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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
The Danger of Propagandizing the Crisis of Yar’adua’s Illness It seems to me some people and a section of the country’s media are determined to turn the crisis of President Umaru Yar’adua’s ill-health in to a North versus South affair in which the North, as usual, is painted as the villain of the piece. The leader in this propaganda war against the North is the Nigerian Tribune, the self-appointed mouthpiece of the Yoruba, which, by virtue of its early contact with the Whiteman compared to other nationalities, considers itself the most sophisticated nationality in the country and therefore the rightful heir to the legacy of the long departed colonial master. As a, if not the, mouthpiece of the Yoruba, the Tribune, has always regarded the North, more specifically, the region’s dominant “Hausa-Fulani” (for which read Kanuri, Nupe and any tribe which is predominantly Muslim), as a usurper of this legacy and therefore a legitimate target for unrelenting attack. For a newspaper that has always looked for any excuse to attack a region it apparently considers a mortal enemy, the Yar’adua health crisis must have been God-sent. Since the crisis climaxed in November with the sudden evacuation of the president to Jedda, Saudi Arabia, for treatment, hardly a day passes that the newspaper would not lampoon the North for allegedly wanting to hang on to power at the centre by hook AND crook. In one of its most recent attacks the newspaper said in banner headlines in its edition of February 3, that the “North (is) behind Yar’adua’s refusal to handover.” “Contrary to the media posturing of key northern leaders on the need to respect the constitution as a result of Yar’adua’s prolonged absence from the country” the newspaper said in the story, “the Nigerian Tribune can reveal that leaders of the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) are behind the power vacuum occasioned by the president’s absence.” I read the story and found no evidence beyond a flippant conjecture about a decision by the ACF at the end of a meeting Tribune said it held on December 16, to “play politics of the North in a bid to ensure that power does not go back to the South.” Tribune is, of course, not alone in its bid to paint the North as the villain of the crisis of Yar’adua’s ill-health. Only last weekend Saturday Vanguard carried a front page headline which talked about “Why the North is against Jonathan.” In the same edition, the newspaper carried a bold reverse line block headline on pages ten, 11 and 12 which claimed “The North takes on Jonathan as Yar’adua returns.” Its evidence was no more than an interview with Alhaji Abubakar Rimi, a former governor of Kano State, who said in effect that the North was not opposed to Jonathan acting as president but the manner in which it was done by the National Assembly. Another newspaper, The Nation, had a similar story about the North being the villain in its edition of the same day. “Northern governors’ plot against Jonathan fails,” it said in a front page banner headline in its weekend edition on Saturday. I read through the story and found absolutely no evidence of a plot, never mind one that failed. Instead the newspaper itself provided evidence to the contrary. “It was learnt,” the newspaper said somewhat lamely, “that a member of the kitchen cabinet of President Umaru Yar’adua who attended the session had tried to persuade the governors to resist what was carefully packaged as an anti-North policy but most of those in attendance called for caution.” If the majority of the governors at the meeting rejected the stand of Yar’adua’s alleged Man Friday, how logical was it then to have concluded that the governors plotted against Acting President Goodluck Jonathan? In spite of the exertions of Tribune et al, the fact is that there is no Northern plot to stop Jonathan from filling the vacuum created by the absence of an apparently infirm Yar’adua. First, the ACF which the newspaper claimed has decided to “play the politics of the North”, whatever that means, is not the only organization that says it speaks for the North. The Northern Union under Dr Sola Saraki, makes a similar claim. Then there is the Middle Belt Forum which claims to speak for a largely Christian part of the North. Et cetera, Et cetera. Second, there have been as many prominent Northerners in support of Jonathan as there have been those opposed to him. If anything there have probably been more in support than in opposition. For example of the odd dozen members of the ad hoc Nigerian Elders Forum that urged adherence to the Constitution in resolving the Yar’adua predicament during a visit to the acting president the other day, only three were from the South. Similarly, there have been as many Southerners opposed to Jonathan as there have been in support. Indeed perhaps the greatest opposition to the man has come from his own South-South , at least initially. It is, for example, a well known fact that the governor of his own state, Bayelsa, probably out of disregard for Jonathan as his predecessor, has never attended the meetings of the National Economic Council which Jonathan chairs by virtue of his position as Vice-President. It is also a well known fact that one of the greatest beneficiaries of the Yar’adua regime is Chief James Ibori, Delta State’s two-time governor and a big financier of Yar’dua’s presidential campaign. It is an open secret that he’s fought tooth and nail to sustain the status quo ante so as to retain his privilege without which he would probably have been languishing in jail by now over his alleged venality. Last but by no means the least, the most acerbic press criticism of Jonathan has been made, not by any Northerner, but by a fellow Ijaw - the irrepressible professor of Virology, Tam David-West. “Jonathan,” he said in an interview in The Spectator of January 13, “is Obasanjo’s man. Yar’adua dismantled Obasanjo’s structures. He wants to smuggle in Jonathan so that he can control us from Ota Farm.” As if this was not enough rejection of Jonathan as acting president, the man said categorically in National Life of February 27 that he had no faith in Jonathan as acting president, never mind as president. Q: Do you have faith in the acting president? A: No. I don’t. Q: Why? A: He is weak. He can’t perform. To be an Ijaw man is not enough. Jonathan is not elected by Nigerians. In the course of the interview he even said the solution to the crisis at hand is that Jonathan should resign! Of all the opposition to Jonathan as acting president I have read nothing has come close to David-West’s. And he is, without doubt, as pre-eminent an Ijaw as any. Yet I have not heard any one saying the Ijaws have been plotting against Jonathan. No, the battle for the presidency as a result of the president’s ill-health is not a North versus South affair. There are rights and wrongs on both sided and we do no justice to the suffering masses of this country if we make it a regional issue. This is because by doing so we make it difficult, even impossible, to resolve on the basis of principles. |