With President Yar’adua’s recent press parley on sundry issues including the fraudulent Ekiti governorship re-run, his hypocrisy is complete. All that any reasonable Nigerian should take away from that conference is that Yar’adua should not be trusted by any right-thinking person anymore. The man is clearly a first class hypocrite. For all the time the crisis in Ekiti went on, he did not say a thing.
The only information we heard about him was that he held security meetings with some key officials of his party where the plan was hatched to rig the election for the candidate of the PDP at all costs. It seems to me that after that meeting the President went into a coma because his kidney failed. This must have been why he did not know what transpired in Ekiti during and after the re-run election. It must have been why he did not show any leadership when it was desperately needed. How else could you explain the fact that the President made no pronouncement on the shame of the nation that we witnessed during this period and that while it lasted, the minister of information, the IG and Prof. Iwu were the open faces of government feeding us with lies and half-truths. If Yar’adua was a responsible president, he ought to have addressed the press at the peak of that crisis to at least calm frayed nerves and to show that this nation has the power of its own renewal within itself. I say this with every sense of responsibility, if the President were to have a conscience, he should resign now but I know he will not because he has none.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content1'); });
Moreso, he is being held hostage but a selfish interest group of which he is a member. This is why his many references and comments about the political elite amusing to say the least. Is the President himself not part and parcel of that selfish political class? To point accusing fingers at the political class of which he is a major player is another show of the President’s hypocrisy. Nigerians should now know their president as a man who is full of deceit and hypocrisy. How he suddenly came to life after the evil, shameful and brazen display of impunity by his party and state apparatus to come and tell all the nonsense that he will institute a panel to look into the violence that raged in Ekiti during the rerun is still a mystery to me. If only he had intervened while the crisis went on and mandated the REC to announce the right results, we would not be where we are today. Those who are still hanging on to a thread of belief that Yar’adua is a man of the rule of law should now know they have been fooled. His seeming gentle mien is why he has taken many Nigerians on a fool’s ride.
I guess victims of such tomfoolery should come off it now and wake up. With him, the more you look, the less you see. He is a green snake under a green grass. You have a president whose appearance commands no respect, whose words cannot be trusted, who is uninspiring, who is lacking in principle, ideology and focus. What do you call that: A failed President. What is clear is that while Yar’adua may be the President of Nigeria, he is not a president for Nigerians and so he is not their servant as he once made them to believe. No serious-minded Nigerian would have voted for such a bad candidate in a free and fair contest. He is not a man after the heart of Nigerians. The logic is simple: here you have a man who has not been chosen by Nigerians and so not answerable to them for anything. This fact should be obvious to anyone who listened to his answers at the said press conference. That the president is granting press interviews now should not be a surprise to anyone. He is preparing our minds for his second term in office. This is how chameleons like him behave. He is beaming with new life so that his court jesters can say he is fit to go for another term. Those who are trying to market this dead product may soon discover that they are pushing us in the direction of a serious cataclysm. However, they should know that at that point, all of us will be losers but they may have more to lose than the rest of us who have not swallowed the wealth of the people of this country.
It must be said that in all his answers at that press conference, the man mercilessly stood logic, commonsense and decency on its head. He chose to defend the indefensible thinking Nigerians are fools. Honestly, I do not know why our leaders take us for a ride? They assume that we are helpless victims in their hands. They think that we can do them nothing because they have the instruments of state violence. They forget one thing namely that one day they will be held accountable. Let me treat some of the issues he raised at the conference as much as I can remember. He talked about the violence in Ekiti state during the rerun saying he would raise a panel to probe the said act and the bribery that took place. Offenders according to him will be prosecuted. He had actually regretted the loss of lives during the same exercise as we heard from his minister of misinformation. Let it be said that the violence in Ekiti state came about because his party wanted to rig the election and foist an unpopular candidate on the state which they eventually did. Ekiti people are a peace-loving people but they hate injustice. If the president and his party did not have the disposition they had, there would have been no violence of any sort. The president could be said to have ignited the problem when he went to Ekiti to campaign for Segun Oni. If he understood his role as president of the whole nation and not just a clique that is called PDP, perhaps the story would have been different. He did not only do that, but went on to say that his party’s candidate will be the first governor to spend six years as governor. What a shame on the president and his party! In all this, there was no talk about service to the people or fulfilling some party manifestoes. It is all about power and nothing more.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content2'); });
The promise to raise a panel to probe the violence and all the threats to punish the culprits of bribe taking are all medicines after death. He himself knew the direct cause of the violence and was not deaf to all that happened but could not take any action because he was the mastermind of the whole chain of events. I could not agree more with Femi Falana that the latest actions of the president are rather diversionary and deceptive. It is on record that over a hundred and thirty thugs have been arrested even including some Senators in possession of firearms. The police should go ahead with the prosecution of these people and the president has no business raising any panel about it. One thing I am happy about is that people are beginning to see the president for whom and what he is: a thoroughly deceptive and crooked man.
The other issue he addressed very comprehensively was the recommendations of the electoral reforms panel. When the president constituted this panel, he was very weak and looking for sympathy from Nigerians just after the “shock and awe, do or die” elections conducted by his predecessor. During that time, he did not consult the national assembly nor the council of state nor the Federal executive council. But after having assembled some of the best brains we have to chart the way forward for the nation and received their reports and recommendations, he handed it over to his kitchen cabinet to doctor and over-doctor it until its vital organs have been taken out and what we now have is the carcass going to the national assembly. In the first place, it is not difficult to see that he was not sincere in constituting this panel in the first place. If anything at all, it was meant to buy time. Fortunately, this purpose has been met as the president is now well seated and settled in office. One of his reasons for rejecting some key recommendations of the panel is that there is nowhere in the world where government is obliged to take all the recommendations of a panel. But my question is, if all the recommendations are good and can lead to genuine reforms, why should they not be taken? If those suggestions are in the interest of the entire nation but against the interest of a small selfish interest group holding us hostage, must we sacrifice our general survival at the altar of satisfying this group? On the selection of the INEC chairman, it is right and fitting that we take it out of the hands of our president. Without any doubt, we did not trust Obasanjo who selected Iwu in the same way that we do not trust Yar’adua at the moment. Let the president know that we do not trust him to select a trustworthy INEC chairman because he has no integrity. He lost his integrity when he accepted the Presidency after the flawed elections of 2007. Since then he has become a man who is deficit in integrity, sincerity and credibility. A man of no integrity will only select someone like himself. My prediction is that Yar’adua will not replace Maurice Iwu after his present tenure has expired and that this same dubious umpire will conduct the 2011 elections if we are lucky to reach that date. Only birds of the same feather can flock together.
This was what Obasanjo meant when he said that he is not aware that his successor is doing any electoral reforms. The other thing Obasanjo did not say is that he is not aware whether Yar’adua is also fighting corruption. Another of the President’s defense on why he must appoint the INEC chairman is that we must have confidence in ourselves. This is the ideal situation: namely that people should have confidence their leader if they have truly elected him. But we did not elect this president. He was only handpicked by Obasanjo and imposed on the PDP and Nigeria. In which case, we do not, should not and cannot have confidence in him. Why is it that our leaders are always asking the citizenry to have confidence in them when they have no confidence in Nigerians. Confidence should not be a one-way traffic. Just after Yar’adua ordered the electoral reforms panel to consult Nigerians and other stakeholders about how to reform our electoral system, he has now turned back to tell us that he cannot accept our views and we must still leave him to still appoint the INEC chairman. It means we don’t matter to him and his government. My take is that the man is only fooling us and saying we all got it wrong. If we have reposed confidence in our leaders in the past and we have been let down, it is natural for us to take it as an article of faith not to trust any leader or ruler we have in future, after all, once beaten, twice shy.
Another thing the President said was that private citizens are free to prepare bills and present it to the national assembly on other aspects of electoral reforms not covered by his own six bills since they have the constitutional power to do so. But to leave the whole issue of the rest of the recommendations to individuals to take private bills on electoral reforms is to expect too much from the citizenry most especially if this can be done by government itself. It shows a leadership pitched against the people, one that is not prepared to prosecute the agenda of its people but its own. What is clear to me now is that we are not going to have thorough-going reforms which the President promised the country and so we should be ready for a violent and fraud ridden 2011 elections granted that our democracy will be alive then. It is clear that a big section of the political class is afraid of free and fair elections and Yar’adua belongs to this group. What is wrong with electoral cases being concluded before people are sworn in? How can a vote robber assent to laws or make laws for the populace? No one should be in any doubt, Yar’adua is not the one we need to take Nigeria to higher heights. He is only there to preserve the status-quo. We must await another leader who will be a true revolutionary leader and statesman otherwise this nation is doomed.
A lot has been said about the President’s health as one of the reasons why he is not performing. But the man is not a baby. He was very aware that he has not enjoyed good health even during the eight years he served as governor of Katsina state. After having indicated his intention to go back into teaching after serving as governor, why should he accept a more tasking assignment of becoming President of a complex country as Nigeria? Should we now be asking for a certificate of health fitness for our Presidents? If a man of his age cannot recognize his weakness, it doesn’t make much sense to me to have any sympathy for him. In any case, you do not need your two kidneys working to full capacity to be a good President who will enjoy the respect and confidence of Nigerians. What you need is sincerity and fair-mindedness about the solution to our myriad of problems. What we need very crucially is a leader who is true to his words and not remote-controlled by interest groups and godfathers. It is because Yar’adua is not a good leader that his seven point agenda has not gotten off the ground. This why he has wasted the last two years and will also waste the rest two years of his tenure. His rule of law mantra is ploy to pull the wool over our eyes because he is naturally slow or not ready to do anything. Even the judiciary is still not free from the control of the present government. For instance the three cases of the governorships elections in Edo, Ekiti and Oyo states are practically the same. But while the case of Edo was eventually won by the right candidate, the cases of Ekiti and Oyo went different ways. Some arm-twisting must have taken place if not why the inconsistency?
In case of the scrapping of SIEC in the different states, I think this is a step in the right direction. At this stage of our democratic practice, our politicians are still lacking in the basic political maturity to deal with elections at the local government level within operating the approach of winner takes it all. Let us face it, if INEC is bad enough, the SIEC is too bad. Whichever party rules a particular state wins in all the local governments. The SIEC chairman in every state is given the mandate to deliver all the local governments and this is done to the letter. This is why local governments in this country have been a colossal failure. If the truth is to be said, we all are in the know of all our leaders who are involved in the Halliburton scandal and there is no need to set up any panel to find out more about them. They should simply be charged to court and the onus will be on them to prove that they are not guilty. But typical of Yar’adua, the appointment of the panel will be the end of the matter. I am sure that nobody will be brought to book at the end of the day.
On de-regulation, it is still strange to me why nobody wants to deal with the root cause of the problem. Why can’t the president vote enough funds to build a refinery in each state of the Federation? What is responsible for the inability of the government to get our existing refineries working? If the refining capacity of our present refineries are at a low ebb, to deregulate in such an environment is senseless. What this has brought to the fore is that Yar’adua is plain incompetent. He is a ruler taking every false step at every turn. He is not a God-given leader to Nigeria Come to think of it, for a government to claim that a cabal is making things impossible for the country in the oil sector is an admission of incompetence and failure. If the Federal government of Nigeria with all its might cannot deal with a group of criminals in a critical sector of our economy such as the oil sector, what hope is there for Nigeria? It all boils down to one thing which is now becoming evident it is the fact that Yar’adua can only lead Nigeria to one place: into the abyss if we are not there already. Those who are saying what we need in this country is a revolution of the heart are being economical with the truth. We need something much more radical if this country is to survive.
Fr. Emmanuel Ogundele is with the Department of Philosophy, St. Peter and Paul Seminary, Bodija, Ibadan.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('comments'); });