The Yar’Adua We Knew

I write this article in response to “The Yar’Adua I Knew,” (Vanguard, June 6, 2010), by Segun Adeniyi, who served as Press Secretary to President Umaru Yar’Adua. “I want to offer a few words about the late Yar'Adua based on my interactions with him as his official spokesman,” Mr. Adeniyi explains.  “In all the tributes that have been paid to him, the common thread has been that while he had his personal failings like all mortals, President Yar'Adua exhibited certain attributes uncommon with people who hold leadership positions in our clime, and that made significant difference. These attributes were: humility, integrity and humanity. I can attest that these attributes indeed defined the essential Umaru Musa Yar'Adua.”
I have a simple answer for him: “WE DO NOT CARE!”

And if humility, according to Mr. Adeniyi’s preferred testimony, “is concerned with what is right as distinct from who is right,” Yar’Adua was in no way a humble man because if he ever had a clue as to what was right, he never identified it. 

“Yar'Adua,” writes Mr. Adeniyi, “was as honest as he was humble and he had nothing but contempt for the primitive accumulation tendencies of members of the Nigerian political elite who place their personal greed above the collective need.”

Really?  Contempt?  Did he announce that, or did Mr. Adeniyi imagine it?  If he whispered it in Mr. Adeniyi’s ear, are we supposed to break out in jubilation?  For three years, surrounding Yar’Adua in both his government and his party were the fiercest, filthiest, greediest, most acquisitive and most corrupt people this country has ever known.  I do not recall Yar’Adua arresting two or three of them, let alone in the hundreds in which they should be sent to the gas chamber.

On the contrary, such people as the infamous James Ibori and Lucky Igbinedion were his closest friends and confidantes—entering Aso Rock whenever they pleased, and being shown straight to Mr. Adeniyi’s hero.

“You see, these former governors are my colleagues,” he told The Guardian in April 2009.  “We had worked together for eight years. Because I am the President, I cannot just jettison people I know. I am always very careful to separate my personal relationship with people from my state duties.”

But this loyalty to friends ahead of country was not exactly what he pronounced at his inauguration, when he bragged: “We are determined to intensify the war against corruption, more so because corruption is itself central to the spread of poverty.”  On that occasion he spoke of “honesty, decency, generosity, modesty, selflessness, transparency, and accountability” as the “fundamental values determine societies that succeed or fail.”

It is this chaotic and contradictory world view permitted Ibori, whenever he pleased, to swagger into Aso Rock.   The way it appeared from the outside is certainly that the policy of this “humble man” was to protect some of our most corrupt elements.  That is not humility. 

Perhaps the most curious case of executive protection of crime—and therefore betrayal of nation—is that of his predecessor, Olusegun Obasanjo, who was implicated serially at home and abroad. 

In April 2009, Yar’Adua bragged, in connection with the Halliburton mess, as follows: “…We have also set up a committee under the IG to investigate locally any substance of evidence regarding anybody …I promise this nation that once we have a response (from the United States), those names …will be made public and we will take actions and direct that the names should be forwarded to the EFCC and those officials and former officials involved will be arrested and prosecuted.”

The following month, in May 2009, the (Mike Okiro) committee submitted an interim report on that investigation.  Among others, it deeply implicated Obasanjo and former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, showing that they shared $74 million with two other men.  Obasanjo also took $5 million with the PDP, although we do not know if he gave the party a kobo.

And what did Mr. Adeniyi’s man of “integrity” do with the report?  He looked this way and that, staggered to his feet, thrust it under his chair, and sat on it until he died. 

Halliburton was only one of many instances in which Obasanjo’s claim to political sainthood was questioned.  A few samples: even by Yar’Adua’s admission, he threw away $16 billion in the power sector.  He ran the Ministry of Petroleum Resources by himself, and billions of dollars disappeared.  At the PTDF, he spent funds on wine, women and assorted malfeasance.  He seized 200,000 Transcorp shares.  In his hands, N200 billion disappeared from the Ecological Fund.  The Presidential Library scheme consumed billions of Naira.  PDP campaign funds vanished.  Yar’Adua looked the other way. 

 “Another area where President Yar'Adua's distinction shone through,” writes Mr. Adeniyi, was his abiding faith in the rule of law.” 

Yes, Yar’Adua did sponsor such propaganda, beginning from his inaugural address on May 29, 2007, in which he mentioned the concept twice.  But what did it mean in practice? 

Mr. Adeniyi offers as his proof the fact that the Governors of Edo State and Ondo would never have won at the electoral tribunals but for Yar’Adua.  In so doint, he confirms the manipulation of votes and tribunals by his principal and the PDP.  The implied threat is that Yar’Adua did those states a favour by allowing the votes of the people to stand.  But there are also many states in which the election tribunal favoured the PDP candidate: does this mean that in those states, Yar’Adua was against the opposition, or that he favoured his party?  Does this claim not suggest that Yar’Adua was involved in the business of the judiciary?  Is that the meaning of the rule of law?

One of Yar’Adua’s most dubious accomplishments concerned Siemens, which Nigeria had blacklisted for corruption.  Not only did Yar’Adua lift the order, he awarded Siemens more contracts.  His excuse was that he did not want the relationship between Germany and Nigeria to be harmed, and that the German Chancellor had appealed to him that Siemens was born again.  That is like a man came to your home and raping your mother, only for you to give him a cash award and midnight visiting rights to your daughters because his father reminded you of the need for peace among men.  

Yar’Adua cobbled together a policy known as the Seven-point agenda to enable him run for office.  He promptly lost track of it.  In his tribute, Mr. Adeniyi tried to reinvent history: “The 'Seven-point agenda' is not an economic blueprint but rather a conceptual framework of the critical areas of our national life that the administration considered of utmost priority.”

This is meaningless gobbledygook.  A “conceptual framework?” So it was because Yar’Adua was still conceiving the frame of the work that he never found it fit to transfer power as required by the constitution he swore to uphold?

In all of his tenure, “Baba Go-Slow” could not even declare his much-advertised state of emergency in the power sector.  The closest he came occurred two years after he arrived: “And this emergency I said I want to declare, I want to look at everything,” he said.  “I think by the end of May (2009), I will be ready by the grace of God to declare the emergency in the sector.”

Of course he did not.  He could not come up with one megawatt of confidence to do it.

The seven-point hoax did not take cognizance of the Millennium Development Goals, which Yar’Adua abandoned without a glance.  And to avoid being embarrassed, the man then started fleeing from the United Nations, repeatedly sending two clowns that, elsewhere, I have referred to as Alao and Shakey-Shakey. 

I agree with Mr. Adeniyi that Yar’Adua made a significant impact on the Niger Delta issue, and I give him all the credit for that.  But let us not forget that he almost bungled it at the beginning by insensitively or ignorantly trying to foist Professor Ibrahim Gambari on the issue. 

Mr. Adeniyi would have attracted more sympathy from me when he spoke of Yar’Adua’s weaknesses, had he been more specific.  He identified none, preferring to focus on Yar’Adua’s loyalty to the boys in the palace.  In doing this, he provides a clear example of why leadership routinely fails in Nigeria: people sit at the feet of the king, insulated from the tumult outside those gates. 

It is clear that on the days Mr. Adeniyi was recruited to make the President laugh, neither king nor clown remembered the suffering and the waiting of the people.  Yar’Adua may have benefited from a rigged election, but he was sworn in.  That is the only reason I reluctantly referred to him as President, hoping he would rise beyond himself to enhance the quality of life of our tortured people. 

The Yar’Adua we knew turned out to be no different from his predecessors.  He did not enrich us with his vision or inspire us with his wisdom or uplift us with his energy or humanize us with his compassion. 

Public officials must resist the temptation to interpret the destiny of a nation in terms of their privileged benefits.  And while we may never speak ill of the dead, we must never neglect to speak the truth about our country.  The truth about my country is that I fully regret the Yar’Adua presidency. 
 
Tribute: The essential Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, by Olusegun Adeniyi
  Jun 5, 2010

By Olusegun Adeniyi

There has been a massive outpouring of tributes to the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua since his passing a few weeks ago. So much so that it is now becoming increasingly difficult for me to recognize the man I served for almost three years.

In typical Nigerian fashion, everybody, including those who ‘cabalised’ his last days, is now eulogizing the late President. It seems one of our major attributes as a nation is that we are ever generous to, and most often hypocritical about, the dead.

Beyond the familiar graveyard orations, however, the Yar’Adua Presidency, like all previous governments, deserves a rigorous and more honest interrogation so that we can learn useful lessons about the past and secure a good guide for the future.

This is an important task which I am sure many Nigerians will take up once the tears are dried and the tempers have simmered. As a front-row witness, I plan to document my own experience and reflections about this period in the next two years when hopefully, I would have the time and the presence of mind to put things in proper perspective.

For now, however, I want to offer a few words about the late Yar’Adua based on my interactions with him as his official spokesman. In all the tributes that have been paid to him, the common thread has been that while he had his personal failings like all mortals, President Yar’Adua exhibited certain attributes uncommon with people who hold leadership positions in our clime, and that made significant difference.
 

These attributes were: humility, integrity and humanity. I can attest that these attributes indeed define the essential Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. Though interrelated, these enduring values reinforce one another, and cannot stand alone. As a leader, if you don’t have the first, you definitely cannot have the others.

Humility, which Ezra Taft Benson argues is concerned with what is right as distinct from who is right, is the core of those human virtues which work in tandem with other positive character traits. It is therefore no surprise that Yar’Adua was as honest as he was humble and he had nothing but contempt for the primitive accumulation tendencies of members of the Nigerian political elite who place their personal greed above the collective need.

Yar’Adua’s humility was particularly telling because aside his well-heeled family background, he had been the governor of a state for eight years before becoming the President. Many in lesser and similar positions would have been carried away. But President Yar’Adua chose the road less travelled by. He didn’t allow power to change him.

From the outset, he recognized that a leader must place the system above himself and use power cautiously and only for the advancement of human dignity and society. With the late Yar’Adua, I saw this disposition at play in several instances. For this effort, I will cite only one.

Whatever little credit this administration can take for the Niger Delta amnesty process, President Yar’Adua’s personal humility was a critical catalyst. I recall that the whole agenda could have been scuttled from the outset when some hardliners stoutly opposed the idea of releasing Mr. Henry Okah from detention and granting him amnesty. President Yar’Adua never for once agreed with people who argued that it would be demeaning for the President of Nigeria to hold meetings with those they considered “criminals.”

In the course of his dealings with the Niger Delta militant leaders, the late President exemplified the enduring lesson of a Hausa proverb (once shared with me by Second (and Third) Republic Senator Uba Ahmed) that stooping before a dwarf does not cost you your height.

Whenever there was a crisis or the likelihood of a crisis, President Yar’Adua would personally call on phone the leader of whichever group was involved or call for a meeting. That explains why Chief Government Ekpomupolo alias Tompolo had very easy access to the late President who also brokered meetings between the Governor of Rivers State, Mr. Rotimi Amaechi and Mr Ateke Tom just for peace to reign in the Niger Delta.

One of the reasons Mr. Okah bought into the amnesty process was principally due to the disposition of President Yar’Adua in their first encounter.

Perhaps only few leaders would have the temperament to absorb what Okah told the President that night about what he described as the “crazy arrangement” in Nigeria vis-à-vis the Niger Delta people. Rather than express anger, President Yar’Adua assured Mr. Okah that he could understand his rage and pledged that he would redress the wrongs. That parley, brokered by my former boss and mentor, Mr. Nduka Obaigbena, was particularly instructive. Despite the fact that there had been a prior decision that government would not meet with the ‘Aaron Team’ of the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND), President Yar’Adua eventually acceded to Mr. Okah’s request.

When the late President—with me and Mr. David Edevbie by his side—eventually met with the ‘Aaron Team’, much to the displeasure of some people in government, Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, Admiral Mike Akhigbe and Major General Luke Aprezi (rtd) can attest to the fact that by the time the late Yar’Adua laid his cards on the table, there was pretty little to argue about as it became very clear he had a roadmap towards resolving the Niger Delta problem.

Apart from the desire to do what was right, President Yar’Adua held the resolution of the Niger Delta issue very dear because he could see in it enormous potentials for the nation at large. It is within this context that the current argument about whether or not the ‘seven-point agenda’ should be reviewed not only begs the question but shows little understanding of what the whole agenda is all about. The ‘Seven-point agenda’ is not an economic blueprint but rather a conceptual framework of the critical areas of our national life that the administration considered of utmost priority. Even at that, President Yar’Adua himself had realised before he died that there was need to focus principally on a few items which would definitely unlock the door to the others.

Three were identified: Land Reform, Niger Delta and Power.
On Land Reform, Professor Akin Mabogunje has done extensive work and the Bill is now before the National Assembly. President Yar’Adua said several times with respect to Niger Delta that the amnesty deal was just the easy bit: the foundation for resolving the crisis in an enduring manner. The solution, he believed, would be in empowering the oil producing communities and this informed his decision to direct that ministerial committees be set up to work out modalities for implementing the report of the Special Adviser on Petroleum Matters, Dr. Emmanuel Egbogah. Titled ‘Equity Distribution in Petroleum Administration: Proposal for the Involvement of Host Communities in the Ownership of Petroleum Assets in Nigeria’, the Egbogah report, which seeks to give oil producing Niger Delta communities a stake similar to land owner royalty, was very detailed. Unfortunately that turned out to be President Yar’Adua’s last official engagement as he fell ill only a few days later and travelled to Saudi Arabia. The rest, as they say, is history.

As for power, President Yar’Adua felt it would be delusional to think that electricity could be generated and transmitted on a sustainable basis in Nigeria if resolution of the Niger Delta question remains literally or figuratively in the pipelines, bringing again to the fore his belief about the centrality of the Niger Delta to national development.

Another area where President Yar’Adua’s distinction shone through was his abiding faith in the rule of law. Many in his position would have fancied themselves not just above the law, but as the law itself. For President Yar’Adua however the good society is the one where impunity is a taboo, and where the rights of the rich and the poor are equally protected. On reflection, I believe President Yar’Adua actually understood the seeming intangibles which have actually held us back as a nation with a clear idea of what needed to be done and was ready to chart the course. Today, I can recall the several discussions I had with him on the primacy of rule of law to the development of any society.

For him it was not mere rhetoric. It is indeed to the eternal credit of the respect the late President had for institutions and constituted authority that he never for once dabbled in the affairs of the National Assembly, not even when there was media pressure on him to do so during the Mercy Etteh crisis in the House of Representatives, which the members eventually resolved on their terms. He also stayed away from the internal politics of his party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). And he gave unfettered freedom to the judiciary as the last arbiter. But for President Yar’Adua’s unwavering commitment to the rule of law, it is most unlikely that Comrade Adams Oshiomhole would be Edo State Governor today. The same goes for Governor Olusegun Mimiko of Ondo State. And in Anambra State, the recent election would most certainly not have been conducted given the fact that there were people within his party who held on to the belief that they already had a ‘Governor-in-waiting’!

On a personal level, I can also attest that President Yar’Adua was an open-minded leader and a loyal boss. Between April 22, 2007 (when I was first contacted) and May 29, 2007, I turned down the offer to be his spokesman several times and only accepted on May 30 after the decision had been taken out of my hands. Notwithstanding, he was faithful to me, especially at a period when I was considered ‘disloyal’ by some people very close to him! By the warped logic of these political do-gooders, the loyal media aide is the one who makes a nuisance of himself by attacking critics of his principal. For not doing that, there were several reports against me by those who rubbed it in that it was not an accident that President Olusegun Obasanjo picked three kinsmen of his as spokespersons in succession.

There were also other people in government with their power mongering collaborators outside who hated my guts and put pressure on President Yar’Adua to replace me with their own media men. Some did not stop at mere attempts to replace me, I was also considered expendable. Such was the desperation.  It is not on record that my predecessors were ever invited for interrogation by the security agencies for just doing their job. In my own case, I endured that humiliation over the controversial Ekiti State re-run gubernatorial election.

In all these situations, President Yar’Adua stood solidly by me, the same way he resisted all the pressure to replace his ADC, Col. Mustapha Dennis Onoyiveta, who got the job purely on merit after a competitive interview conducted by the former Chief-of-Staff, Major General Abdullahi Mohammed (rtd) from a shortlist sent by the Defence Headquarters. That became an issue for those who wanted Mustapha out with the whispering campaign that former President Obasanjo planted him on Yar’Adua. Yet it was clear that Mustapha’s only sin was the little fact that he is an Urhobo man from Delta State and not a Northerner!

As a boss, Yar’Adua was easy to work with and approachable. He was also sensitive to the welfare of his staff. Such was his attention that one day he noticed that his personal secretary and speechwriter, Mr. Matt Aikhionbare, was walking with a slight limp and asked what was wrong with him. When Matt complained about some pains in his leg for which he was seeking local medical care, the President immediately called his personal doctor and asked that he should arrange for Matt to travel abroad and he personally paid all the bills.

Another aspect of the man Yar’Adua which Nigerians did not get to see was his down-to-earth, brutally frank disposition to issues. One morning, as we were leaving the residence for his office, the ADC noticed that the President did not have his Nigeria-lapel pin on. As he attempted to place one on his Agbada, the President turned to us—myself, the Head of Service, Mr. Steve Oronsaye, Matt Aikhionbare, PLO, Habu Habib and the CSO, Yusuf Tilde—and asked cynically: ‘what does this thing really mean? It is not whether we carry the national flag on our head or chest that matters. I wonder why we place too much premium on symbolism in this country when what should inspire us as public official is that our actions are dictated by public good’. In characteristic style, he challenged us to convince him as to why he must wear the pin and was prepared for a debate.

In the end, we managed to convince him to allow the pin to be put in place if only to humour us. I have fond memories of President Yar’Adua because I interacted so closely with him that even colleagues who initially felt uncomfortable with me could not but notice he enjoyed my company.

It got to a point that sometimes when he was alone, they would send for me to go and stay with him. I am one of the few people who could bring out his earthy, humourous nature which he tried very much to suppress. With me, he would laugh because I recognised the fact that while he might have been President, he was first and foremost a human being and I related to him on that score.

While it is true that Nigerians hardly speak ill of the dead, I have received several positive testimonials from people I encountered on the streets in the last few weeks that make me conclude somehow that beyond the crocodile tears and the political tributes, there must have been a genuine affection for President Yar’Adua by most Nigerians and deep sympathy for his personal travails. If only these people had known him up close and if only illness and death had not conspired to rob Nigeria of the freshness and vigour of his humble, honest and humane leadership!

The late president definitely was not the saint some people are trying to make of him. He was a mere mortal who had his faults and weaknesses. But he was also far from being the desperate power-monger that the “cabals” on both sides tried to turn him to in his last days.

He was essentially a very good man who had lofty dreams for his country; a man of ideas who, though hampered by ill-health, gave the thankless job of building a good society his very best; a simple human being who refused to let position and power deprive him and others of their humanity.

All said, I am proud to have served my country through the late Yar’Adua. I also feel gratified that I remained faithful to him to his very end. For me, this humane and loyal boss deserved no less. May God Almighty grant him eternal rest. And may He grant his family the fortitude to bear the loss.

*Adeniyi was Special Adviser on Media and Publicity to the late President Yar’Adua