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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
Between God, Obasanjo, Yarádua And The Rest Of Us
Barely three months after President Olusegun Obasanjo rigged himself back into office for his second and final term, he said in an interview in Sunday Punch that he was leaving the question of his successor to God.
“Mr. President,” he’d been asked, “have you given thought to who would succeed you?” To which he replied, “I will leave that to God.” (Sunday Punch, September 8, 2003).
As things turned out, the president never really meant to leave anything to God. It soon emerged that even as he invoked His name, the man had made up his mind that he would be the one to succeed himself whatever it took.
Before long his Third Term Agenda began to unfold. His long time critic, the late Alhaji Wada Nas, had repeatedly warned Nigerians about such an agenda but few took him seriously. Half way through the president’s second and final term, it became obvious that Nas was not being frivolous. But by then it looked as if the Third Term train had become unstoppable.
Then God, once again, showed that no one invokes His name in vain; in May 2006 the Third Term train suddenly and unexpectedly hit the buffers and skidded off the rail. This was when the National Assembly threw out the constitutional amendment bill through which the president wanted to realize his wish.
Predictably the man responded to the collapse of his self succession agenda with un-sport-manlike sour-grape. “Many derogatory statements and unfounded allegations,” he told a meeting of PDP’s National Executive Council meeting on May 18, 2006, “have been made about me and my position concerning the so-called third term in the National Assembly and in the media which are false, incorrect and uncalled for... I was maligned, insulted and wrongly accused but I remained where I am and what I am.”
Having been a victim of a “ruthless and undemocratic regime,” he further said in obvious reference to his imprisonment in 1995 by General Sani Abacha’s regime on a charge of coup attempt, “I cannot be anything but a guardian of democracy.”
One year later the man was even more categorical in his denial of his Third Term Agenda. “If,” he said on May 19, 2007 in the FRCN/VOA radio programme, The President Explains, “I sought the third term and I wanted it, I would have got it. I have not said this before. God would have given it to me. I did not want it. If I had wanted third term, I would have prayed for it. I would have worked for it and God would have given it to me. I know this because there is nothing I wanted that God did not give me.”
This clearly amounted to an attempt by the man to play God. As Kunle Fagbemi, an editor at The Nation, summed it so beautifully in a reaction in the newspaper’s edition of May 22, 2007, the man inadvertently exposed his “theology” as one that was a “subtle deification of self as he sought to bring God to dote upon his whims.”
Nigeria’s predicament today over being ruled by a president whose physical health is unstable, all the vehement official denials regardless, is the direct consequence of Obasanjo’s theology of self-deification.
Evidence of this self-deification abound, not least of which is his famed penchant for knowing-it-all. This vice revealed itself clearly at the December 10, 2005 convention of the PDP. On that day, the man sought to arrogate to himself the prerogative of being the sole interpreter of the party’s policy on power rotation.
“As a party,” he told the convention, “we must resist efforts by some individuals or groups to use their pedestrian understanding of power shift and power rotation to hold the country to ransom. When the time comes they should ACCORD ME, AS THE LEADER OF THE PARTY, THE OPPORTUNITY TO INTERPRET our policy and principles of power shift to suit the occasion which will definitely consider the seeming agitation from the North of the country.” (Emphasis mine)
The time for him to exercise this self-arrogated prerogative of being the advocate, judge and jury of the PDP’s affairs finally arrived during its presidential primaries in the run-up to last year’s general elections. By then his Third Term agenda had, mercifully, become history.
As the sole advocate, judge and jury of PDP affairs, the man decided to impose a Yar’adua/Goodluck presidential ticket on the PDP and eventually on Nigerians. This was certainly not the strongest ticket the party could present. On the contrary it could hardly be weaker. At the time it was already an open secret that Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar’adua, the reticent government of Katsina State, had a kidney disorder which was likely to get worse if the man subjected himself to the punishing work regime of presidential campaign. Also at that time, there was case of money laundering running in to tens of millions of Naira against the wife of Goodluck Jonathan, the governor of Bayelsa State.
It spoke volumes about Obasanjo’s commitment to democracy, transparency and accountability that he still went ahead almost single-handedly to impose such a weak ticket on his party and eventually to ram it down the throat of hapless Nigerians.
As with his Third Term agenda, Obasanjo’s attempt at playing God by imposing someone of doubtful health and another with a question mark over his integrity on Nigerians as president and vice-president may yet come back to haunt him. Already, he is known to have complained about Yaradua’s reversal of several of his policies. Who knows, he may eventually overcome his infirmity and live long enough to completely dismantle his benefactor’s obnoxious legacy.
Yar’adua would not, after all, be the first leader in the world to suffer ill health and attempt to hide it. America’s John F. Kennedy, for example, suffered from Addison’s disease which is a rare hormonal disorder. He also suffered from numerous other mysterious diseases which led to his addiction to amphetamines and other drugs. According to Gore Vidal in his 2001 collection of his essays entitled The Last Empire, four times Kennedy was given the last rites as a Catholic and four times he survived the news of his imminent death. This was before he finally fell to an assassin’s bullets in 1963. All through his political career he and his kitchen cabinet managed to keep a lid on his diseases and addiction to drugs.
But that was then and this is now. Forty five odd years ago, the personal health of an American president, like his sexual peccadilloes, was off-limits for the press. This is no longer the case. For several decades now the state of the president’s health has to be made public at least once a year.
In any case, to attempt covering up the ailment of a leader in a democracy and in the 21st century is like attempting to cover up the sun with the palm of your hand. This, needless to say, is impossible.
The attempts to cover up Yaradua’s ill health could be based on well founded suspicions that Obasanjo never meant well for Yar’adua himself and for Nigerians in imposing him on the country as president. But Yar’adua and his kitchen cabinet ought to know that whatever may have been Obasanjo’s propositions only God is in a position to dispose.
The president should know that it is not in his own interest or that of Nigerians that he should remain president, if, as seems obvious since he took office, he cannot cope with the rigours of his office due to his ill health.
As a Muslim, he knows that a leader must be trustworthy. He cannot be trusted if he continues to deny what is all too obvious about the state of his health. This would amount to playing God, something He obviously does not take kindly to as his benefactor, Obasanjo, may have since hopefully learnt.
Yar’adua may fear that he could trigger a political crisis if he levels with Nigerians and as a result he is eventually forced to resign and hand over to his deputy as the Constitution says. That may amount to forfeiting his region’s turn to preside over the affairs of the country, thus triggering a major political crisis based on his party’s policy of power rotation. He should leave the solution to such a conjecture to God.
In the meantime the rest of us should learn at least one big lesson of the predicament Obasanjo has plunged us into by imposing a dubious presidency on the country. And this is simply that if it ain’t broke, as the American’s would say, don’t try to fix it. This policy of power rotation that has since become a convention of our politics was a foolish attempt at fixing a system that was not as broke as we imagined. In any case, the policy is patently undemocratic, even anti-democracy.
God may be the final word in whatever we plan or do but He gave us the faculty to distinguish between right and wrong. In other words we owe ourselves to do our own bit before we leave the rest to Him.
Our current predicament shows clearly that power rotation is wrong in principle and potentially destabilizing in practice. We would only be doing our own bit if we do away with it starting with the next general elections in 2011. If we don’t, we can be sure that genuine democracy will never take root and flourish in this country.
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