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Turai, You Can Run

April 28, 2010

Let’s get some assumptions very clear right from the start. The current jostle for power in PDP for next year’s general elections is immoral and unprecedented. It is so because the incumbency of President Umaru Yar’ Adua is still ongoing and validly so. This is also because all democratically elected past office-holders and at the moment had either ran for two terms, or seeking to be re-elected. 

Let’s get some assumptions very clear right from the start. The current jostle for power in PDP for next year’s general elections is immoral and unprecedented. It is so because the incumbency of President Umaru Yar’ Adua is still ongoing and validly so. This is also because all democratically elected past office-holders and at the moment had either ran for two terms, or seeking to be re-elected. 
Alhaji Shehu Shagari ran a second term, first from 1979 to 1983; however, the government was overthrown at the commencement of the second term following the military coup in December 1983. Chief Olusegun Obasanjo did two terms, first from 1999 to 2003, and from 2003 to 2007, thus completing his two terms.

Now, enters the biggest constitutional debacle in our electoral history. The Katsina-born Umaru Yar’Adua came to power in 2007, and had been dogged with crippling ailment since November 23, 2009 when he was last seen in the public and in the corridors of power. Under the doctrine of necessity, the erstwhile vice president, Dr. Ebele Goodluck Jonathan became the country’s Acting President barely two months ago. Since then, Nigeria and the ruling party, PDP had kept the people in a quandary about what to make of the party’s contraption of North-South rotational presidency, a veiled abridgement of the country’s constitution in order to shut out the opposition parties from any electoral advantage. There is therefore no iota of doubt that Dr. Goodluck Jonathan’s government at the moment is a continuation of the administration of Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.

 In a constitutional monarchy, any proclamations from Jonathan could only have been exercised in the name of the Head of State or King. Jonathan could therefore be likened to a Prime Minister holding and exercising power in the name of the Head of State, or President-Yar’ Adua, whether seen or unseen. Perhaps, this was the point the former controversial Attorney General, Chief Michael Aondoakaa referred to when he postulated that the President could govern from anywhere. With deeper hindsight, he might have been legally correct, but politically deficient. Couldn’t the bombastic bully have executed his game plan without opting for a political suicide?
This raises the question whether Goodluck Jonathan, or Atiku Abubakar or General Ibrahim Babangida or anybody in the PDP could aspire to seek nomination for the office of the president while the legitimate occupant was still alive, whether in an active or sickly capacity.

Until Alhaji Umaru Yar’Adua is eased out of office as a President, the power and incumbency is still his. This is a cul-de-sac to the Northern establishment. Without Yar’Adua vacating office as a President, Jonathan remains an Acting President, and so there cannot be another Acting Vice President. So for now, Jonathan remains a sole administrator in office.

Constitutionally, Umaru Yar’Adua remains in power and not in office. My understanding and rationalization of the controversial doctrine of necessity which the National Assembly invoked to wrest power from the sickly President Umaru Yar’Adua only further exacerbated the metamorphosing contradictions in our chaotic democracy. I might not be a lawyer, but my common sense told me that power was stolen from Umaru Yar’Adua and handed to Jonathan, and without cleaning up the tracks. Why has it not occurred to the butchers of our constitution that those who crafted the document were deliberate that under no circumstance shall the Presidency be held, or occupied by one man only? Still, this is not Jonathan’s problem. It is not the problem of Umaru Yar’Adua either. It is the problem with the people. It is the problem with the fraud called Nigeria. And we all are feeling cool with an unusual scenario and pretentiously moving on in one direction, while the elephant sauntered moved in the opposite direction.

The rotational clause in the PDP’s constitution, or wherever the charter was drafted and ratified, presents a litmus test about the integrity, honesty and morality of our democracy in Nigeria. The clause might have been designed to ensure power exchange between the North and the South. The spirit might have been designed to ensure stability in the polity, but it was also the source of fraud to the extent that it did not allow unfettered right to compete for power. Such undemocratic environment easily gave room for manipulation and disenfranchisement of the best and most able by those with skewed interests. This is the unfortunate trajectory of the ruling party’s often celebrated largest party in Africa, and sadly too, the biggest social embarrassment in Africa.

The lure of power is enormous and so are the temptations. The nation is once again at the evil gate of deception, never known since the aborted infamous third term bid by General Olusegun Obasanjo in 2006. With no last word yet on the state of health, and fate of the incumbent President Umaru Yar’Adua, almost all the newspapers in the country are now brimming with speculations about whether the Acting President, Goodluck Jonathan would run or not in 2011. However, if the body language the Acting President displayed in an interview with the CNN correspondent, Christiane Amanpour recently offered any credible lead, then the simple, but sad conclusion, is that the Bayelsa state-born “Mr Lucky” is a sure candidate. This is dangerous for our fragile stability, not least the age-long distrust between the North and the South for which most Southern politicians like Chief Obafemi Awolowo was not accepted in the North despite his assailing credentials. Why would Goodluck Jonathan want to rupture the growing friendship and rapprochement among the younger generation?

Would Goodluck Jonathan spew the landscape with mistrust? Would Goodluck Jonathan be able to look in the face of his trusted friend from Jibiya village and say, it was all politics and that in politics there were no permanent treaties but permanent interest? When gentlemen begin to renege on the agreements that they had entered, then suspicion and bedlam take the centre stage. The Acting President can best serve the cause of Nigeria and strengthen her democracy by organizing a very credible election of one-man, one-vote. By becoming an active player in any future contest, the outcome would not be judged free and fair, no matter how transparent the process might have been. In a short spell of time, the AP has tasted power, and he appears to have been infested with the Aso Rock virus. He needs a strong anti-virus to clean up the hard disk of greed and temptation.

Without resolving the Umaru Ya’Adua’s debacle, he remains a ghost that would haunt and hound the selection process for a presidential candidate in next year’s election in the PDP. The party must accept and recognize the fact that there can be no meaningful end, or acceptable solution to the hanging presidency, if the ailing President was not factored in their calculations. This might not be the best of time in Africa’s largest dubious party, the PDP and no thanks to the unending shenanigans to railroad the Nigerian democracy in their own devious image.
 
When King Hafez al-Assad of Syria died in 2000, his son and current King assumed power as leader of the Baath party and elected head of State of the Arab same year. When Prime Minister Rafiq Baha Hariri of Lebanon was assassinated in February 2005, his son and current Prime Minister, Saad Hariri was groomed and became a Prime Minister in November 2009. After President Fidel Castro of Cuba was confined to the hospital bed due to cancer, his younger brother, General Raul Castro was nominated to the office in acting capacity and later made a substantive Head of State in February 2008. After Senator Benigno Aquino was assassinated at the Manilla airport as he disembarked the aircraft from exile in the United States by agents of the dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, providence threw up a vaguely known house wife, and better known as Corazon Aquino into prominence. Generally known globally as “Cory”, she became the hub of the new Filipino offensive in the wake of the husband’s assassination.

As the agitation for democratic reforms worsened, the beautiful widow became handy tool and an enthusiastic leader of the opposition voices against the despotism of Ferdinand Marcos. Despite the fact that she had no prior political experience except that she was the wife of a successful senator and heard him debate; she was deeply saddened at the death of husband for his democratic values. This was to her a national challenge and a call to duty. She seized the moment and soon became the rallying point of the opposition, inspiring all shades of the demographic strata into civil disobedience, and called for a return of the country to the people. In February 1986, the Aquino resistance toppled the evil dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and thus became the President of the Philippines.

At this turn of our new – yes, new – history since destiny and fate drew curtain on what was supposed to be the shinning phase of the Umaru Yar’Adua’s walk on power. History is never short of events, as man remains the centre of that orbital swing. Since the reclusive life of the President that had assumed some mythical epoch, the wife of the President, Hajia Turai Yar’Adua had raised the bar of the powers and influence of a First Lady that many analysts have fingered her as the real power that guided the Yar’Adua’s presidency. She is a cursory study in the management of power. Nancy Reagan, wife of the late American President, Ronald Reagan was perceived as the power behind Ronny’s presidency. She told him when to go and when to return, where to sit and when to stand.  
 
The best tribute and honour that the PDP could pay to the Yar’Adua’s legacy is to adopt the wife in the next year’s presidential elections. When Benazir Bhutto of the Pakistani Peoples Party, PPP was assassinated during the electioneering campaigns in 2008, the party rallied support for the husband, Mr. Yousuf Gilani and the party went ahead to win the general elections. Yar’Adua is a fine gentleman and conscientious leader that engineered the peace process in the Niger Delta. Today, he is bedridden, not so much because he was a sickler, but on account of service to the nation. To be kind to him is to ensure that his legacies live on. In the circumstance, the best person that had been at his side while in office, and his bedside, is the wife. PDP should mass support behind this woman. She is educated and intelligent. She is smart and prudent in authority.

Let Turai take up the gauntlet of power struggle. Yes, she can. She has the beauty, the poise and height to stand together with her peer leaders. She was first state officer to recommend the use of nuclear technology in the treatment of breast cancer for women during one of her working visits to Spain early last year. This is a new generation woman that thinks 21st century technology applications for human development. None of the male contenders for power have reasoned along the line of technological solutions for our national development, except where such ideas aided their kleptomaniac tendencies. She should build new abridges of power across the country and reconcile with the civil society. Nobody hates her; it is just that her adversaries dislike her disdain for Nigerians who desired to see their kidnapped President. With two sitting governors as son in-laws, and the 65 million women population, Mrs. Turai Yar’Adua could split the PDP down the middle in the primaries, through the governors’ club and galvanize the populace to an unprecedented outcome. Truly, she can, and yes, she can. However, she must give up these antics of turning the husband into a mythical object that can appear and disappear anytime. This man is in dire strait, and even a patient that had been confined to hospital bed with acute malaria knows pretty well how long it takes to recover, let alone return to full and active duties.


Fidel Otuya
Lagos

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