The following argument ensued when the extreme right-wing Fascist Party was, despite its dictatorial nature, gaining popularity across Italy in the 1920s, between a Fascist Party apparatchik and a rural socialist who was urged by the politician to join the Fascist Party but responded as if he was asked to renounce his faith. “How can I,” retorted the rural socialist, “join your party? My father was a socialist. My grandfather was a socialist. I can not really join the Fascist Party.”

No doubt, the responses you always would get from many respondents when one asks people why they don’t want Umaru Musa Yar’Adua as the president of Nigeria come May 29, 2007 would have invariably borne a peculiar theme. “He will be Obasanjo’s clone,” scores of commentators have declared. “My people are not members of the PDP.” “He is sick,” many have argued. “He emerges from PDP,” one concluded. Like the rural socialist, most of the people nowadays cannot give cogent explanation as to why they have particular political identity, or, why they prefer one politician to another. But here unlike the rural socialist who later declared: “I will join the Fascist Party” when the fascist politician wrapped around his neck this poser: “What if your father is a murderer?” Some people cannot even engage you in any argument – however tenable – that might tamper their mere secular attachment. Why do we hate something that we cannot explain why we hate it?

What I want to say here is that political parties are birds of a feather. You cannot differentiate, in terms of achievement or political fairness/fair-play, between an ANPP-controlled state or AD-controlled state and PDP-controlled state or APGA-controlled state. In Nigeria, the doctrine the politicians respect more than the Constitution is flaunting power. Whatever party gets the power it simply becomes something else.

Some have however said that he will be Obasanjo’s clone. But would he really be that or run a puppet government? To answer this, we need to take a brief voyage into history. When the northern elite supported Obasanjo in 1999, the Yoruba said that Obasanjo would be more responsive to the north than his kinsmen because they (the northerners) were the people that installed him. So they anointed their “real son” in person of Chief Olu Falae. Did Obasanjo run a puppet government as the Yoruba envisaged? Or, did he become IBB’s lackey?

To a pedestrian in the street of, say Kano, becoming a member of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is almost a heresy. I have recently engaged a friend that has this political view in argument as to why he will not join the PDP. He tersely responded that nothing good comes out of the PDP. You see this is ridiculous. I argued myself out that good may come out of the PDP by giving him a detailed story of how Prophet Musa (Moses) [AS] emerged from the house of despotic Fir’Auna (Pharaoh) to become prophet and receive the Revelation. After the story, I then bowled him out with this interrogative cudgel: Can we now say that nothing good came from Pharaoh’s house? Yar’adua’s CV, I told him, shows that he is honest, simple, self-effacing and good resource manager. Aren’t you aware that he is also not political neophyte, for he has since cut his political teeth at a youthful age? Are you not one of those certificate-freak Nigerians? Another good tiding for you is that none among the trio of the top contenders has a university degree but him. Most of the people today have closed-circuit mind that precludes intelligent argument. I put it to him that it is the personality that he should vote because in Nigerian politics any ruling party has despotic tendencies. And that is the nature of the parties since independence. Don’t you think Yar’Adua will be different? We are all aware that the pre-1999 Obasanjo we knew is quite different person today.

The argument that Yar’Adua is indisposed is most upsetting, I put it to my friend. Though I am not his physician to ascertain this nor are you, but he (Yar’Adua) has disputed this several times. You, the prophets of doom, once uncovered the PDP’s “grand plan” by prophesying that Governor Ahmed Makarfi of Kaduna State was fixed to die at the early stage of his administration to give way for his healthy deputy, Stephen Shekari from southern Kaduna to become the governor. But as it later turned out, God says no, Makarfi outlived his “healthy” deputy who died some two years or so ago. Since that time we did not hear this unintelligent ranting about Makarfi again – the hypothesis and the deputy are dead, Makarfi alive. Another good example was the sudden demise of Mallam Aminu Kano before 1983 elections, which he would have been in the presidential contest. Did the doom-merchants predict Aminu Kano’s death? I can go on and on. Can you say that none of our political leaders is diabetic or asthmatic? Death has many causes, we all suppose, you cannot flee from death and however your condition is, you will die only when your time comes. What Allah (SWT) says in the Glorious Qur’an 4:78 is “Wherever you may be, death will overtake you, even if you should be within towers of lofty construction…” “Say,” Allah added in Qur’an [62:8], “‘Indeed, the death from which you flee – indeed, it will meet you.”

Didn’t it occur to us that the present insecurity that bedevils the nation is more dangerous than much other physical impairments? What about the present gale of armed robbery that wreaked havoc on our lives in major cities and roads? What about the dangers of flying our monstrous skies? How many governors (like late Col Wase), deputies, senators, army generals, spiritual leaders, school children (with promising career), etcetera, etcetera that our skies gulped? No cancer can take more than 60 young children at a go but Nigeria’s ailing aviation industry. And even in the war, President Obasanjo has noted, 12 serving generals don’t perish! Does cancer ever kill 12 generals at one time? Why are we rationally challenged?

You should have rather put your weight on his principled posture than the prognosis that he will die the sooner he is elected. One apt proverb disparages this hypothesis as it observes: “a happy heart doeth good like medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones.” Don’t you know that lying behind Yar’Adua’s frail demeanor and the (alleged) ailing heart were a happy heart and an unbroken spirit that may cure Nigeria’s ill health?

“Then, I will vote for Yar’Adua,” my friend conceded.

Jaafar is of Yar’Adua Network, Katsina Road, Kano (jafsmohd@yahoo.com)