PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

 

Danjuma as Vice-President?

ndajika@yahoo.com

Last Thursday Thisday carried a story on its front page in which it said a group of “Northern intellectuals and professionals” met in Abuja the day before to push for the candidacy of  former army chief, General T. Y. Danjuma, as vice-president should Acting President Goodluck Jonathan become  substantive. Listed among those “intellectuals and professionals” were Ahmed Joda, a super permanent secretary in the ‘70s, Mamman Daura, a former managing director of New Nigerian in its heydays, Adamu Fika, Wazirin Fika and a former head of federal civil service,  Dr Mahmud Tukur, a former minister and one of the country’s most respected egg-heads, Abba Kyari, a former managing director of United Bank of Africa, Adamu Adamu, a well known political columnist, Wada Maida, a former managing director of News Agency of Nigeria, and yours sincerely.

 The problem with the story was that it was a gross distortion of what really happened. To begin with the group never met on the Wednesday Thisday claimed it met. On that day I was in Kaduna. So also was Wazirin Fika who was indeed convalescing at the time. Malam Mamman and Alhaji Ahmed Joda were abroad. I am not aware if they have returned.

 Second, the last time the group met was nearly two months ago and that was the second of only two meetings it held. Malam Mamman, Wazirin Fika and Dr. Tukur were never at any of those meetings. Same thing with Nuhu Sani Zongo and Rufa’i Jumar Jose whose names were not even familiar to most of those at the meetings.

Third, General Danjuma’s name was only one of several that featured at the meeting. Others included Malam Adamu Ciroma, Madakin Fika, Professor Ango Abdullahi, General Aliyu Mohammed and a couple or so of former and serving governors.

As a participant in the meetings, Thisday’s story came to me as a big surprise. First, by the time the newspaper published the story Danjuma seemed to have taken himself out of the running for the No. 2 job by featuring prominently among the Eminent Elders Group of former heads of state and chief justices of the country and a few self-selected elders who met with Vice-President Jonathan to add their voices to calls on the infirm President Umaru Yar’adua to hand over the No. 1 job to his deputy.

Second, if Thisday had not been in a hurry to publish the story it would have found out that even though Danjuma and Madakin Fika were reluctant to take up the job should it become available, citing their age and physical fitness, they were not altogether averse to the idea.

However, with General Danjuma, there were concerns among some members of the group that former president Obasanjo, as the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) and Jonathan’s proverbial godfather, would strongly object because of the bitter feud that has since developed between the two erstwhile friends and because with Danjuma as the second-in-command Obasanjo was likely to find it harder to control the presidency than otherwise.

I suspect it is the fear of a malevolent influence over Jonathan by Obasanjo which may have motivated only God knows how many Northern groups, including ours, to try and find who they think is the right person to counter the former president should Yar’adua fail to return to his job. However, this fear can only be one of several other motives, perhaps some of them self-serving.

With the Joda group, the fear of Obasanjo was hardly the primary motive. It would have been an irony if that were so because the intimacy between Joda and Obasanjo that goes back to Obasanjo’s military rule in the late seventies is an open secret. Indeed not a few who learnt of the initiative believed it was an Obasanjo script we were inadvertently playing out.

Perhaps so. But with most members of the group, I believe the main concern was the way the constitutional crisis caused by the president’s infirmity was beginning to reflect badly on the North. Certainly that was my main concern when I accepted the invitation to be part of the initiative.

In a center-spread interview with the Peoples’ Daily last Monday, veteran radical politician and elder statesman, Alhaji Tanko Yakasai, said something which I believe underscored the concern of those like me who thought the crisis of the president’s health was taking a dangerous North/South dimension. “Obasanjo”,  Alhaji Tanko said, “came up with this bombshell that the president should resign. Before then no one had called for the president’s resignation.”

Obasanjo, he said, made the call because Yar’adua refused to die as the former president had hoped so that the presidency can go back to the South so soon after Obasanjo’s eight-year rule which was disastrous for the country, and even more so for the North. Whatever might have been Obasanjo’s motive in calling on our infirm president to go, Alhaji Tanko was certainly wrong to say the former president was the first to ask Yar’adua to resign.

Long before Obasanjo I did ask Yar’adua to resign for reason of his infirmity.  “The president,” I said on these pages on September 10, 2008,  ”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.” I am sure I was not even the first Northerner to say so.

Of course being a journalist, even if a veteran, my voice could never have the weight of Obasanjo’s. But it was important to know there were Northerners who were as concerned as other Nigerians about crisis of development the president’s ill-health had inflicted on the country.

Even if Obasanjo’s motive for the presidency to remain in the South were to succeed through Jonathan’s ascendency I believe the North has itself to blame for allowing Obasanjo to have single-handedly imposed what was clearly a lousy presidential ticket on PDP, a party which had its origin in the North and which could boast of not a few generals and veteran politicians from the region. After all actions or inactions have consequences.

The over-riding consideration on such matters must be what is right and proper, morally, legally and constitutionally. On all three counts it is not right and proper that the country’s development should be held hostage by the infirmity of a president because of the internal convention of the ruling party, a convention which, in any case, negates the basic principles of democracy.

This was why some of us that Thisday described as Northern “intellectuals and professionals” met not so much to push for General Danjuma, or anyone else for that matter, to be the next vice-president, but to work quietly against the impression that the presidency must remain in the North for the next eight years by hook or crook.

The irony of Thisday’s story was that it came when our effort seemed to have reached a dead-end.