By now, you have heard the ageing joke about how some Nigerians order their food these days in local restaurants. They ask for fish or meat in their stew, “and Yar’Adua.” That means he wants snails.It is a play on the fact that in his first year, Nigeria’s leader was so sluggish in his role he was referred to as “Baba Go-Slow,” or snail-slow.
Actually, he was doing nothing, but his public relations people preferred the “Go-Slow” tag to the truth. It was better than admitting that although their principal had bragged he would be a servant-leader, he could not lead a group of market women to the market.
They wanted us to know that the great changes Yar’Adua promised at his inauguration, beginning with making right the terrible rigging that permitted him to assume the presidency without winning the election, were still on the way.
Nothing ever really happened. The man never seized the presidency by the scruff in the service of his nation, never roared in anger, never rose to his full height. Instead, Yar’Adua reduced Nigeria to the levels of his personal absence of ambition and energy and health.
Today, our so-called leader fights. But he fights for life, not for Nigeria, and Nigerians do not even know where he does his fighting. The suspicion is that he is abroad. But there has been so much misdirection in his government that it will be no surprise to find he never left Aso Rock in the first place.
Up until last week, nobody that had actually seen him had spoken on the record, and with any authority. Ministers lied early and often alongside political party stage-hands. Theirs was the misguided hope that all they had to do was hold out for a few days until their boss showed up in Abuja with sufficient strength to be patched up for a few minutes worth of public viewing.
Not this time, and it is now six weeks since he was removed from Nigeria on the verge of death. All that Nigerians know is that he was allegedly being flown to Saudi Arabia, again, with no new university to be deployed in alibi. Ironically, Saudi Arabia is the last country that Yar’Adua ever said he was showing up in public to do something to benefit the people. That was in September 2009, when he claimed he was attending the commissioning of a university. He saw no irony in his own nation’s universities being shut down at that time.
Actually, he was visiting his doctors or seers at the time. Yar’Adua had always lied to himself that his health problems were his personal problems.
In December 2009, those health problems were not only demonstrably critical, they became an easier way to see Nigeria for all its warts and demons. We found out Yar’Adua was never really in charge and was never really needed. He was not the puppeteer; he was the puppet.
Given that Yar’Adua had never followed the provisions of our constitution whenever poor health took him out of the country, his current absence is far less a question of sickness than it is abdication of duty. He is merely Absent Without Leave, a ploy he had used to his own benefit several times in the past. He should not flout the constitution and be given the benefit of the doubt for it.
This is why there is no longer a middle road about Yar’Adua: in health, he had no respect; in less-than-health, he has attracted only the manipulation of those close to him and the aggravation of those he is manipulating.
This is why, instead of being an object of sympathy, Yar’Adua is the target of derision; instead of being an object of inspiration, Yar’Adua is the subject of mistrust; instead of being a beacon of hope, Yar’Adua has become the symbol of despair. Nothing has drained Nigeria of as much momentum and movement since the other coward who annulled the 1992 election.
But it is moments like this that make history, because it is in moments such as this that masquerades are unmasked in the public square.
In my book, it is no coincidence that Yar’Adua vanished into the cave, and we could see other things more clearly. Take the Federal Executive Council, for instance. Now we know the sad admixture of con-men and yes-women of which it is made. Their loyalty is to their official cheque books, not their nation.
Take Olusegun Obasanjo, who should be hiding his face from the world for his role in all of this. He has had two chances to re-direct our country, but has only proved to be loyal to himself. Is it merely coincidence that despite his serial betrayal of Nigeria, he was hired by the United Nations to “save” another country?
Take Ibrahim Babangida. It is during this mess that he was seen crying for the cameras in public, allegedly for Maryam, his wife who died of cancer. It was not clear to me why we should have been interested in IBB’s tears; he showed no mercy on his country or its peoples when he was wrecking hopes and lives. And I am sure he did not see any Nigerians in the American hospital where his wife spent weeks before she passed on, as he would had the hospital been in Minna, or Abuja, or Enugu. Nigerians are dying in their homes because they cannot afford to go to a hospital.
Maryam Babangida? Exactly what did she contribute to moving Nigeria forward, the Better Life roadshow? While she built a school for her own enrichment, she did not build a hospital that would benefit the people, let alone one in which she could receive treatment. There was nothing in her lifestyle that suggested she identified with the ordinary Nigerian.
Take James Ibori. During Yar’Adua’s disappearance, and to his great joy for sure, the former governor of Delta State had 170 corruption charges against him dismissed. The melodrama was so anticlimactic that the University of Benin scheduled him to give a “Founders’ Day” address on the afternoon of the judgment. There was never a question as to what “judgment” would be given.
Take Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the Christmas-day airline bomber who had reached the conclusion, at 23, that living in opulence and attending some of the world’s best schools was such a sad way to live he would rather die by blowing up an aircraft with nearly 300 people in it.
No, Yar’Adua did not cause Abdulmuttalab. What Yar’Adua has done is remind us that while the world now seeks to understand Nigeria through that Abdulmassmurder, they will never get to see millions of its honest, talented and hardworking. Unfettering Nigerians so they can give their best is not the objective of our nation’s leaders.
Mercifully, there is a contrary reality. During Yar’Adua’s abdication of duty, Nigerian institutions and groups consistently chose Governor Babatunde Fashola of Lagos State as Nigerian of the Year, in appreciation of his before-our-very-eyes legacy of true public service.
It is no surprise that Lagos is not a People’s Democratic Party (PDP) State. It is the anti-PDP, the proof that government can work. It is the proof that there are really no excuses for the monumental collapse that is Yar’Adua’s government, which died long before Yar’Adua conveniently disappeared.
Lagos is proof that we do not have a democracy. What we are lumbered with, and suffering from, is government of the PDP, by the PDP, for the PDP. It cannot yield service, nurture probity, or engineer development. There is no better demonstration of this truth than the mess we are currently witnessing.
Left to me, the president should be impeached. Yar’Adua can remain sick while we rescue the presidency. But we are talking about the PDP, where the standard is to substitute what is convenient for what is right, excuses for action, and prayers for medicine.
But even for a shark-pool such as the PDP, we are clearly coming to the end of this terror on our commonwealth. Yar’Adua is no longer just a metaphor and a warning; he is now the final watershed. Our crisis is attributable not to an absence of rules or their inadequacy, but the refusal of Nigeria’s leaders to play by them.
Nigerians must shed their cowardice and irrelevant little cocoons and seize the moment to confront this menace. What divides and separates us from progress is neither ethnicity nor region, but the greed and irresponsibility that defines power as self or party, rather than nation. There is no hiding room now, and there will be even less in the future.
A snail on the menu is not an option. There may be no restaurant at all.
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