A Booby

A Booby-Trapped Presidency

Moses Ochonu

Obasanjo has done a number on Umaru Yar’Adua , Nigeria ’s new but fraudulently minted president. It was not enough to extract Yar’Adua from a life of blissful obscurity to burden him with the task of undoing the multiple injuries that Obasanjo inflicted on Nigeria in the last eight years. It was not enough to virtually force a reluctant man of modest ambition into a demeaned and discredited presidency. In the true tradition of Obasanjo, he is not leaving Yar’Adua to his own independent presidential whim; the old man’s last two weeks in office were marked by a gale of hasty appointments into sensitive chambers of our national political and bureaucratic establishment. They were also characterized by the greedy, corrupt, and rushed sale of valuable national assets to Obasanjo’s corporate friends and rumored fronts.

These last-minute actions by Obasanjo were informed not just by his insatiable accumulative impulse, which is well documented, but also by a self-serving political calculation: Obasanjo is blackmailing Yar’Adua into retaining as much of Obasanjo’s tainted legacy as the latter wants. Obasanjo intends, by these rash decisions, to hamstring Yar’Adua and prevent him from asserting himself. The logic is fairly straightforward: confront Yar’Adua with a fait accompli on these appointments and fraudulent asset sales and force him to either accept the ubiquitous imprint of the expired dictator on his government, or move against these neo-Obasanjo presences and risk the wrath of his benefactor.

Obasanjo has effectively booby-trapped the presidency for Ya’Adua. The new president has no room to maneuver. Whatever he does will get him into trouble—with Nigerians or with Obasanjo’s lingering brigade of opportunists and sycophants. The question is: whose trouble would Yar’Adua rather court or seek to escape, Nigerians’ or Obasanjo’s?

Here is the scenario. Most of the last-minute appointees of Obasanjo’s government are Yoruba. This is crass nepotism and is clearly in violation of the federal character principle of the constitution, so, legally, Yar’Adua would be on solid ground if he decided to reverse his mentor on these patrimonial awards. Politically, however, Yar’Adua could court serious trouble if he tried to undo the appointments. For now, most visible South-Western political figures, especially those entrenched in the dominant Awoist tradition detest Obasanjo and the electoral farce that he recently engineered. A reversal of these appointments could, at least temporarily, put them in a pan-Yoruba alliance with Obasanjo against Yar’Adua and what is likely to be a Northern inner circle of his administration. Charges of political ethnic cleansing could be thrown at Yar”Adua by even the most rabid anti-Obasanjo elements among the latter’s kinsmen. Hackneyed, simplistic, political constructs like “Northern domination,” “Northern Oligarchy,” and “Northern hegemony” would make a glorious re-entry into the lexicon of our national political conversation. The post-June 12 political animus directed at the North and the Hausa-Fulani by the South-Western intelligentsia could be resurrected with an intractable vehemence. There will be pressure on Yar'Adua to assert his independence by removing Obasanjo's last-minute appointees, but if he succumbed to such pressures, he would inadvertently be helping a bastard political child reconcile with his estranged kinsmen--an unlikely alliance that may be directed at Yar'Adua himself.

If Yar'Adua does not undo these appointments, he would be saddled with a federal bureaucracy beholden to Obasanjo and his widely hated legacies. If he undoes them, Yar’Adua could lose his only reliable constituency of support: the entrenched pro-Obasanjo group of ethnic loyalists and political opportunists. This could be good thing for Yar’Adua. But would he have the courage to challenge his only constituency, and if he did, would his already tenuous presidency survive the battle that may follow? At any rate, would a political rookie lacking any enduring ties to the national political elite be able to cultivate an alternative national political constituency to sustain his presidency? These are the dilemmas laying in wait for Yar’Adua.

It has been reported that Yar’Adua has already suspended the dubious sale of the Egbin thermal power plant to politically connected buyers. Apparently he did this to avert a looming strike by power sector workers that would have thrown the nation into darkness. He could do this because the buyers are, from what we know, not as intimately connected to Obasanjo’s financial interests as the Dangotes and Otedolas. Curiously but understandably, Yar’Adua has yet to make a pronouncement on the rigged sale of the Port-Harcourt and Kaduna refineries to this duo. He would be walking a political minefield if he moved so quickly against so intimate a financial interest of his mentor. Reversing these sales is fraught with political danger for Yar’Adua because it would constitute the most direct, brazen act of betrayal yet by Obasanjo’s protégé, a sign, perhaps, of things to come. This would most certainly unleash Obasanjo’s legendary vengeance on all things Yar’Adua.

This, like the reversal of Obasanjo’s desperate appointments, would be praised for its populist, patriotic motivation. But it would incur Obasanjo’s vindictive angst, the outcome of which no one can predict. Is Yar’Adua man enough to put patriotism and the national interest before his political loyalty to Obasanjo?

Among Obasanjo’s cruel twilight decisions were the increase in the pump price of fuel from N65 to N75, and the 100 percent increase in VAT. This is yet another trap for Ya’Adua. But, unlike Obasanjo’s other parting decisions, it provides Yar’Adua with an opportunity to overcome some of his credibility handicap. What this decision presents to Yar’Adua is not so much dilemma as it is an unintended opportunity to buy some legitimacy with populism. What’s more, the political fallout from reversing these increases are likely to be less damaging—perhaps a few angry chuckles from Obasanjo at the unexpected audacity of his neophyte protégé.

Yar’Adua can, without irreversibly alienating his mentor, reverse these increases in an admittedly impressionistic and shallow display of populism. He could even go further to restore some of the subsidy removed from petroleum products and return the price to the region of N35-N40. This would win him some of the credibility that would otherwise elude his presidency.

Yar’Adua’s options are limited. He has little or no wiggle room, thanks to the self-interested midnight decisions of his predecessor. He has to make a choice between offending Nigerians and offending Obasanjo. For a presidency emptied of all electoral credibility and for a president who is a conflicted beneficiary of a fraudulent mandate, his only choice is to cultivate for himself some political capital, if not credibility, even if it means undoing and undermining his mentor’s controversial legacies.

Those who are close to him should be counseling him to choose the populist path, even if he has to do so crudely and even if it is shamefully obvious that he is doing so to stave off some of the questions of legitimacy that plagues his administration. This is his safest, least problematic, option.

But while populism may win him new friends among the populace, endear him to a new national political constituency, and perhaps discredit Obasanjo and his legacy and deprive them of the political capital with which to get back at Yar’Adua, a desperate embrace of populist governance comes with its problems. As much as Nigeria is need of some urgent populist interventions in some sectors of the economy and to bring some temporary succor to the suffering people of Nigeria, what the country desires more is strategic thinking and planning about the future. A rash of populist decisions and reversals of his mentor’s decisions would elicit applause in the short run, but it would only be a matter of time before perceptive Nigerians began asking the same questions they began asking of the Obasanjo presidency after applauding, tolerating, or forgiving its populist rhetorical beginning.

Populist actions taken without a strategic destination in mind and outside a transformative agenda may even reinforce the perception that Yar’Adua was not prepared to be president, and that he is merely a naive victim of Obasanjo’s obsession with self-perpetuation and self-preservation.