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The Death of a Nation

March 5, 2009

The debate over whether Nigeria is a failed state is over. Now we are learning that the consequences feed one another in accelerating spirals of destruction. The fear is that, we may be approaching the point of no return. By any measure, Nigeria is at the tipping point. Be worried. Be very worried. No one can exactly say what it looks like when a country takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Nigeria. Never mind what you have heard about failed states as a slow motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us. It certainly looked that way as the country is simply not working.

When a society is in a season like this, when political and economic tensions pervade, when the signals are so scaring that Yar’adua is determine to stay foot for the second term in 2011(which of course is predictable) despite debate over his health, when the PDP governors are raving for a showdown with the people of Nigeria in 20011 polls, a nation would normally take a recourse to the positive and timely intervention of statesmen around, who would deploy wisdom and maturity to ensure that the society is steered away from perdition. But unfortunately, what is being witnessed today is that those who we would expect to rally the nation away from this path are the real people driving Nigeria towards Golgotha. But even under this appalling situation that this administration has put this country, the state of our economy and Yar’adua’s quiescence has remained the greatest puzzle to every responsible and reasonable human being. Fresh from signing his oath of office as Nigeria’s president in 2007, Yar’adua promised to be a servant leader. Since then, to put it more charitably, the people of Nigeria have not seen much service or much leadership. The assertion that Yar’adua will not be going across the road to buy a stick of cigarette while Nigeria burns is debatable and left to our guesses. Whatever his believers will tell us is whether the seven point agenda they kept blowing into the ears of those who care to listen is a reality or ruse. We leave that aside for another day. But his success or failure in the crucial power sector could best be understood when we take into cognizance his resolve to settle for generators as a means of powering government offices.


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While Yar’adua and his predecessors are regular out patients at Uniklinik, Wiesbaden Germany even at an instance of common cold, In Malaysia, the former Prime Minister Mahathir has had three heart bypass surgery in a facility he built seventeen years ago while he was in power! And this centre is accessible to all Malaysians at a registration fee of an equivalent of 300 Nigerian Naira. The disastrous state of our health sector and this Malaysian example however, is a strong pointer to the danger ahead. Perhaps, the quite man from Katsina may yet grow into the role, but while we want to see if such expectations would be borne out, the discourse about national priorities cannot subside. The president’s musketeers have striven to assure the nation that what we the unbelievers perceive as inaction as an uncertain touch is just a different style of leadership. For the sake of the country, I can only pray they are right in the passion befitting a people, as trusting as Nigerians are, not much skepticism attended the servant- leadership proclamation.

But the record of the first two years in office is compelling an examination of precisely what kind of servant or whose servant, and whose leader the president wishes to be. For a servant may be unworthy, just as a leader could be bad, and the reverse is equally possible. And one of these is equally possible. And none of these is attained by mere assertion. For a man who was a near recluse as governor, the public persona of Yar’adua still remains blurred which may take a thousand Adeniyis and Akunliyis to launder, almost like those of the military boys who imposed themselves on the nation literally from shadows. It is not his fault that he was vaulted into this highest office in the land despite having no national profile. But it is difficult for a sitting president to remain anonymous, no matter how hard he tries. A profile of the president’s style is now a reality that even sky scrapers cannot hide, and it is not pretty, Yar’adua is emerging as a ruthless, closet hawk that takes delight in operating behind the scenes and getting the Iboris and Yayales to do his behest. The hash made of weakening the EFCC is the clearest instance of this. It was obvious Michael Aondoaka was not acting alone when he made his move against the anti-graft agency. When the government finally resolved to see the rear light of Nuhu Ribadu, the president refused to exercise his powers to simply remove him and ask him to go home. Rather, we witnessed the subterfuge of getting the obliging Mike Okiro to wield the axe. In the rush to assure the crooks in the EFCC books that they are now immune against Ribadu, Yar’adua happily suspended fidelity to his own rule of law mantra, as he proceeded to trample upon and violate relevant portions of the EFCC Act governing the tenure of the chairman and the prescribed training courses for the EFCC personnel. Reacting to the public outrage that greeted the Ribadu-Must-Go-to Kuru fiasco, presidential spokesman Adeniyi dismissed it as a blackmail and media intimidation. The disdain for the public extends to the impropriety of suspects in grafts trials nipping over from the court room to be received as a valued guest of the president cultivated as he sought to ‘win’ 2007 elections (?), but that should not justify building a coalition around these crooks, or seeming to tilt to their whims. The president has a choice about whom to serve and whom to lead. A government can change its mind, but when this is done without rigorous considerations of the legal and policy implications, it begins to suggest incompetence. It can only be hoped that this regime would be more coherent than now. Even with the Ribadu case, claim being peddled is that the media made possible for the president to reverse course after he discovered that he had been blindsided into approving Ribadu’s nomination for Kuru. In their usual haste to blame the media, those who made this claim calls to question the president’s judgment. Should not the duty of care be diligently discharged before approving the recommendations? And when did it become the responsibility of the media to either praise a wrong decision or sympathize with a misled leader? In the economic sector, it is same disastrous IMF/World Bank Soludonomics that is threatening to plunge our naira towards the Zimbabwean Dollar. The commitment to privatization is suspect, as rising oil prices boost public coffers, the fiscal measures the president is trying to imbibe in terms of wage cuts and the disturbing value of our Naira cannot be reconcile, while the power projects initiated by Obasanjo have been used as an excuse to continue to live in darkness.

As Zimbabwe has tragically demonstrated, national economy is much more serious than playing the roulette with it. It goes beyond the likes of Tanimu Kurfi making insulting statements on state of our economy while poverty, disease and want thrive and dwell in the land. Nigerians may not know Ummaru well yet, but there is no confusion about their desire for service. It is time for some substance to show beneath the president’s style. A government cannot be propelled perpetually solely on the claim that it differs from its predecessors. Not being the devil is not sufficient to elevate anybody to the level of Angels. I think we are paying the price of our docility. People who forced themselves on us through the manipulation of the electoral process are free to take us for a ride as long as we resolve to heed to the calls of the self acclaimed statesmen to submit and accept the filth they call elections for ‘PEACE AND STABILITY’. The repercussion of our docility is having non dreamers as president and the vice president of our country. Nigerians should by now be wary of unwilling presidents, who by the time they wake up, time is up and they will start looking for ‘more time’. The headache is much and may keep relapsing as long as we do not drop that apathy that caused the tragedy of April 19th 2007.

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We should be determined to stem that PDP tide that caused so much pain and penury to the nation in the last ten years of PDP regime. The West African sub-region should be a somber reflection. As is quite clear now, and has been dramatically illustrated in the stealing at NERC and their laughable seven point agenda with more than a thousand committees and the exposure of thieves from within the heart of the administration, all the policies have not succeeded. The momentum for constitutional amendment faith is being lost, and that is generated by the bitter memories of the evil third term perpetuated and hatched by Yar’adua’s ‘leader’ .

The regime goes on contradicting itself, repeating itself for constitutional faith and upholding democratic values at a time Iwu and Uwais are still calling the shots, with the weight of platitudes, retreats, festivities, marriages, inter marriages and other forms of public display and ostentation, are attempting to conceal the critical impasse over the question of reforming the country’s electoral system with Iwu as chairman and conversion of Nigeria into a one party state by intimidation and other forms of coercion. Dramatic manifestations of this impasse as has happened over Ribadu and the harboring of some corrupt officials and some friends of the regime are attributable to sometimes to an inherent perversity in the character of the Nigerian people. These are often countered by assertion that the root of the problem is the present regime that lack commitment, vision, and skill and are generally incompetent and/ or the absence of a genuine democratic belief. These guys will do everything to make sure they hold us at ransom for in Ogulafor’s words ‘fifty years’. The choice is left to Nigerians to decide if to lay fallow and allow their destinies to be manipulated by these desperate people. This we can do only if we can stand firmly and talk to these charlatans straight on the face and reject their plans to ruin the nation through compulsion and impunity. The dangerous signals are already beaming, for even the blind to see. By expecting a messiah in Yar’adua who emerged from the same stinking and hazy political process he is now pledging to reform and surrounded by these menacing characters whose occupation is to eulogize the incumbent and vilify the former, we are looking for a salvation from a wrong source.

And it is this ill messianic illusions promoted by these wangled charlatans that breeds tyranny and despotism in the theatres of governance. It is only those that forget why, when, how and where the whole Yar’adua project started that will quiver at this dramatic descent to infamous political tragedy that awaits the nation. Already blackmail and intimidation has taken a center- stage. Whoever doubts this subversive initiative for dictatorial innovation is unconsciously succumbing to great shallowness and an errant superficiality.

 MUKHTAR KABIR USMAN Is a PhD fellow and wrote in from UNIVERSITI ANTRABAGSA ISLAM, KUALA LUMPUR MALAYSIA


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