PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Yar’adua: A War For Crude Power

News, as even the layman knows, is the staple of newspapers. These days, however, you are likely to learn nearly as much about goings-on in our dear country by going through the political advertisements that inundate our newspapers as you will by reading the news columns.

By now not a few regular, possibly even the occasional, newspaper readers may have noticed the long running campaign against the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, (CBN), Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, by a self-styled Renaissance Professionals (RP). For months now the group has published one, and occasionally two, full page adverts in at least three national dailies each day calling for the sack of the governor for incompetence and other sundry offences.

Until the recent elevation of Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan as Acting President by legislative fiat, the primary objective of RP seemed to have been to swing public opinion against the banking reforms Lamido had embarked upon no sooner than he replaced Professor Chukwuma Charles Soludo late last year. In this objective the group does not seem to have achieved much.

With Jonathan as acting president, the group may have reckoned they now have more receptive ears than they could ever hope to get from President Umaru Yar’adua who, in the first place, gave Lamido the job in spite of every obstacle – and they were many - those apparently behind RP threw in Lamido’s way; its more recent adverts have shifted from appealing to public opinion to appealing directly to the acting president to sack the governor.

If the online February edition of the Economic Confidential newsletter is to be believed, the RP may soon achieve this objective. “Any moment from now,” the newsletter said, “acting President of Nigeria and Commander-in-Chief, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, may succumb to pressure into sacking some top military and intelligence officers from Northern Nigeria through a deliberate smear campaign on suspicious loyalty.”

The pressure which the newsletter said was being mounted by “powerful groups of politicians and ethnic leaders from the South through some selected media and blog outlets,” was not, it said, limited to only sacking military and intelligence officers from the North. The leadership of the CBN and Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) were also in the sights of the groups.

Since the publication of the newsletter, the National Security Adviser, Major-General Sarki Mukhtar, has been sacked, but has been replaced by another northerner and a veteran of the intelligence profession, Lieutenant-General Aliyu Mohammed.

General Mohammed’s appointment was somewhat surprising not least because, first, he has never disavowed his well-known presidential ambition, and second, Mukhtar took over from him less than three years ago. In this sense it is unlikely that if others speculated by the Economic Confidential to be in the line of fire get Jonathan’s boot he will replace them by fellow northerners.

The newsletter’s speculation may in the end turn out to be true. If it does it would be proof positive that the jostling for power in the wake of the crisis created by the ill-health of President Yar’adua is happening much more through political adverts than was hitherto the case. More importantly, it would suggest that it is about anything but principles

In other words, political actors recently seem to find in political advertisement an effective a weapon of propaganda as the news column.

Commonsense suggests that they couldn’t be more wrong if only because far more people read news than care to read adverts. Fewer still believe the adverts than believe the news.

That, however, has not deterred those involved in spending millions of Naira to push their cases through adverts. Part of the explanation could be the sponsors have deep pockets. It could, in some cases, also be that the sponsors have official backing.

This, I suspect, is the case with a spate of adverts by some individuals and faceless groups that seem to be fighting a losing battle against Jonathan in his now open bid to take over the presidency from an ailing Yar’adua.

This month alone I have counted no less than nine adverts by such individuals and groups. Arguably the most prominent of these was the full page advert in several newspapers by the veteran politician, Alhaji Tanko Yakasai, which described last week’s dissolution of the Federal Executive Council by the acting president as “illegal.”

Regardless of the merit of his position Yakasai deserves respect for at least having the courage of his conviction by not hiding behind any faceless group to fight Yar’adua’s war. You can hardly say the same about adverts that have been sponsored by what look like fly-by-night operations like Save Womanhood Group and Save Nigeria Coalition which has apparently been created to serve as a counterpoise to the Save Nigeria Group led by Nobel Literature Laureate, Wole Soyinka.

However, even though the pro-Yar’adua group seem, by and large, to be using guerrilla tactics to fight their war, they are not losing the war because the pro-Jonathan group are on any higher moral ground. Far from it. This much is obvious from the fact that the group is not bothered by the fact that their principal has been elevated to his acting presidency through what is clearly a constitutional sleight-of-hand.

It is also obvious from the fact that at a time Yar’adua’s wife, Turai, is being pilloried left, right and centre, as a power-hungry woman, quite justifiably so in my view at least, no one is saying anything about the danger that Jonathan’s wife, Patience, may be even more grasping as First Lady, considering her somewhat unsavoury antecedent as the First Lady of Bayelsa State who was implicated in money laundering abroad.

The point of all this is that what we have had on our hands since we got saddled with an ailing president is not a war of principles as the Jonathan group would have us believe. What we have is simply the good old war for crude power. In the end it makes little or no difference to the ordinary folks who wins or loses the war.