“A politician is someone who believes you don’t have to fool all the people all the time. Just during elections”
Stanley Davies.
President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua died two years ago. Most of the footprints he left have been virtually swept off the landscape by horrendous setbacks in governance, and it will amount to speculation over whether he would recognize the nation he left two years ago. To be sure, he was in large part an architect of much of what we have in our hands today, but would he approve of the structure he helped design? In a way, this would summarize the dilemma in the political life of late President Yar’Adua: great vision, poor execution and severely compromised outcomes.
The Yar’Adua legacy in his 8-year tenure in Katsina State is being hotly disputed. The rump of his loyalists say his successor and trusted deputy, Ibrahim Shema, has re-written Yar’Adua’s script. Shema’s people say he is building on the solid foundations of Umaru’s legacies, and he has no apologies for writing his own script. Katsina State is today one of the bulwarks of the PDP machine in the nation, but its political clout and economic progress have been highjacked by forces outside the state, and the north. The schools and roads Umaru built of such high quality are failing in many parts, and the considerable number of enemies and adversaries he made when he sat tightly on public funds have found their ways into favour. The state struggles to put something on the ground after paying salaries, and it must be costing more than an arm and a leg to preserve the difficult control of the PDP over the political terrain in Katsina, and the disposition of Shema himself as a man who counts pennies before parting with them must be making it even more difficult to keep the CPC at bay.
But it is at the federal level where Yar’Adua started with the appearance of a man determined to make a relatively clean break with history that even more profound changes have occurred in the last two years. Against the most vociferous resistance, he denounced the elections that brought him to power, and pledged to reform the electoral process. He followed through with a credible effort under the Justice Lawal Uwais committee, but abandoned the process when it became clear that a reformed electoral process was going to take too many casualties, with his own party, the PDP as the biggest. He declared his assets publicly, and set alarm bells ringing when all political appointees thought he would judge them negatively if they did not do same. He did not. His was a symbolic gesture to send a message that he would fight corruption, and would be a servant leader. He raised hopes around the mantra of rule of law as his fundamental concern, and said times without number that a corrupt leader could not be a good leader.
Those flashes of hope and courage were swamped by forces far stronger and more entrenched then President Yar’Adua. Far from fighting corruption, corruption fought back under his watch. His baggage included some of his closest advisers who had many hands in tills; scandalously-corrupt former and serving public office holders who had substantially bankrolled his campaign; and scheming politicians who saw weaknesses in a good man who trusted too much, and made enemies too easily.
His brilliant mind and native intelligence showed brightly in his initial conception of his agenda; but it fell victim of a past which had just dug in. He thought he could address the crippling problem in the Niger Delta by a master-stroke of granting amnesty to people who had made billions through crime, hiding behind genuine communal concerns, and a radical reform of the entire oil and gas sector. Against advice which exposed the deep-rooted linkages between politics and militancy in the Niger Delta, he embarked upon an expensive and potentially dangerous amnesty programme. Today, there are hints that beneficiaries of the programme are being groomed to provide the backbone of a skilled manpower which the south south could use, in the event that the region has to chart a course on its own. The Petroleum Industry Bill (P.I.B) which was knocked together at great pains by Rilwanu Lukman and his team has many versions today; and may never see the light of day, no thanks to the potential for vicious resistance against which the late President was warned. Massive corruption and a lethargic bureaucracy frustrated his plans to expand the power sector. His great vision for reform of the land administration system in Nigeria, for agriculture and water resources and road and rail networks was blunted by indifference beyond his immediate, small circle, and a public service which served corruption more than it served the public.
President Yar’Adua wanted to be his own man, but was shacked all around. He was the product of a political campaign which was funded by people he detested even to be in the same room with. So he preferred not to know how he got to the Villa. He wanted his party, the PDP, an institution which will win the Nobel Prize in subverting the democratic process to toe the line of his mantra of the rule of law, but there were too many debts to settle; too many interests to pander to; and a godfather who was very much around and very demanding. He had a most profound respect for President Obasanjo, and was therefore reluctant to unplug many of the latter’s decisions and schemes, yet they offended much of his definition of good governance, and the manner he defined his own administration. In the end, he neither pleased Obasanjo nor himself. Behind him, or over his shoulders, he had the constant presence of Atiku Abubakar, another elder he respected tremendously, but who is now a political rival; and of General Muhammadu Buhari, a politician he knew only too well, and who retained the potential to uproot his disputed victory for a long period during his presidency.
His circle expanded or narrowed with his health. He had a group which became obsessed with protecting his failing health and personal dignity and the integrity of his office by all means necessary, and unnecessary. He also had others in the group who saw in his failing health and stubborn streak an opportunity to use his authority to their own benefits. Long before the nation became aware that his failing health was becoming a major issue in governance, a small clique had positioned itself around him. The facade of normalcy was carefully orchestrated, and a determined effort was made to keep his deputy, Vice President Goodluck Jonathan as far away as possible from the Presidency. A weak president was persuaded to approve a shoot-at-sight order on his way, literally, out of the country, when the Boko Haram insurgency had overwhelmed the police in Borno State in 2009. Today, the nation lives with the consequences of that decision. A weak President was persuaded to approve a policy of removing public officers from service against the basic rules of the service, with claims that the policy will radically transform the service. Today, hundreds of senior officers are being retired at the very moment when they are most needed, and the fundamental breach which that decision caused in the manner it violated sanctified values of the service is being made worse. The public service is collapsing at an alarming rate, and the pension scam, and the subsidy exposé are symptoms of failures of the public service to protect the public and political leaders against corruption and impunity and may be just the tip of the iceberg.
Almost to the day, the President who took over after Yar’Adua died is grappling with worsening levels of corruption and insecurity. He has had a public falling-out with his National Security Advisor (NSA) over the causes of the Boko Haram insurgency, but the nation is being told that it has failed to really understand the NSA. The problems, we are being told, is that Yar’Adua’s kith and kin have been sponsoring an insurgency against President Jonathan, even though he, Yar’Adua, a northerner, had almost single-handedly engineered the amnesty programme in the Niger Delta. Thousands of Yar’Aduas fellow citizens, majority of them Muslims, are dying daily at the hands of an insurgency which says his administration is responsible for having their leader killed illegally, and they will continue to wage war against the Nigerians State and Christians who offend Islam. The nation is already in the grip of opening skirmishes towards 2015, even though basic issues around the 2011 elections and the post-election violence have not been addressed. The nation Yar’Adua thought he could give a new lease of life is showing signs of failure due to unspeakable levels of corruption, unprecedented threats to national security, and a weak leadership. All told, the period during which Umaru Musa Yar’Adua was President of Nigeria look just like flashes in the dark.
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