.
At any rate, Yar’Adua’s gesture has beamed the light
on the scandal that passes for asset declarations in
Nigeria. The law merely requires that certain
categories of public officials make confidential
disclosures to the Code of Conduct Bureau. The idea of
confidentiality renders the entire process suspect.
The air of secrecy impedes, rather than facilitates,
transparency. It serves to mask the ruling elite’s
predatory activities.
While laudable, Yar’Adua’s personal example hardly
goes far enough. He has the power to compel his
ministerial nominees to follow suit by offering open
disclosures of their assets. He should also lean on
the National Assembly to change the law in order to
make public declarations mandatory. The current custom
of withholding asset declarations from the public is
outmoded and counterproductive. Any well-meaning
Nigerian willing to step into the arena of public
service ought to embrace the ethic of public
disclosure. They should, at minimum, be open to
scrutiny.
The Yar’Adua paradox is evident in other ways as well.
In one breath, he attracts public applause by inviting
Nigerians to glean his assets. In another, he earns
public discredit by consenting to play willing
conspirator in former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s
latest cloak and dagger move. By playing saint one
day, devil the next, Yar’Adua has deepened the
widespread perception that his chief mandate is to
perpetuate Obasanjo’s anti-human policies.
Last week, Yar’Adua played the part with ignoble
perfection. He let himself be dragged out to a hotel
room where Obasanjo hatched and executed an illegal
take-over of the ruling party’s Board of Trustees.
Yar’Adua’s presence at the “crime” scene lent
legitimacy to Obasanjo’s illicit but altogether
characteristic maneuver. It also exposed Yar’Adua as a
man with little mind of his own. Nigerians can’t
afford to permit such a man to run, and ruin, their
lives for four years.
Many Nigerians must hope Yar’Adua is not hard of
hearing. The cry in Nigeria is for Obasanjo’s regime
to be probed. Nigerians want the whole truth about how
oil blocks were handed out to the ex-president’s
cronies. They want a thorough audit of the books of
the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. They
demand a cancellation of the fire brigade sale of the
nation’s refineries to business associates of the
former president. They want an inquiry into the
assassination of Bola Ige, Harry Marshall, A.K. Dikibo
and several other political figures during Obasanjo’s
watch. They want to know who empowered thugs to
overrun Ibadan and to cause mayhem in Anambra. They
want the senseless slaughters in Odi and Zaki Biam
investigated.
Deaf to the popular sentiment in Nigeria that wants
Obasanjo consigned to his farm (or worse), Yar’Adua
has stepped out to consort with the nation’s public
enemy number one. If there was a public relations
disaster for the record books, this was it. Yar’Adua,
who already labors under the burden of illegitimacy,
exhibited poor political instincts when he chose to
advance Obasanjo’s inordinate political ambitions. A
friend sent me a doleful e-mail. “Obasanjo’s third
term has just begun,” he wrote.
In keeping Obasanjo’s perfidious company, Yar’Adua
appears curiously intent to authenticate Nigerians’
suspicion that he was smuggled into the presidency to
act as stooge. His “presidency,” by the evidence of
his own act, seems marked by surrogacy. By helping the
former president to hijack the reins of the ruling
party, Yar’Adua has accentuated his own political
deficits.
Which brings one to Yar’Adua’s fervent political
enterprise: the selling of “unity government” as the
fix for the crisis of illegitimacy in which his
government is trapped. Let’s be clear: a unity
government as conceived by Yar’Adua cannot address the
nation’s political malaise. Far from acting as a
credible instrument of remediation, Yar’Adua’s
usurpation of the presidency means he is part of the
problem. As a usurper, he is encumbered by a lack of
legitimacy. In that spirit, he lacks the
constitutional wherewithal to initiate a unity
government. Such a government is deeply pernicious,
for its objective is to consolidate an illegality: the
widespread disenfranchisement of Nigerians.
It is hardly surprising that some opposition parties
are in thrall to the idea of unity government. They
are, after all, factions of the usurping class, a
collection of men and women who operate in an ethical
vacuum and whose only principle is greed. These men
(and a smattering of women) are wedded to the notion
that Nigeria is theirs to gorge on. That explains
their desperation to grasp some quota of ministerial
and other political appointments.
“Unity government” is an invitation to the nation’s
rapacious elite to congregate around the idea of
collective sharing the spoils. It is a seductive idea
for career politicians whose lone means of livelihood
is lucre, but it represents a toxic prospect for other
Nigerians. Predictably, the sponsors of this facile
idea have taken to intoning the mantra of “moving the
nation forward.” The falsity of this creed is
self-evident. Nothing founded on impunity and crime
can move forward. And the April election was a
carefully conceived, coldly executed crime against the
sovereign will of Nigerians.
The right response to that crime—the proper way to
move the nation forward—is for all sectors of society
to repudiate the electoral heist, to expunge it from
the national data. The courts and tribunals should
have the courage to lead in this process. Nigerians
should encourage members of the bench to do the right
thing, to uphold the integrity of the constitution and
the sovereignty of the people. The judiciary ought to
see to it that the impositions that passed for
elections at all levels are squelched.
One has nothing against Yar’Adua. In fact, I suspect
that, if armed with a legitimate mandate, he may prove
an astute president. He may be an angel for all we
know, but the forces that imposed him on Nigeria are
determined to, and will, stifle his angelic
intentions. Witness the alacrity with which Yar’Adua
left off other engagements and hastened to Nicon Hotel
at Obasanjo’s bequest to enable the old fox to
consummate his seizure of party power. Witness
Yar’Adua’s inability to reject Obasanjo’s cruel and
senseless imposition of higher fuel prices on the eve
of his departure from power. Witness Yar’Adua’s
spinelessness to probe, or cancel, the questionable
sale of the nation’s refineries to friends of
Obasanjo.
One must hope that Yar’Adua, deep down, is a patriot.
If so, he must know that Nigerians deserve a
legitimate government, not a confected and bastard
mutant called “unity government.” If he means well,
let him rally the political parties not to consolidate
an illegality in the name of a unity of thieves but to
agree on constituting a high-powered, independent
panel to investigate the sham elections. It would fall
to the investigation panel to recommend how to conduct
credible elections run by trustworthy umpires, not a
shameless academic who defends fraud. This is the road
to be taken should Yar’Adua aspire to be a patriot and
hero. If he wants to cling on to illegitimate power,
then stay the odious course of “unity government.”
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