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A new kabiyesi, the same old tunes by a kowtowing civil society

March 23, 2010

For those who had hoped that the disastrous tyranny of the ancien régime which officially ended about three years ago would be a useful cautionary tale for the people, the acting presidency of Goodluck Jonathan, an Obasanjo lackey, is painfully proving that much of the nation’s civil society is still encumbered by debilitating reflexes.

For those who had hoped that the disastrous tyranny of the ancien régime which officially ended about three years ago would be a useful cautionary tale for the people, the acting presidency of Goodluck Jonathan, an Obasanjo lackey, is painfully proving that much of the nation’s civil society is still encumbered by debilitating reflexes.
This is the case with especially its media and organized pro-democracy components. A strategic segment of the national media used to be referred to disdainfully as ‘kabiyesi press’ on account of its kowtowing and complacent relationship with the  regime of Nigeria’s imperial ruler, Olusegun Obasanjo, whose  misgovernance lasted for eight wasted years, from 1999 to May 29, 2007.

Faced with the challenges of President Yar’Adua’s health-related difficulties, reactions by the pro-democracy establishment and key sections of the local media have tended to show a worrisome levity bordering on the crudely partisan and mischievous. A leitmotiv one encounters almost daily is that  Goodluck Jonathan is the ‘man of the moment’, a  figure imbued with a mission and  a ‘mandate’ to positively  transform our miserable lives during an interregnum that is nevertheless haunted by stultifying contradictions and inconsistencies. The new Kabiyesi is expected to be the shining star in a polity peopled by dim-wits, cantankerous, self-absorbed and profligate soi-disant leaders and cowardly, sedate souls whose short attention span has been a critical factor in the continued debasement of the citizenry.  Nudged on by often shrill, intemperate and castigatory whining directed against the favorite punching bags of our current dispensation, – ailing President Yar’Adua, his wife, Turai, and a mythical cabal - , Jonathan was told to ‘assert’ himself by firing those ministers that were said to be close to Yar’Adua. Worse, in a classic case of a storm in a tea cup, any government agents extending courtesies to the substantive president are virulently vilified and their professional gestures passed off as acts of insubordination ( to Jonathan ) and  therefore  treason  as exemplified by the pointless brouhaha around the intelligence and security cover provided by the relevant bodies on the occasion of the president’s return to the country. That’s how bad and unedifying the grossly partisan pro-Jonathan discourse has been.

 That Jonathan represents a semblance of hope for the kind of transformational change the citizenry has been yearning for must be dismissed as a creation of the fertile, if misguided imagination of sections of the national media and the self-acclaimed pro-democracy outfits which have been echoing the questionable rhetoric of the Obasanjo/Jonathan tag team. With Acting President Jonathan, a consummate election rigger in the Obasanjo and Yar’Adua hue, what the country has right now is akin to the realization of the third term scheme as envisaged by the ex-dictator.

Since the illegal National Assembly resolutions of February 9 declaring Jonathan acting president ( an action which, although hailed by much of the national media as judicious,  was unnecessary in the light of the Justice Abutu ruling which indicated that the vice-president could exercise executive powers on behalf of the ailing president ) , the country has witnessed a series of desperate and self-serving gestures by a conniving individual whose lust for power seems orchestrated to replicate a familiar pattern under the régime of his mentor and godfather. It requires reiterating that Obasanjo's reign of terror and “neo-liberal”kleptocracy wore a hypocritical "born-again" façade that was uncritically presented by a complacent press as reformative governance. To our utter dismay, the same press is today mired again  in its parochial preferences. Deeply-engrained prejudices are held out as the absolute truth. There seems to be little room for nuance – an inconvenience that threatens truculent and simplistic certainties. Running parallel to the near-deification of Jonathan by the Lagos-Ibadan axis of the national press in particular  is the portrayal of Turai Yar’Adua as the ultimate villain in the unfolding struggle for power at Aso Rock. The pillorying  of Turai Yar’Adua has gained such dubious  currency that very few voices have dared question its Manichean religiosity.  What one is faced with  invariably is  the kind of hysterical regimentation that undermines the very basis of liberal democracy. While the media and the civil society in general denounce the antics of a  cabal that is supposedly  holding the nation to ransom, they seem to conveniently ignore that the very individuals who are busy grandstanding on this cabal issue are themselves part and parcel of the ‘cabalistic’ warfare now raging within the PDP.

We should move beyond knee-jerk reactions by observing that perhaps a more pernicious threat confronting us as a nation is the fact that under a Jonathan 'acting presidency', what we are witnessing is a return to reckoning of perhaps the most depraved and anti-people influences in our collective history. Trying to make Turai Yar'Adua as the scapegoat of our ills today should be seen as counter-productive.

Judging from the above remarks, it is obvious that the largely contrived hysteria of the past few months has thrown up what is increasingly looking like the Jonathan/Obasanjo hegemony - a tragedy in the making whose early manifestations are being ignored by a largely genuflecting media that is more interested in the peddling of myths and partisan propaganda. That seems to be the case also regarding yet another desperate and self-serving move on the part of the acting president, namely, his nomination of retired Lt. General A. Gusau as national security adviser (NSA) to replace retired General A. S. Mukhtar, an appointee of President Yar’Adua.

Gusau’s appointment is another spiteful gesture that is bound to produce no positive results for the average Nigerian. It is a pity that some newspapers like Abuja’s Leadership have welcomed it as a “wise” decision. It its ‘front page comment’ of Wednesday, March 9, 2010, the paper advocates, perhaps inadvertently, what is tantamount to an escalation of the war of attrition taking place between the two main factions of the PDP by apparently taking sides with the Obasanjo/Jonathan faction.

Aliyu Gusau is a recycled item from the Babangida and Obasanjo tyrannies, respectively. His nomination as replacement for Muktar is yet another indication that Jonathan has neither the alertness of mind nor the will required to move the country forward. Jonathan and his ally, the former despot from Ota, have sadly opted for the kind of partisan scheming for political advantage which has been the bane of governance in Nigeria.

After recycling other ‘atavisms’ in the form of Lt. Gen. Danjuma (Rtd), Anyaoku and M.D. Yusuf by placing them in his so-called Advisory Council, the Obasanjo protégé has harked back to the past once more to retrieve from the dustbin of our recent history a character known more for his subterranean scheming than for any meritorious service to the nation. What a shame! Gusau was NSA during the previous Obasanjo misrule when the nation witnessed its worst inter-ethnic upheavals, not to mention a most dreadful security situation across the land. High profile political assassinations were the order of the day when Gusau held sway as security guru of sorts. Some of the grim examples include the brutal murders of the former Attorney General and minister of Justice, Bola Ige, and Marshal Harry, an ANPP kingpin from the South-South zone. It was also during Gusau’s tenure that some of the worst constitutional and security-related transgressions in the country’s history enabled the ruling PDP – his party – to brazenly rig elections as was the case in the ‘419’ polls of 2003. Still under Gusau’s watch, the former head of the EFCC, Nuhu Ribadu, another Obasanjo appointee, recklessly and with impunity, deployed the security apparatus at his disposal to illegally overthrow state governors and intimidate his political master’s enemies, real or imagined. The negative impact on the Nigerian democratic project of the abdication by Gusau and his former boss cannot be overemphasized.
 
It is apparent that the excavation of Gusau has everything to do with the intra-party warfare now taking place within the PDP and little or nothing to do with helping provide a more secure environment for the citizenry in general. But Jonathan is making the mistake that other opportunistic pols before him have made, namely, his preference for short-sighted and self-serving antics. Moreover, time is not on his side. The more he and his gang become desperate, scheme and basically engage in all manner of skulduggery, the more their failings become obvious . There are worrisome reports in the local media that Jonathan and his political godfather are contemplating yet another trip to Nigeria's garbage bin of history by bringing into government other Obasanjo acolytes like el-Rufai and the former tyrant's attack dog par excellence, Nuhu Ribadu, all that, as part of their lust for power for power's sake.

Jonathan is condemned to move in circles, what with his penchant for recycling old and discredited rags.

Instead of the troubling acquiescence that has apparently greeted the reports in the media intimating us of the acting president’s intention to appoint Mrs. Akunyili as the next chairperson of the country’s electoral commission, INEC, the  nation’s voices of conscience and the opposition in general should consider such an appointment ill-advised, to say the least. Her status as a card-carrying and rabidly partisan member of the governing PDP, not to mention her despicable role in the allegedly rigged re-run governorship election in Ekiti last year, has made Akunyili the last person any serious government should think of as an electoral umpire. At any rate, we should not be replacing the notorious Iwu with a fanatical apparatchik who has demonstrated amply of late that her allegiance is primarily to her party’s new oligarchs and only minimally, if at all, to the country. The strategic INEC chairmanship position should not be seen as Jonathan’s gift to a loyal acolyte. Nigeria needs an INEC chairperson that will not be tied down by partisan and other nebulous allegiances. Clearly, Akunyili is not such a person.

The country and its people should be worried that what is deceptively being presented by complacent and kowtowing sections of the media as signalling hope for transformational change is revealing its true identity as a revanchist enterprise on the part of an assortment of carpet baggers, tired and rapacious tin gods, rent-seeking parvenus, turncoats, wayward irredentists and their confederates.

As I keep repeating, critical segments of our civil society have sadly become obsessed with the PDP’s intra-party squabbles to the point of taking sides as has been the case with Wole Soyinka’s Save Nigeria Group ( SNG ). By so doing, our self-styled pro-democracy advocates have consciously or unconsciously contributed to the untenable PDP-dominated status quo. Stuck in the miasma of its contradictions and partisan proclivities, the nation’s pro-democracy orthodoxy should do us all a favour by extricating itself from its inconsistencies and wayward fantasies. Nigeria’s democrats should concentrate more on the development of viable structures that would throw up credible electoral alternatives. Significantly therefore, Balarabe Musa should immediately disband his CNPP pulpit – an increasingly worthless outfit known more as a vehicle for the distilling of ineffectual press releases than as a viable agent for democratic change. Musa and other opposition figures ought to spend more time on rebuilding their parties ahead of the next elections. With the likes of Aliyu Gusau, Danjuma, Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, Jonathan and the entire PDP confederacy, the talk of free and fair elections in 2011 must be received with extreme caution. 

Aonduna Tondu ( [email protected] ).

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