If you are doing right, you don’ t feel like you are wielding power.-Allan Jackson.Umaru Musa Yar’dua is certainly not doing the right thing. Umaru obviously does not reside in Aso Villa where rule of law reigns. Yet Umaru bestowed with an enormous power by a corrupt despot called Olusegun Obasanjo. It is a devil “trinity” of Maurice Iwu, Umaru and the Police that is today assaulting Nigerians in a democracy that only they know the rule and the meaning.
It is an assault and not leadership that Umaru is inflicting on Nigerians. On the 29th May 2007 the day he took the oath of office, Umaru, realizing his shaky and unlawful mandate, made a feeble declaration of introducing reform in the electoral system. He admitted that the elections that brought him was flawed. But what happened since then? All the re-run elections and that of the local government in the country including Katsina his home state were anything but free and fair. They were simply the continuation of 2007 general rigging. And even where Nigerians for lack of better reasons decided to give him a chance – he bungled it as in the way he treated the Uwais Reform Committee Report.
Another chance – the Ekiti re-run election and an Iwu’s supplementary edition in just ten local government areas was equally bungled. Imagine over 20,000 security agencies of police, SSS and the military headed by an A.I.G. and IGP Okiro. Inec too was there with five commissioners headed by Maurice Iwu. At the end what happened – deaths, destruction of properties and total violation of the process. With all these, if Nigerians still believe Yar’adua has the sincerity, the will, and the competence to organise a general election covering 774 local government areas simultaneously then we can as well kneel in prayers to thank Obasanjo for his ingenuity for identifying the true Nigerians – people who live in illusion and are earnestly working for self destruction both as people and as a nation.
Last Wednesday, almost all the media flashed on the nation’s television screens Yar’adua’s belated media outing where he met with Aso Villa press corps for the first time in two years. Among other issues discussed, he accused Nigerians for calling for a wholesale implementation of the recommendations of the Uwais Electoral Reform Report as “lacking full understanding of the contents of the panel’s reports”. This he does in spite of the fact that he refused to make the report public. Nay, he applied the same style as he did while holding forth in Katsina---where he alone knew the solutions of everything and any dissenting voice was an enemy. He hid the report away from Nigerians – making it a PDP, Police and INEC family affair. What it means is that Nigerians have no right to comment on it. Yet he wants Nigerians not to “doubt” him but to keep their “hope” in him.. But his antecedent as a governor of Katsina state betrayed these expectations. Between 1999—2007 Yar’adua had carried out an extensive radio sermon in which he appealed to the people of Katsina to trust him. (We challenge Yar’adua to order for the reproduction and broadcast of those messages if he is sincere as some of his cronies are making us to believe). The people gave him a chance. What was there reward? First he sacked all elected council chairmen of the ANPP, intimidated and bought opposition members in the state assembly. Then he moved to the PDP where he suffocated all elements of democracy with the party in the state. Finally, he moved on the entire people of the state where he conducted the worst local government elections in the country. He, for the first time introduced violence in the history of Katsina politics. It is a record that he’ll live to bear. At the end of the exercise, dozens of people were killed, many others were injured. Yet many more were detained by the compromised police and properties worth millions of Naira destroyed. Police and army officers known by the public to have carried out this heinous act were simply transferred to far away states.
On the allegations of malpractices and bribery during the Ekiti poll, The Nation of Wednesday, May 13 among other papers of the same day quoted him as saying “I have ordered the appropriate security agencies to thoroughly investigate the reports ... and prosecute all those against whom cases can be established”. Judging from past experience, Nigerians have every right to “doubt” your sincerity on this issue.. They are equally entitled not to “hope” for anything positive from the Ekiti saga. Else you forget immediately after the 2007 presidentially elections the media reported a case of fighting by Katsina state INEC staff over the sharing of #40 million gift allegedly given by Dahiru Mangal, a PDP stalwart in the state and one of the cronies of Yar’adua. The oppositions shouted themselves hoarse – till date nothing has been done.
Referring to the Halliburton bribery scandal, Yar’adua had this to say, again The Nation of May 13th. “I will give you assurance that it will be pursued to its logical conclusion ... those that have genuine case to answer will be prosecuted ... this administration will not falter”. The big question: Is the Yar’adua administration faltering on the Siemens bribery scandal? For over one year now the US state department had named some Nigerian officials as part of the scandal. Up till today none of them is even questioned let alone prosecuted. Yet some of them are still holding high PDP position while others are sitting pretty in the Senate chambers.
No! Mr.. President, all indices of sincerity and common good are lacking in this administration. Nigerians ought to be in “doubt”. Nigerians ought not to be “hopeful”. Because the only “persistence” Nigerians see is the persistence in derailing the system. Period.
Ya’u Shehu Darazo
[email protected]
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