01 Aug 2008 |
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by Chris Ngwodo I can remember the exact moment that my doubts about the Yar’Adua administration began to crystallize into a loss of faith. I was watching the senate’s screening of the president’s nominees to the federal cabinet. It was an agonizing spectacle. The screening of Fidelia Njeze in particular summed up the farcical nature of the event. Senator Uche Chukwumerije rightly asked if a woman whose sole administrative experience consisted of running a pharmaceutical store had the acumen to run a federal ministry. It was a solitary attempt to inject some intellectual rigour into what had been up till then a cerebrally minimal exercise and it failed to elicit the needed response.
One senator said that since Mrs Njeze’s middle name, Akuabata, in Igbo means ‘wealth has come,’ her appointment would be a good omen for the country. Another senator, a lady, asked her colleagues to be “gender sensitive” and observed that any widow that could raise four children and run a one-man business could definitely handle a federal ministry. It didn’t occur to the women on the floor of the senate that accepting such meagre qualifications from a female nominee is actually gravely damaging to the cause of women in politics. It didn’t matter. Mrs Njeze was endorsed by the senate and duly took a bow like several of the nominees before her and left. On the strength of her widowhood, her undisclosed maternal skills and a business of indeterminate success, she is today the Minister of state for Defence.
In contrast, Bode Agusto, one of the handful of nominees with a track record of personal and professional achievement, was grilled for over two hours and then eventually rejected by the senate. It was at that time, that I began to suspect that the Yar’Adua administration was about to break new ground in official mediocrity. By and large, that expectation has been fulfilled in extremity.
Rarely has a federal cabinet been so drab and colourless; rarely has one been so lacking in initiative. Given the contentious nature of his emergence, President Yar’Adua was expected to hit the ground running. Instead, he hit the ground with a dull thud and has taken a long while to reorient himself.
To a great extent, he has been let down by his supporting cast. The attorney-general, Michael Aondoaaka wasted little time before revealing himself to be a puppet of special interests. The Minister of Education, Aja Nwachukwu has distinguished himself only by announcing periodic reversals of his predecessor’s policies. Other than that, he has shown no aptitude for initiating anything of his own. His handling of the nationwide teachers’ strike has worsened an already dysfunctional educational sector. His credentials for his high office appear to be his ancestor’s political exploits in the First Republic. Few if any of the current set of ministers have indicated any aptitude for high performance. The anti-corruption campaign has been subverted. The EFCC which had earned the reputation of being one of the few effective government agencies is in the process of being neutered to bring it into consonance with the operational efficiency levels of parastatals like PHCN or the police.
One argument is that the generally lustreless complexion of this government derives from the temperament of the president himself. By all accounts, Yar’Adua was set for a return to a teaching job at the Ahmadu Bello University before he was virtually conscripted into the presidential campaign by Obasanjo. Strangely, the argument for Yar’Adua’s presidency was continuity. Obasanjo supposedly handed over to a trusted successor who would carry on his reform agenda. This has turned out to be a grave miscalculation. Yar’Adua has largely torpedoed most of these reforms and his lieutenants have dismantled most of the structures put in place by his predecessor. Despite Obasanjo’s many mistakes, the dismantling of his structures seems tragically like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
It has to be said that President Yar’Adua does not seem in control. His reclusive style, though markedly different from the over-bearing style of his predecessor, has also allowed the “hijack” of his administration by various forces. One might justifiably wonder if the president has ever been in charge. It is a fair question. Yar’Adua’s qualifications for the presidency include his patrician heritage, a recognizable brand name and a modestly successful two term stint as governor of Katsina. His reputation for reclusion is bolstered by the fact that he rarely travelled outside Katsina apart from his medical trips abroad. This is hardly preparation for leading a diverse country of over two hundred ethnic nationalities all offering differing perspectives and levying disparate demands on the Nigerian state. With few exceptions, the current dispensation has been characterized by a leadership deficit, personified by the man at the very top.
Much of the present situation is Obasanjo’s fault. From his own perspective, Obasanjo’s cardinal mistake was picking someone as ambitious as Atiku Abubakar as his Vice President in the first place. In the first term, Obasanjo and Atiku ran a virtual co-presidency. The marriage unravelled when Atiku’s ambition became unmanageable and his alleged proclivity for acquisition became excessive even by Nigerian standards. Atiku’s “profile” rubbed off against his principal the wrong way. It was Obasanjo’s obsession with preventing Atiku from gaining the presidency, that led him first to contemplate a third term in office and when that failed, to handpick Yar’Adua as his successor. His choice of the Katsina governor was meant to split the ranks of the late Shehu Musa Yar’Adua’s disciples who would have to choose between their late leader’s own brother or his favoured protégé, Atiku. In Obasanjo’s estimation, scuttling Atiku’s ambition was of greater consequence than the continuance of his reform agenda.
Atiku has been banished into political oblivion but Obasanjo’s reform agenda is in tatters. His own administration has been the subject of various corruption probes. Most of the technocrats who drove his reform agenda are also in political exile. Initially certain top figures of the Obasanjo government were to have been retained in the new administration. Somehow, anti-Obasanjo forces conspired to abort that plan by apparently convincing the president that having no direction at all was better than a direction charted by Obasanjo.
Within the new administration, an agenda by various forces to root out Obasanjo “loyalists” is in progress. The senate’s rejection of Agusto was probably part of the groundswell of anti-Obasanjo sentiment, so were the defenestration of Nuhu Ribadu and the staged probe of Nasir El-Rufai. To be sure, these figures have earned the animosity of their traducers. Going by these trends, it will be something of a miracle if Professor Charles Soludo sees out his tenure at the Central Bank of Nigeria. He is the last of Obasanjo’s technocrats.
All of this is because Obasanjo gambled and chose a man whose only ambition was to teach at university. Worryingly, in the past, Obasanjo has displayed a disturbing penchant for picking men of limited ambition to succeed him before. In 1979, it was Shehu Shagari who wanted to be a senator but wound up fortuitously as the presidential candidate of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN). Shagari was reputed for his personal honesty but nevertheless ran an administration which became a metaphor for cluelessness. His lack of control enabled his lieutenants to engage in all kinds of excesses, and thus provide ample justification for the 1983 military termination of the Second Republic.
There are disturbing parallels between the Shagari government and the present administration. Like Shagari, Yar’Adua was possessed of limited ambition before fate (assisted by an electoral heist) gifted him with the presidency. Like Shagari (so far, at least), Yar’Adua’s reticence has emboldened his lieutenants. In view of how the Shagari era ended, one hopes that these similarities end there.
It seems that this president is more of a systems maintenance manager than a change agent. Before his election, much was made of his passage through the Aminu Kano school of radical politics and his association with left-leaning radicals like Bala Usman. Perhaps, Yar’Adua’s patrician conservatism has overpowered whatever radical instincts he once harboured. This is unfortunate because Nigeria is at the moment crying out for leadership, big plays and major set-pieces in statesmanship and statecraft to resolve various problems. The president appears content to merely polish the furniture while ignoring the structural and foundational deficiencies of the house of Nigeria.
Two more years of this administration at this tenor and Nigerians will be pining for “the good old days” of Obasanjo. They will conclude that abrasive leadership is better than no leadership at all and that a president visible at home and abroad (to the point of being criticized for travelling too much) is better than the phantom of Aso Rock. It is a matter of some concern that the First Lady, Turai Yar’Adua, has more visibility than her husband and is revelling the splendours of a non-existent office – an extra-constitutional vestige of military rule. In a few years, Atiku and Buhari despite their tenuous claims to political credibility will feel justified in running again. And the PDP will once more engineer an electoral heist of farcical proportions.
Perhaps, I am being pessimistic but this is how things are looking at the moment. After over a year in office, it is not too early to search for signs of progress and such signs are in scant evidence.
One thing that Yar’Adua must definitely do is to reshuffle his supporting cast. Many of the key players in his administration have not helped his cause and they deserve to be shown the way out. Secondly, I don’t place much stock in this administration’s ability to resolve the power and energy crisis facing the country. The government has been quite candid in admitting its inability to solve that problem. As for other challenges, the administration, thus far, has looked out of its depth, adrift at sea and bereft of imagination.
One legacy that Yar’Adua can leave is in the area of electioneering in Nigeria. If he can commit himself to conducting free and fair elections in 2011, and do so successfully, he will have broken the curse of zero sum electioneering that has bedevilled our experiments with civil rule. By doing this, he will also renew confidence in our electoral system and in our public institutions which right now is at its lowest ebb. If President Yar’Adua can do just this one thing, he will have done enough. One only hopes that even this isn’t asking for too much.
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