The presidency is an unforgiving office. Its occupant does not have the luxury of trial and error. There are no do-overs. That is why it is not for the ill-prepared, the unprepared. Like Umaru Yar’adua.
The presidency is an unforgiving office. Its occupant does not have the luxury of trial and error. There are no do-overs. That is why it is not for the ill-prepared, the unprepared. Like Umaru Yar’adua.
At the root of the current lull in presidential leadership is the fact that the current president never imagined his political future in the presidency. Aso Rock residency has been an incidental occurrence in the convoluted political career of Mr. Yar’adua. Although carefully engineered by ex-president Obasanjo as insurance against instant recompense, there has been nothing careful or deliberate about how Yar’adua has embraced his unexpected political transformation.
As a product of and reluctant protagonist in another man’s ambitious script, Yar’adua didn’t have to develop a temperament suited to the presidency. Groping for direction is thus inevitable.
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Plunged into an unfamiliar political firmament, Yar’adua has demonstrated an acute disinterest in the burdens of his job. He has instead merely reveled in the aura and ceremonial pleasures of the office. The urgency and alertness demanded by a presidential mandate continue to elude him. This is logical since he has no mandate to lead. His presidency appears doomed.
So let’s look beyond Yar’adua and his pyrrhic presidential privileges.
How do we prevent another Yar’adua from happening to us in 2011? The first step is to throw off our Stockholm syndrome of falling in love with—or at least making peace with—our predicament. Reconciling ourselves to Yar’adua is the political equivalent of enduring a robber’s brutality and accepting his rationalizations after the fact. That’s self-victimization.
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Second, we have to commit to disrupting the cycle of incompetent and corrupt leaders installing their clones to sustain the rot. If we do not confront Yar’adua’s infrastructure of electoral fraud in 2011 and allow ourselves to be rigged once more out of the process, his imposition, when he’s finished with us, may inspire the type of tragic nostalgia that some now privately confess about the recent Obasanjo dictatorship.
There is a democratic minimum: voting and having the votes counted towards determining a political outcome that cannot ignore those who produced it. Dispirited from the electoral abuses we have suffered over the last few decades, we have exoticized this banal political truism. We have widened the goalpost and accommodated ourselves to the strange narrative that certain political outcomes are either inevitable or are physical realities that should be accepted.
Other polities see electoral transparency as a given, an obvious element of democratic praxis not to be compromised. We see it as a luxury, a fetish—beyond reach and a product of providence. We have to insist on that democratic minimum in 2011. It starts with removing the most visible enemy of that proposition from his fraudulent perch as INEC chairman.
Maurice Iwu must go. Most people agree, but where are the “Iwu Must Go” campaigns? We can’t wait for Yar’adua to claim credit for it, using Iwu to solidify preparations for another electoral farce and gratefully arranging for a mutually rewarding exit to deceive the naïve.
We can’t invest our 2011 anxieties in Yar’adua’s electoral reforms either. You may believe innocently that the reforms will be a sincere confrontation of our electoral woes. You can be forgiven for this. But as a cushion against disappointment, you should also work with the hypothesis that an electoral system is only as good as the vigilance of voters who participate in it.
Even with Iwu out of the picture, and with a heightened vigilance, the emerging Obasanjo-Atiku-Yaradua trifecta—or one element of it—may yet prevail in 2011. But this triumph of the status quo would once more be a product of our curious willingness to accept the unacceptable and adjust complacently to perennial electoral adversity.
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