In memory of Nigeria’s anonymous President Yar’Adua and the devil himself, Obasanjo

In memory of Nigeria’s anonymous President Yar’Adua and the devil himself, Obasanjo.

By Rudolf Okonkwo, USAfricaonline.com columnist and CLASSmagazine correspondent

December 2, 2003: Just like you and I, Yar’Adua will die. Someday. I want to be the first to write his obituary. It is the greatest honor I can give to the man. Yar’Adua should be able to read it while resting comfortably in his hospital bed. Not many people will have such a privilege. So here you go, Mr. Umaru Musa Yar’Adua:

There lies a sick man stranded at the presidency. The damage he wrecked could only be accessed posthumously. Beneath his grave is the bile of our epilogue.

Mr. Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, the second president of Nigeria’s fourth republic, was tied to the presidential stake by the devil himself. (Yes, there is a devil. And his name is Olusegun Obasanjo).

Yar’Adua spared nobody of any pretension to leadership, so we should spare him no pretension to polite tribute.

Yar’Adua’s era had no poetry. His days had no imagination. If not for his sickness, he could as well have been an anonymous president. I can bet my last naira that no parent named their child Umaru or Musa or Yar’Adua as a consequence of his sojourn at the presidency.

Yar’Adua subverted whatever remained of the Nigerian spirit. He never had a cult. He never had a worshiper. He was an unfinished failure. He was a god that did not make it.

As the governor of Kastina state, Yar’Adua instituted the sharia law that sentenced Amina Lawal to death for adultery. She was to be stoned to death. Later an appeal court freed her. No appeal court could free Yar’Adua’s daughters from being auctioned to the highest bidder.

If Yar’Adua only stole the cup of invincibility from Nigeria, it would have been pardonable. But he dropped it into a latrine. The adventures of Yar’Adua would make for a bad children’s coloring book. His gargantuan body of achievement dwarfed those of the legendry turtle.

Yar’Adua proved that if you change the clothes without changing the diaper, what stinks will continue to stink. He distinguished himself as an arch-Nigerian- ignoramus hanging on the wing of inaction.

He whetted no man’s appetite. He brought no smile on any citizen’s face. His posture was uninspiring. His program was invisible. He was too pathetic to be laughed at. Our eternal respect for him was in his complete lack of comic value. There was no distinction to be made between his government and the government of a dash.

Before Yar’Adua, the universally acclaimed mantra was that, “Nigeria is the only country in the world where the best is impossible and the worst never happens.” But after Yar’Adua, Nigeria became a country where the worst is impossible and the best never happens. In essence, Nigeria hit the bottom after Yar’Adua.

Before Yar’Adua, Nigeria was governed by two kinds of leaders. It was either “a fool surrounded by idiots or an idiot surrounded by fools.” It was Yar’Adua that first established a government led by a dead man surrounded by vultures. What comes after Yar’Adua will be a government of vultures surrounded by dead men.

I have often argued that the problem with Nigerian leaders was that they forget that they were mortals. Yar’Adua proved that men who are conscious of their mortality will not necessarily perform any better. While Yar’Adua daily knocked on the door of hell, his wife, Turai, was busy stuffing oil blocks inside her bra.

Yar’Adua will forever live in one mythology – his was the definitive proof of how not to be president. He performed so woefully that if Nigerians were people who valued excellence, they would staple a tail to his corpse. So that when he reincarnates and aspires to a leadership position, he will be promptly identified and quarantined.

Yar’Adua studied Analytical Chemistry at ABU but had no understanding of the law of Thermodynamics. On its own, heat cannot flow from an area of cold to an area of hot, says the second law. Yet, Yar’Adua’s Vision 2020 hoped to go from an area of cold to an area of hot on its own.

Faraday’s Law states that “the weight of any element liberated during electrolysis is proportional to the quantity of electricity passing through the cell and also to the equivalent weight of the element.” What Yar’Adua did not grasp at school was that this law means that the moral authority of any politician following an election is proportional to the amount of fraud that took place during the electoral process and also to the moral state of the politician.

Yar’Adua was the last “Nigerian” president. Hundred years from now, when the history of that territory formerly called Nigeria is written, historians will note that it was Yar’Adua who finally brought an end to the farce. They will note that his physical ailment was a reminder to the people trapped in that dead and dirty pond that they, too, were sick. The predicament of Yar’Adua was the predicament of the Nigerian lot- an incapability to know when to quit.

If the tears of the downtrodden did not make him raise a finger against corruption, nothing else would. If the histrionics of the vultures around him did not make him question his reality, nothing else would. If an obituary like this did not make him rethink his legacy, nothing else would.

May his soul, and the soul of all those who die, unnecessarily, every day, in that occupied territory, rest in peace.

In lieu of dancing in the street, play squash in honor of the dead president. In lieu of flowers, send assault weapons to his gun-loving son.

•Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo wrote exclusively for USAfricaonline.com, the insightful and much cited report: Anambra’s rigged 2003 elections, and Chris Uba’s confession at the WIC 2004 convention in Newark, New Jersey; and several commentaries.

——-

NEWS: Yar’Adua should resign, handover to VP: some politicians, activists demand; some signatories deny statement

By Obinwa Nnaji in Lagos, USAfrica Executive Editor (Nigeria) and Chido Nwangwu

—–

USAfrica and USAfricaonline.com (characterized by The New York Times as the  most influential African-owned, U.S-based multimedia networks) established May 1992, our first edition of USAfrica magazine was published August 1993; USAfrica The Newspaper on May 11, 1994; CLASSmagazine on May 2, 2003; www.PhotoWorks.TV in 2005.

—–

December 2, 2009: As Nigerians continue to debate and speculate about the serious health issues facing their President Umaru Yar’Adua, a group reflecting a cross section of political and civil society leaders, mainly outside the ruling Peoples Democratic Party but significantly including its former national chairman Audu Ogbe, has called for his resignation.

The 56 signatories also recommend that the Vice President Dr. Goodluck Jonathan should take over, immediately, to serve out the term of the Yar’Adua  health-challenged presidency.

Their signed statement states, in part, “As President Yar’Adua’s compatriots and part of his larger Nigerian family, we sympathize with him and believe that his health should be given priority attention. At the same time, the need to provide effective governance for this nation of over 150 million people cannot be compromised…. Indeed, the constitution has rightly envisaged the situation in which the country has found itself. In any event, we are of the view that the president should immediately and unconditionally hand over to the vice-president, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan to complete the current term of office, and conduct the next general elections on the basis of the report of the electoral reform committee headed by Justice Mohammed Lawal Uwais.”

On the issue of those who insist Yar’Adua’s mandate restricts the presidency for 2 terms to the northern section of Nigeria, the group argued that the “Conventions and devices as rotation are strictly non-constitutional and any attempt to becloud issues by mixing political party administrative devices would be unhelpful in the situation we find ourselves.”

The group cited “several loopholes in his presidential service delivery”  which they insist have not served Nigeria well. For example, the signatories mentioned the recent 2009 “United Nations General Assembly for which a private audience had been arranged between him and President Obama for high level discussions of issues mutually beneficial to Nigeria and the United States because he was in Saudi Arabia to ‘open a university’ which was a dummy sold to cover up his treatments.”

Among the listed notables are former Senate president Ken Nnamani, former speaker of the House of Representatives Aminu Masari, presidential candidates Dr Tunji Braithwaite, Olu Falae and Prof. Pat Utomi,  former Military governor of Kaduna State retired Col Abubakar Umar, former governor of Edo State John Odigie-Oyegun, former presidential aspirants, retired Lt. Gen. Alani Akinrinade and several others. They add that the president has breached constitutional procedures in the way “his health condition has necessitated several medical trips abroad (and for which) he has not transmitted to the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives a written declaration that he was proceeding on vacation or that he is otherwise unable to discharge the functions of his office as required by Section 145 of the Constitution.”

His option is “to immediately choose the honourable option of either: resigning his office immediately, or if he is confident of his true physical condition, request the Federal Executive Council to pass a resolution pursuant to Section 144 (1) of the Constitution to the effect that the President appears incapable of discharging the functions of his office.” They continue that “In the circumstance, Ministers have routinely flouted the orders of the President and engaged in infighting as a direct result of the vacuum in leadership. This was recently embarrassingly exposed to the world with the series of conflicting public statements credited to the Attorney General and the Chairperson of the EFCC. This was also exposed further when the president disavowed knowledge of a memo to all foreign missions purportedly on his instructions. Furthermore, till date, ministers continue to flout the public instruction of the president that ministers who presented memos at the FEC should stay behind to brief the media.”

Some political leaders from the North, especially Alhaji Tanko Yakassai, have also cautioned against demanding Yar’Adua’s resignation. Sources close to VP Jonathan have dismissed earlier reports that some unnamed, influential   persons were putting pressure on the VP to resign amidst the President’s ill-health as a guarantee for a northerner to continue as President.

Meanwhile, the First Lady of Nigeria and a few very close aides of the President are with him in Saudi Arabia as his complicated health situations are managed by a team of international doctors.

USAfricaonline.com and its blog Nigeria360@yahoogroups.com continue to feature debates among Nigerians on the dramatic turn of events and unique clash of party politics, regional politics, presidential performance and constitutional order. e-mail: news@USAfricaonline.com and USAfrica247@Gmail.com