Nigeria is a country full of humour. In a serious adversity, a Nigerian will manage to smile. On a field work in one of the most squalid and poor parts of Kaduna some few days back, I came across a send forth party the hapless souls of the area had managed to organize, to send another daughter of the community to an uncertain future. Dressed in their cheap but colourful Chinese textiles (remember our textile industry has collapsed long ago) the motley crowd was full of laughter, smiles, and jokes as if oblivious of their hopeless and environmentally hazardous conditions.
It is no wonder that Nigerians were ranked the happiest people on earth. The internet and the GSM have unleashed the joking ingenuity of Nigerians and allowed them to share their jokes widely. They do not spare their leaders who they hardly meet and see. One of the jokes widely circulated electronically about President Umaru Yar’Adua goes thus:
A man walks into a restaurant and says to the seller.
Man: Abeg give me rice and plantain with 2 kpomo and 2 Yar'adua.
Seller: oga abeg no vex, but which wan be Yar'adua...
Man: (laughs)...u know now...na SNAIL now...
This joke is a reflection of the general perception of many Nigerians of our president. He is perceived to be slow, indecisive and even unfocussed.
Indeed some call him “Baba Go Slow”. And there are many indices to explain this perception. It took him two months, from May 29 to July 27, 2007 to form his cabinet only to dismiss half of them in October 2008 - less than two years. It took him another two months to find replacements for them. The list of those maintained, dropped and then replaced did not in any way suggest that competence was a key factor in the decision. And yet competence is key to the achievement of the over-hyped Seven Point Agenda. Perhaps that is why it has remained just that, an agenda as some are wont to argue.
He promised to declare a state of emergency in the electricity sector; he is yet to do so. In a rare “positive” article on Nigeria, the Economist wrote; “any conversation in Kano has to be conducted over the noisy chug of a diesel-fuelled generator; lack of electricity means that power cuts can last for more than five hours there in the north’s biggest and most sophisticated city.” The paper further captured the exasperation of the ordinary Nigerian by quoting Dr Zango of Bayero University - “even the people in Gaza Strip have electricity” While the Vice President and the ministers are constantly telling Nigerians that the electricity situation would improve, the presidency proposes to spend N542.4 million next year on fuel and generating plant for its use. And yet they want Nigerians to believe their promises. For almost four months the country’s universities were closed but our President jetted out to Saudi Arabia to commission a state of the arts university built by the Saudi state. Evidence of some of the projects undertaken by the Kingdom with its oil windfall. Contrast this with Nigeria. According to Hamman Tukur of the Revenue Mobilisation and Fiscal Commission, “only about $7 billion is left in the excess crude account of the country from the $27 billion inherited by the Umaru Yar’Adua administration in 2007. The excess crude account is almost depleted, the Federal Ministry of Finance has now resorted to domestic excess crude account denominated in naira to augment monthly allocation to the federal, state and local government councils” Poverty on the other hand has increased astronomically. All data collected by national and international institutions agree on this. It seems today, in Nigeria, the more the country earns money the higher the poverty.
While the whole world was at the General Assembly of the United Nations, in New York, President Yar Adua was conspicuously absent. No thought provoking speech was delivered on behalf of Nigeria either, and yet Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar Adua wants Nigeria to secure a permanent seat in the Security Council. One has lost count of the number of times our president had mouthed the rule of law as the cardinal principles of his administration. Yet what we have seen so far is the misrule of law. Evidence: his Attorney-General acts as if his paramount role is to shield the looters of federal and state treasuries. Series of interviews granted by the boss of the EFCC, Mrs. Farida Waziri, seems to suggest that the fight against corruption is all but lost especially when it involves leading politicians. According her “it is indeed frustrating that cases involving politically-exposed persons (PEPs) filed some three years ago, are still at plea stage and suspects continue to flaunt their illicit wealth to the annoyance of Nigerians indeed, all corruption haters.” She further added that there “cannot be the just Rule of Law when those justifiably suspected of crime with huge illicit assets involved enjoy those assets in a manner that irritates other law abiding citizens. There cannot be just Rule of Law when suspects use illicit wealth to influence major decisions in the society to their further advantage.” So much energy and efforts have been invested in pursuing Nuhu Ribadu than those known to have condemned many a Nigerian to a life of penury and desperation. Some of them are top legislators. The lenient sentences handed down to Bode George and his co-looters by Justice Olubunmi Oyewole of the Ikeja High Court have in no way convinced Nigerians that things are about to change on this score. The 2009 Corruption Perception Index released by Transparency International places Nigeria in the unenviable position of 130th out of 180 countries. Last year the country was ranked 121. It would be difficult to come across a Nigerian who disagrees with this report. Some even opined that the report was too lenient on the country.
Mallam, as Mr President is sycophantically called by his boys, is getting used to sending elaborate budgets to the National Assembly only to hardly implement substantial part of it. Recently the speaker of the House of Representatives informed the nation that the 2009 budget is being poorly implemented as over N5000 billion approved for capital projects was still in the vaults of the Central Bank. This includes N59 billion approved for the development of the Niger Delta despite Mallam Umaru’s avowed desire to bring to an end the crisis in the region. At the end of almost every Federal Executive Council meeting, the country is treated to the ritual announcement of contract approvals for major infrastructure projects. It seems they remain just that-projects. Or else how does one explain the chronic infrastructure deficit the country is afflicted with. Our roads have remained death traps, hospitals have become departure lounges to the great beyond, airports have become glorified molue motor parks, and darkness has remained the lot of majority of Nigerians. Nights in Nigeria are as dark as the grave.
Although our country did record impressive economic growth between 1999 and 2006 a study conducted by the federal government which benefitted from the technical assistance of the World Bank gave a cheerless picture of the labour market. The report revealed that youth unemployment has continued to skyrocket. Even those “employed” are underemployed. But this is not surprising. The much vaunted economic growth government officials keep drumming into our ears have not translated into development which they argued could generate jobs. The growth has been “driven by sectors that generate little employment opportunities, such as oil and finance, while the sectors that have the potential to create new jobs, such as manufacturing have lost jobs. The Central Bank of Nigeria reported that in the second quarter of 2009, manufacturing production in the country declined by 1.4%. Capacity utilization fell by 2.3 percentage point to 53.5%. The bank attributed the poor performance partly to electricity supply, the average generation of which was 1.5 mw between April and June. This was 26.1% below the level in the first quarter of the year. Not all is rosy with the financial sector either for, it has since been revealed by the Central Bank under Lamido Sanusi that the sector was about to collapse and with it the hard earned savings of many ordinary Nigerians. But as shocking as the revelations are, the man who presided over this near collapse of the financial system, Professor Charles Soludo is being rigged by the PDP first to become its flag bearer in Anambra state and later the governor of that bastardised state. So much for good governance and the rule of law.
While our amiable Madam Rebranding, the Minister of Information keeps telling Nigerians that things are improving, constraints to cost-effective production are mounting. Evidence: in the World Bank’s Doing Business 2010 report released on September 9th this year, our country was ranked 125th place in 2010. Last year we were ranked 120th out of 183 countries on the ease of doing business. The business environment has continued to deteriorate.
All these factors give the impression that the ship of state is drifting. It is this perception that might have led Professor Wole Soyinka to depict our president as either “being on permanent sabbatical, or is “a somnolent spider at the centre of an elaborate web.”
President Umar Yar’adua’s taciturn and frail look may have oiled the various descriptions of him captured above. They also portray him as a very weak person. Even a pawn in the grip of some hedonistic shadowy clique. The reality is however different. In the struggle for power, those who mistake appearance for reality are bound to commit serious and unmitigated blunder. The failure of the opposition to remove General Abacha from power until the inevitability of life caught up with him could partly be explained by the fact that he was under-rated by the opposition. People mistook his lack of communication skills and introversion for weakness. The result is now history. Should this thinking prevail and President Yar’Adua overcome his illness and decides to really seek for a second term he will spring a surprise.
President Yar’ Adua, like all humans may be suffering from some ailment. He has not denied that. History also informs us of many cases of very sick leaders who held on to power till death or were driven out. Sekou Toure and Lansana Conte of Guinea, Seyni Kounche of Niger, Houphuet Boigny of Cote d’Ivoire, (died in office), Mobutu Sese Sekou of Congo DR (chased out of power), Habid Bourguiba of Tunisia (removed from office on account of senility) Pompidou (died in office) and Mitterand (died after leaving office) of France are but few examples. But while in the case of the last two, the ship of state stayed on course and sailed smoothly, in all the African countries mentioned, paralyses and instability ensued. The ship of state strayed into terrible political turbulence. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the armed conflicts and anarchy that followed the demise of those leaders. The difference is not difficult to discern. France is a democracy and has solid state institutions. The ailing presidents also had competent lieutenants to run the affairs of the country effectively. This cannot be said of many African countries including our own. Our situation is compounded by corruption, crass hypocrisy, sycophancy and hero worshipping and the concentration of power in the president either constitutionally or otherwise.
Physically and administratively weak as he appears to be, President Yar’ Adua has the singular and unwavering determination to pursue his objectives. He loves and understands power. Even a casual observation of his actions since he was declared the winner of the 2007 presidential elections reveals that President Yar’adua acts with the speed of a cheetah when it comes to securing and consolidating his power. The opposition could ignore this to their peril. Mallam Umaru’s perceived weakness or sickness has so far not prevented him from achieving his political ambition. Soon after he had cobbled together what he called K34 in Katsina in 1998 he fell sick. He rebounded, led the group into PDP and won the 1999 gubernatorial elections in Katsina State. When prior to the 2003 gubernatorial election people thought his defeat in the hands of the ANPP was certain, partly due to his failure to deliver on his promises to the people of the state and the political actors who helped him secure power and partly due to the Buhari bulldozer, he snatched victory from Nura Khalil and ruled Katsina for another four years. Before the election, leaders of the ANPP were arrested and detained. Katsina state was the only state to the best of my knowledge where soldiers were deployed on election day apparently to intimidate the opposition. Even the Minister of State, Army, Alhaji Lawal Batagarawa was on hand to ensure that everything went according to plan. He was however consigned to oblivion after Alhaji Umaru had secured his second term. Alhaji Umaru Yar’Adua who sees himself as an excellent political strategist, was also able to hide the cost of his victory to the Katsinawa. But even if one does not think he is an excellent political strategist, there is no denying the fact that he has had excellent rendezvous with power thrice. Only two Nigerian politicians have been that lucky, General Olusegun Obasanjo and Alhaji Bukar Abba the former governor of Yobe state and now a Senator. In his pursuit of power President Yar’ Adua may appear clumsy. He also has the penchant for either surrounding himself with nincompoops or arrogant advisers and thugs who can and do irritate easily. They take blame for his failures and in turn enrich themselves. But that has in many cases proved his strength. He is easily under-rated.
When Mallam Umaru secures power he keeps. This can be gleaned from his actions since he was declared the winner of the 2007 presidential elections. He is good in the art of political subterfuge. No sooner had he been declared the winner of the widely discredited 2007 elections than he clandestinely set out contacting opinion leaders to seek for their support to legitimize his administration. He promised to sanitize the electoral system and repeated same to the nation in his inauguration speech titled “March with me to the Age of Restoration.” Hear him: our elections had some shortcomings. Thankfully we have well-established legal avenues of redress, and I urge anyone aggrieved to pursue them. I also believe that our experiences represent an opportunity to learn from our mistakes.
Accordingly I will set up a panel to examine the entire electoral process with a view to ensuring that we raise the quality and standard of our general elections and thereby deepen our democracy.
It was a half-hearted speech which avoided the obvious – that there was no election in the strict definition of it in 2007. But whereas he did not whole heartedly admit that the election that brought him to power was manifestly flawed, he knew however, that the trauma President Obasanjo subjected Nigerians to was such even a half-hearted admission of guilt would be satisfying and encouraging to some Nigerians. By the time he inaugurated the Uwais panel on electoral reform, many Nigerians were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Some had even thought that “the march to restoration” had begun. That bought him some time. The particular appointment of Justice Uwais who had presided over the legalisation of three flawed presidential elections was instructive in that he was better placed to know what went wrong with those elections in the past and the judicial abracadabra they employed to legalise them. It was therefore an opportunity for him together with the other members of his team to suggest the way forward. Nigerians have since realised that what President Yar’Adua stands for is a “march to entrench rigging” by the way the report was handled by him and his team.
Similarly, President Umaru then took what to a casual observer was a decisive step at distancing himself from his benefactor General Obasanjo. He told the nation that the Obasanjo administration had spent $16 billion, on electricity projects without any tangible result. By so doing he paved the way for the House of Representatives to conduct public hearing on the matter opening the Pandora ’s Box. Corruption which was the hallmark of the Obasanjo administration was thoroughly exposed. Obasanjo was humiliated. His pride deflated. He lost weight. He celebrated his birthday not with the fanfare of the past but like a wet rat in a corner of his Otta farm. He only found his voice when the Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki Moon wrongly rehabilitated him by appointing him as a mediator in the Congo DR imbroglio. But for his thick skin General Obasanjo would not have had the temerity to be seen in public functions not alone to parade himself as the Chair of Board of Trustees of the PDP.
President Umaru took credit for the public hearing and the humiliation of General Obasanjo since there was no evidence that he tried to stop it. However, while the startling revelations at the public hearing bought him some political and moral capital and extended his honeymoon with Nigerians, President Yar’Adua, to the best of my knowledge has not taken any serious steps to clean the stable. It has been business as usual as the report of the boss of the EFCC cited above clearly demonstrated. This may have encouraged and even emboldened the Chair of the House Committee on Electricity, Hon. Elumelu and some officials of NERC to attempt to help themselves with N12billion rural electrification funds - that is if one believes the newspaper reports and the charges levelled against them in court by the EFCC.
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The next step in President Yar’Adua’s bid to consolidate his power was to get rid of those technocrats around President Obasanjo who played no mean role in bringing him to power. They were oblivious of what happened to Alhaji Lawal Batagarawa before them. President Yar’Adua knew that some of them had antagonized some of the political actors who also contributed to his campaigns and coming to power. An important segment of these actors were the governors. He needed those political actors to consolidate his power. The Obasanjo boys on the other hand did not only misunderstand Malam Umaru but also forgot that African leaders are not known for settling political debts. They do not want to be constantly reminded that they rode to power on the backs of some local champions. The worse of them prefer sycophants. Two of the Obasanjo technocrats, Alhaji Nasiru El Rufa’i and Alhaji Nuhu Ribadu were terribly bruised. They received the shock of their lives by the way they were treated. Obasanjo who was fighting for his reputation and the possibility of going back to jail could not save them.
If half of the energy that went into discrediting Nuhu Ribadu had been invested in investigating and prosecuting treasury looters some of whom have become our “Distinguished Senators” Nigeria’s ranking in the Perception index of the Transparency International would have been far higher. In dealing with Nuhu even the ICPC which had been hitherto comatose had suddenly woken up. It had not only found its vitality but also discovered that it can bark and bite. As for El Rufa’I, apart from his humiliation by the House of Representatives, he was also not only declared wanted on charges of corruption but he and other Nigerians were given the rude awakening to the effect that authoritarian rule is still with us, what with the attempt to permanently make him an exile. An attempt was made to deny him a passport. President Yar’Adua was quick in sacrificing one of the overzealous officials in the centre of the shameful saga, due to adverse public reaction.
According to Ribadu he was hounded out of office because he arrested and arraigned Chief Ibori the former governor of Delta state in court on charges of corruption. That his actions invited the ire of President Yar’Adua is not unconnected with both the tangible and intangible resources Chief Ibori had contributed to the processes that saw him to power. Ribadu’s assertion apart, there are other explanations for the perceived or obvious protection Chief Ibori continues to receive from the administration. Being a clever political animal President Yar Adua knows that without the solution to the Niger Delta issue he will definitely not have a successful tenure. And given the open secret that many of the major politicians in that region have their militants, he needs the likes of Chief Ibori, to cage in some of them. The Umaru rule of law as distinct from the Farida Waziri’s “just Rule of Law” was effectively used, first to deal with Ribadu and then to make Chief Ibori feel secure while Umaru and his lieutenants continued to rule Nigeria as they deem fit. A prelude to this was the plea bargain entered into first by Chief Alamieyeseigha and later Lucky Igbinedion.
Having outwitted the Obasanjo technocrats he turned his attention to one of the most important arms of the state - the armed forces. Remember, just before General Obasanjo left he had made series of appointments to the top echelon of that institution. As some political scientists say, the military is “an evil necessity”. It is evil because it can turn against the state that created it. It is a necessity in that it is an important element in the defence of the state. No African leader will be comfortable with a tenuous control of that institution. What is more, it was also gathered that there was no love lost between some of the top officers. And so it was that on the eve of his first trip to Saudi Arabia for treatment, Yar’Adua made sure that he changed the inherited military officers with his own appointees whose loyalty he thinks he commands. That way he would not need to be looking over his shoulders frequently and sleep only in the day time a la Dadis Camara of Guinea.
When General Abdullahi Mohammed, the Chief of Staff Mallam Umaru inherited from General Obasanjo forgot where power was located and thought he could manipulate the President, he was not only sent packing promptly and unceremoniously, but also the office he occupied was dismantled. George Edvibie the right hand man to Chief James Ibori who behaves like the major shareholder in the “business enterprise” known as the “presidency of Nigeria,” was appointed to the strategic position of the private secretary to the president. The same fate was later to befall Babagana Kingibe judged by the human shield around the President as too ambitious and whose loyalty in this uncertain period was in doubt.
Governors have not been left in equation. In Nigeria, they are critical to winning or losing elections. This has not escaped President Yar’Adua. After all he was at the PDP convention where governors made General Obasanjo kneel before Atiku to beg for a second term. He, more than anyone else, knows the role they played in bringing him to power. He is therefore aware of the dangers of antagonizing them. Hence he has been making strenuous efforts to bring even those who are not in the PDP into the fold. Evidence is his personal attendance at rallies organized to welcome those who had decamped from other parties into the PDP rigging machine. Governors who cannot cross-over for obvious reasons are courted and transformed into moles within their political parties. Ali Modu Sherrif is a typical example. When a fraction of his intimidating machine turned against him, President Umaru was quick in coming to his aid. With uncommon speed, the military descended on the enclave of the Boko Haram with ferociousness that are normally reserved for foreign invaders. The brutality beats the wildest imagination of many Nigerians. Those who surrendered were killed in cold blood. These included a 76 year old man whose crime was to have been an in-law to Mohammed Yusuf, the leader of the Boko Haramites.
Finally in his drive to have absolute control of the machinery of state, President Umaru Yar’Adua has turned his attention to the veritable vehicles for the implementation of government policies and programmes - civil service and government parastatals. It is also through these institutions that the wheels of clientalism are oiled. Civil servants who run these institutions can therefore easily become powerful. If they cease to be compliant, clientelism and election rigging become difficult. Hence, the need for a president to have the absolute loyalty of at least, the top echelon of the civil service and parastatals. Remember what General Obasanjo said while swearing in new permanent secretaries just before he was forced out of office: “to me there is no 99% loyalty. It has to be total. If you cannot give total loyalty you should look for another job.”
Recently many permanent secretaries and directors in the federal civil service and the parastatals were forced out of service. This is may not be unconnected with the perception some of the advisers around the President have of these officers. They think that the permanent secretaries and directors affected have been in office for too long and have become powerful. This has been reinforced by the fact that some of the officers have had policy implementation altercations with some of these advisers. They were not compliant enough. They must therefore be shown the way out. A minister is in the habit of threatening the civil servants in the ministry he heads. Indeed he got a respected permanent secretary transferred for daring to disagree with him.
What has happened so far has serious implications for free and fair elections and therefore democracy in Nigeria. This for the simple reason that in any democratic system, civilian political parties, and civilian pressure groups, and organisations, engage in democratic electoral contest for power on a regular basis. The existence of these and the democratic electoral contests which some of them engage in for power at various levels, cannot be sustained without an electoral commission, a civil service, a judiciary and law-enforcement agencies, which by the very existence of these contesting political parties, and political pressure groups, have to develop some capacity to operate within, and respect, the rule of law and the supremacy of the constitution. For, if the electoral commission, the civil service, the judiciary, and the law-enforcement agencies become partisans of the party or parties, in power, such that they do not allow a minimum of political space for free and fair electoral contest, the system will break down.
The Nigerian opposition and all Nigerians who desire to see democracy deepen democracy can ignore Mallam Umaru at their own peril.
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