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The Yar’adua Phenomenon

March 28, 2009

The helpless people of Nigeria are today under the sway of an unprecedented phenomenon called Yar’adua; A capitalist by any measure who is at present our country’s President. Having been bundled into the villa by Obasanjo and entrenched from an opaque Supreme Court judgment. Having launched a project to cleanse the process that brought him, Yar’adua seeks in the same instance the total subversion of Nigeria into a one party dictatorship. The result is the paradox of our times. We ‘got rid ‘of Obasanjo by having the worst. Transformation in stasis. Revolution without motion. Democracy without liberty; Excellencies without excellence; Distinguished without distinction; Honorables without honor. These are the true hallmarks of our contemporary politics. The president’s style is based on twin foundations. First he surrounds himself and places key posts in the hands of avaricious charlatans. Secondly, he employs all the power at his disposal in silencing the voice of enlightened criticism and emasculating media houses who dare subject his presidential adventure to scrutiny. In pursuing this line of action he was always bound someday to jump into a pool far beyond his depth. Unfortunately, the ingénues around him, instead of urging, like good advisers, restraint, tolerance and civility, cheer their boss into his waterloo. It is a classic comedy of the village headmaster in a village council.

  When Yar’adua was bulldozed into villa as the President of this country in 2007, despite all reservations on the process that    brought him, many regarded him as a promising young man. He was young, educated, suave and charming. Similarly, until recently many Nigerians ( that never knew ummaru from his Katsina days) from across the political spectrum referred to him as ‘Malam’ who has behind him a record that places him in the array of the great Malam Aminu Kano of the PRP. Behaving true to type, Ummaru has cleverly used every single occasion in Nigeria and abroad, to mobilize national and international figures to shower praises on him as the first Nigeria’s president from the left camp. Where the Malamship and the Comradeship goes when those Lebanese belly dancers perform at that ostentatious Yuguda’s wedding or the forbidden spree that came at a time the powerless poor Nigerians wallow in poverty is still muzzy, and yet to either be branded or re- branded by  Akunliyi or Adeniyi.    However, the stark state of our country today has turned everything told about the servant leader upside down. The departure of Obasanjo in 2007 is said to have removed his lieutenants in wrecking this country from power. But these people, most of them ex- governors, and PDP thugs were not removed, they were displaced. These mercenaries who constituted the governing section of the ruling class before May 2007 merely moved into other, sometime more powerful positions. Most of them are young people who would have become full term politicians, are now self appointed party elders, contractors, importers/ exporters, company directors and various species of middlemen.


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 The spectacular enrichment of this class and its proliferation went hand in hand with the enrichment of our security apparatus that is always handy for elections rigging. And they have now established a firm grip on the state. This corruption has now become the Achilles hill of Yar’adua’s regime, especially when the likes of Ibori and co, richer and more confident, realize that with Ya’aradua, the business is more than just usual. The purging of corrupt public officers and their investigation and publication of their activities by Ribadu have, perhaps more than anything conceived as the routine PDP carrot and stick exercise turned into a dramatic political expose of the totally illegal ways in which Yar’adua’s regime creates and recreates itself. And what Ribadu found, the Dogs would not it! The purges and the probes gained their significance not simply because of who was purged or probed. In that respect, many of the critical elements of the system of illegal financing of the Yar’adua project were not even touched. Their significance lay in the massive popular response they got and the way they heightened popular consciousness. The dislike for the purges and the probes even among the top members of this regime and the presidency itself is illustrative. This exercise is the unforgivable sin of Nuhu Ribadu in the eyes of this cartel and the presidency. All the massive media propaganda Adeniyi mounted over the years to sell him as the pious one, has now been shown to be hollow, baseless and without any foundation. And are reflections of the kind of government we now have.

 How has the journey been since the carnage of April 19th 2007? Is our situation better today than it was before Yar’adua? Have we learnt any lesson form our immediate past as a nation? How have we fared under the Ogunlafor’s led PDP? Politics involves the art of possibilities, and the science of civil government. Democracy, which is the backbone of politics, holds that a nation should be controlled by all the people, each sharing equally in privileges, duties and responsibilities. In a democracy, certain ideals come to the four freedom- to talk, think, express and associate freely whether in religion, politics or any form whatsoever, for as long as it does not run foul of the laws of the land as explicitly stated in the constitution which contains the fundamental laws and practices governing the operations of a nation. When democracy is therefore made to stand on its head and not its feet, what we have is a dictatorship. This is a phenomenon which may be described as the art of deluding or hoodwinking people into believing that they must be governed, no matter how immorally, fraudulently or incompetently, by rulers who are deficient in wisdom, ideas and sagacity; who captured power through manipulated elections, who exhibit extreme contempt for decency and the rule of law, who doesn’t give a damn even if Nigeria dies and who are not willing to make room for others to demonstrate that they can perform better. In other words, the Yar’adua phenomenon!

But the beauty of it all is that dictatorship in any form has been referred to as ‘power without responsibility’ and to which James Baldwin noted as the ‘historical and official privilege of prostitutes’ because the effectiveness only lasts for the governed, dictators by their very nature are vulnerable, because dictatorship is a confidence trick. Ummaru has come from seemingly nowhere, like an artless messiah, without an inkling of his calling or his destiny. He was marked by Obasanjo for things beyond Ummaru’s or anybody’s understanding, and if the sleaze pouring from the PDP is anything to go by, then his desire to stay foot in 2011, could be a record of his journey. We can only imagine how it begins, but we all know it begin with tricks. For any trick to be effective however, the perception or feelings of the people upon whom trick is played is important. If the people are gullible or credulous and are unable to detect such fraud when it is unleashed on them, then the trickster is assumed safe, albeit temporarily. However, once it is detected that the tricks or ‘cuku cuku’ are being played, the people perceive deception and betrayal and the trickster begins a certain trip on a road littered with Banana peels. During this diabolic trip, such a trickster glides, slips, where he should be in firm grip of his footing and unavoidably lands on even more slippery ground. From then onwards each step taken by the trickster becomes unsteady, more undecided and more uncertain than the previous ones. And a fall becomes inevitable. Such a fall may occur at anytime during this diabolic trip, and it may be soon as in Pakistan, where Musharraf’s ludicrous antics paved way for his eventual waterloo. Will the servant leader survive all these or be yet another buried statistics in an unraveled series of events into the dust bin of history?

Mukhtar Kabir Usman is a PhD fellow and wrote in from
University Islam Antrabangsa   Kuala Lumpur
Malaysia 

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