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Umaru Yar’Adua’s long suit is his vaunted integrity. This public persona of unimpeachable integrity is so well packaged that even his critics often concede it as a premise for their criticism. But is this image of integrity true or a product of careful image management? Is Yar’Adua truly a man of integrity or is this aspect of his political identity a carefully nurtured myth? At the very least, this claim should be scrutinized in light of Yar’Adua’s own conducts that belie or at best trouble such assumptions of personal decency.
Nigeria
’s political arena is populated by such irredeemably debauched characters that it is easy for a politician who falls short of this perverse standard to gain a reputation for integrity. Because corruption and vanity have become the normative features of public office, it is easy for a politician who is not as vain as the rest to seduce the nation with a carefully crafted rhetoric of integrity, without arousing much skepticism. This is what Yar’Adua seems to have done.
Yar’Adua’s reputation for integrity rests on a triad of mutually reinforcing claims. One is his purported achievements while he was governor of Katsina state. A second public narrative that holds up his claim to integrity is that he was not corrupt as governor. A third is that he was popularly elected governor twice.
Each of these claims has acquired a life of its own, becoming a truism that serves as a referent for analyses of Yar’Adua’s actions and inactions as president. So accepted have these claims become that unless they are interrogated and their truths separated from their falsehoods they will continue to structure the way Yar’Adua’s legitimacy-challenged presidency is evaluated. I have been intrigued by the vehement disappointment that Yar’Adua’s appointments, associations, actions, and inactions have elicited from many commentators. I have come to the conclusion that the sense of shock and disappointment flows from a prior belief in Yar’Adua’s integrity. Those who have been most shocked by Yar’Adua’s disappointing appointments and curious political associations are those who unquestioningly bought into his public persona of integrity. These commentators have been let down because, according to them, Yar’Adua has not lived up to his reputation for probity and decency. They have not bothered to probe that reputation itself. Conversely, those who never bought into these claims or regarded them with varying degrees of skepticism have been less shocked by Yar’Adua’s presidency.
Let us reexamine Yar’Adua’s performance as governor of
Katsina
State
. His singular most important accomplishment is his accumulation of huge monetary surpluses, an impressive feat in a nation where governors are synonymous with profligacy. His reputation as a mean, frugal, and careful manager of public funds is thus deserved. But his governorship was also remarkable for being a lame duck governorship. Katsina witnessed no transformation in its developmental fortunes during his administration. There was similarly a dearth of strategic developmental vision. Nor was there a transformation in the state’s social infrastructure. Katsina remains a rural, infrastructure-challenged state despite Yar’Adua’s purportedly successful eight years as governor.
Under Yar’Adua, the state’s health sector was so under-funded and primary healthcare so cavalierly handled that stories of women taking their children to neighboring Niger to be treated for common childhood ailments by the personnel of Medecins Sans Frontieres were rife and caused embarrassment to the government. This reality has not abated under his successor.
Popular political discourse in Katsina during Yar’Adua’s governorship succinctly captured the contradictions of his governorship: his ability to accumulate huge reserves for the state and his simultaneous inability to develop one of
Nigeria
’s most rural states. Some people even argued that the huge reserves which earned him the reputation of transparency were sustained by the utter dearth of transformative developmental initiative in his eight year administration. In other words, it was logical for reserves to accumulate since Yar’Adua did not prioritize development, which costs money. Some Katsina people used to say that while it was good to have a governor who was accessible and prudent with public fund, this provided little comfort to the common man who needed to see visible improvements in social infrastructure and in the quality of his life. What was the use, some of them used to say, of boasting of huge reserves, when there were problems in all social sectors crying for governmental intervention?
It is therefore not a settled truth, as some would have us believe, that Yar’Adua was an achiever in Katsina state. If you value prudence above performance, he was your man, but if you desire both prudence and performance, he was by no means your picture of an achieving governor.
His reputation for incorruption is similarly debatable. How did a man who declared about N19 million as his total asset in 1999 come about an asset of nearly N1 billion in 2007? And why does he continue to lay claim to incorruption in light of this curious and suspicious turn around in his fortunes? He could not have been conducting private business while he was governor as the constitution explicitly forbids this. As many analysts have opined, the declaration raised more questions than it answered about Yar’Adua’s vaunted incorruption. N1 billion is modest compared to the asset declared by Yar’Adua’s governor-colleagues, but it only indicates that Yar’Adua’s claim to personal probity is only valid in comparison to the reputation of the likes of James Ibori, Peter Odili, Lucky Igbinedion, George Akume, and others. That one is better than this vile lot is not a complimentary reputation to brag about. This relative cleanliness does not entitle Yar’Adua to a reputation of incorruption.
The last plank on which Yar’Adua’s claim to integrity rests is the myth of his popularity in Katsina state. It should be said that many Katsina people detested his lethargic approach to governance even though they respected his prudence with public funds. Whatever acceptance he enjoyed stemmed from a difficult tradeoff in which one had to make peace with his non-performance in exchange for one’s admiration for his knack for preserving public funds. This is not a testament to political popularity but to Yar’Adua status as a lesser evil and to the paucity of attractive alternatives in Katsina politics. We must not forget that he rode on his elder brother’s political martyrdom to the governorship in 1999. By 2003 he had become so unpopular that most Katsina people still believe that Nura Khalil, the ANPP candidate and an ally of Muhammadu Buhari, actually won the governorship election of that year.
The argument for Khalil’s victory is persuasive. Katsina voters overwhelmingly voted for Buhari, the ANPP presidential candidate. The run-up the 2003 elections in Katsina state was a study in anti-incumbency disillusionment. This wave of anti-incumbency angst in Katsina targeted the PDP’s most visible and proximate symbols: Obasanjo and Yar’Adua. It congealed to an acute dislike for the PDP and a decisive shift of support to the ANPP and its candidates. It was this anti-PDP, anti-incumbency climate that gave Buhari’s alternative, populist message mass appeal in the Northwest, giving him the bulk of the presidential votes in
Kano
, Katsina and
Jigawa
States
. Yar’Adua was however declared winner of the gubernatorial contest in Katsina. How a largely illiterate community of voters in a rural state was able to make the nuanced distinction of voting for Buhari/ANPP in the presidential elections and voting for Yar’Adua/PDP in the governorship election has yet be explained satisfactorily to those who think such electoral sophistication implausible for Katsina.
It is said that the late Dr. Aminu Safana, a cheerleader for ex-speaker Patricia Etteh, was instrumental in fraudulently wresting the election from Nura Khalil and delivering the governorship to Yar’Adua, who had given up on being reelected after exit results showed Khalil heading to a comfortable victory. Yar’adua’s political intimacy with the late Safana is said to have been consummated by this act of electoral salvage. After that, Safana became one of Yar’Adua’s most trusted political confidantes; for the president owed his political comeback to the late legislator. For those who wondered why Yar’Adua virtually relocated the presidency to Katsina to mourn his late friend, this small piece of Katsina political history may provide the explanation.
If this popular and credible story is true then there is a precedent for Yar’Adua accepting a tainted electoral mandate and enjoying its benefits while still cultivating and nurturing a personal narrative of incorruption and decency. It belies the received myth of Yar’Adua’s political exceptionalism. It means that there is an established pattern of Yar’Adua being a typical Nigerian politician: hungry for power no matter its source, and impervious to moral indictment. It means that, contrary to Yar’Adua’s carefully packaged political biography, the man is not different from other Nigerian politicians who have no qualms about obtaining defective electoral mandates as long as they enjoy the fruits thereof.
For those who have been wondering why Yar’Adua refuses to denounce and relinquish his discredited presidential mandate, the foregoing may put things in perspective. For those who cannot understand why a purportedly decent and unconventional politician insists, in spite of his own admissions of electoral fraud in April, that he has a mandate to govern, the foregoing scrutiny of Yar’Adua’s politics of mythmaking may help explain the president’s inexplicable insistence on enjoying a questionable electoral “victory.”
Those who wonder why Yar’Adua would rather be an illegitimate lame duck president than succumb honorably to fresh elections should look to his history of settling down comfortably into a problematic electoral “victory.” For those who cannot fathom why Yar’Adua has been enjoying the aura of the presidency without embracing its challenges and without offering any strategic vision for progress and long-term economic and political reclamation, a study of Yar’Adua’s lame duck governorship in Katsina would be helpful.
This deconstruction and demystification of Yar’Adua’s vaunted integrity, incorruption, and “performance” as governor of Katsina state should help put his disorganized and directionless presidency in sharp relief. Most politicians are a product of their antecedents and can hardly transcend them. Yar’Adua is no different.
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Authors 
Posted by Robot| 04.11.2007 20:28