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The Year 2011: Yar’adua For Second Term

May 2, 2010

The campaign for the Presidential election of 2011 has started in earnest and I am proposing that Yar’Adua should consider re-contesting for second term in office. Did I hear you say ‘what a crude joke’? If you consider this  a joke, what then would you call the heavy media onslaught being unleashed on us daily by a group that go by the funny name “friends of Yar’Adua”? By the way, the group as with most funny groups in Nigeria is faceless.

The campaign for the Presidential election of 2011 has started in earnest and I am proposing that Yar’Adua should consider re-contesting for second term in office. Did I hear you say ‘what a crude joke’? If you consider this  a joke, what then would you call the heavy media onslaught being unleashed on us daily by a group that go by the funny name “friends of Yar’Adua”? By the way, the group as with most funny groups in Nigeria is faceless.
The undiscerning will be tempted to regard them highly as true friends who will do anything to stand by their friend through rain and sunshine. But nothing could be farther from the truth. With friends like “friends of Yar’Adua”, no one needs an enemy. These are a bunch of desperados who decided to treat with the highest scant, an otherwise sober outcome {illness} that no one, no matter how powerful is immune to. In truth, they represent the new face of wicked enemies.

One cannot say for sure whose idea it was to politicize the illness of Yar’Adua to this disgraceful proportion. Most of the blame has been placed at Turai’s doorstep. While she deserves it, the cacophony of voices that have joined to say the presidential umbilical cord should continue to be tied around Yar’Adua’s waist has created fresh doubts in the minds of most Nigerians. The case of Turai insistence to hang on at all cost could easily be explained. Here is a woman that is highly sedated in the concussion of lies prepared by jobless marabouts and fortunetellers. As first lady of the sleepy state of katsina state, she was confronted with the early signs of this same health challenges that has kept Yar’Adua out of circulation for nearly six months now. The marabouts were reported to have advised that Yar’Adua would come out of the illness smelling better than when he went under the surgeons knives’. That he would not only complete his term but will also move ahead to rule Nigeria. He reportedly stayed away from office for six good months and it came to pass that he did not only complete his term but also became President against all odds in accordance with the earlier predictions of the powerful marabouts. With such mindset and emerging from that experience successfully, it is easy to see why Turai has abandoned all reasons and turned our own equivalent of white house into one hell of a theatre for comedians and the husband the object of ridicule. What a pity!

From the beginning, Yar’Adua set up himself to be ridiculed. He was not upfront with us about his true health status. What was reported as catarrh during the 2006/07 electioneering campaign turned out to be kidney, liver and heart diseases summed up as pericarditis? What most Nigerians and other observers have consistently failed to understand is why the so-called friends of Yar’Adua and some hitherto respected elders from the North have not deemed it necessary to ask Yar’Adua to take the only available window of respectability-resignation. The poor handling of the Yar’Adua illness eroded all sympathies that could have accrued naturally to him and perhaps to the North in considering and upholding the so-called un-imaginative power rotation among PDP members. However, Obasanjo a major player in the power equation in the PDP politics of rotation has distanced himself from such arrangement and has challenged anybody that has a document to that effect to make it public. Talk of agreement and honour among a band of robbers. The general feeling and position of most Nigerians is that whatever it was that might have been agreed by PDP members should not sum up the feelings and aspirations of majority of Nigerians and therefore amounts to a dream. Any agreement that is not incorporated in the constitution of Nigeria being smuggled for use in determining the who becomes the President of Nigeria in the next dispensation will amount to monumental injustice to the greatest number of Nigerians who were neither party to nor consulted before arriving at such private arrangement. If that is what Obasanjo meant in his VOA interview, for once, he is perfectly in order. It was the same people shouting ‘it is the turn of the North to complete its remaining four years from 2011’ that also opposed vehemently the proposed six-zonal presidential rotation Dr Alex Ekwueme suggested during the 1995 Abacha organized constitutional conference that essentially delivered the 1999 constitution. Since they were so short sighted to see what Ekwueme was saying then and support it, they should just shut up and apologize to the rest of us because nothing has changed drastically since then to alter their position.

 The question of Yar’Adua’s continues abode in Aso Rock has become pertinent and pitiable. Whatever purpose it was meant to serve has since been overtaken by events except the clerics are still spinning their divination stones and promising life after death. Let us assume that Yar’Adua gets well tomorrow and I sincerely pray he does, will that automatically make him start from where he stopped? Couldn’t these fellows see that too much water has already passed under the bridge since that decision to smuggle Yar’Adua back under the cover of the night?  Nigerians have moved on, any reference to Ya’Adua now appears to be a distraction, and that’s the unfortunate part. It has gotten to a point where people genuinely believe he should not recover because of the abuse his family and so-called friends have subjected him and the childish psychological torture the equally unleashed on the psyche of the average Nigerian each time the report of his miraculous appearances in gardens, coffee tables and lately his private library are reported. They practically turned our most important political address {Aso-Rock} as apparition ground.

Let us now examine some of the messages they are passing and expose the folly of these guys who perhaps believe that most Nigerians are as dense as they are. Please read a sampler that was posted by a group that goes by the cheeky name of YAR’ADUA SUPPORT GROUP {YSG} in a Thisday Newspaper advertorial dated Sunday 25, 2010. “For over four months now Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, president, commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria has been a victim of coarse jokes, cruel jibes, ill-mannered cartoons, unsavoury commentaries and jaundiced editorial in the mass media. He has been demonized and criminalized, his legacy tarnished and scoffed at. This process of dehumanization is being excessively funded and promoted by both known and faceless individuals and power blocks whose path to instant power and future political hegemony must be paved with the battered image of a fine gentleman, and true democrat personified. Of course, these power crazed individuals have found ready allies in the media who blow their trumpets very loud, and among a tiny segment of civil society who aid them in spewing out poisonous words and bellicose slogans against Mr. President”. Etc.

That was one of the many inanities these deranged monsters would want us believe is the true situation in Nigeria today. If you reverse roles and indeed, we should, it would appear that every thing they have accused us of is what they represent in the Yar’Adua saga. For instance, who is power crazed? Is it the people that kept Yar’Adua in a cage to be viewed as a peep show or they people that observed this man’s inhumanity to man and took exception to it? If these clueless power drunks have treated our President with deserved respect and dignity, how-on-earth would the Commander-in Chief of the armed forces of Nigerian become a victim of coarse jokes, cruel jibes, ill-mannered cartoons, unsavoury commentaries and jaundiced editorial. This shows clearly that the characters we are dealing with are afflicted of delusional disorder. They indeed need urgent psychiatric attention while true lovers of Yar’Adua where ever they may be should stand up to be counted. They should quickly save the man whatever little honour is left. I am talking specifically to his daughters and their powerful husbands to insist in taking their father to a proper medical facility where he could be attended to properly. Here, if it is the wish of God that he will come out of this illness and become President of the world, so be it, if not, he should be allowed to answer the call of God gracefully with honour and dignity which is an inevitable debt we all have to pay, if not now but certainly later.

For these his enemies that would rather we see them otherwise, we have noted your campaigns for  and would wish to inform you that your message is blurred because we really don’t understand what you want. If the message is Yar’Adua for second term, we say yes; but let him tell us himself, after all no one becomes president by proxy.
Chike Orjiako.

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