|
Nothing
demonstrates the crisis that presently afflict the Yar’Adua government
presently than the way it resorted to overkill in handling the
resignation crises that might have spewed out from its inner coves.
That the regime descended with its full weight on Channels Television
and banned it because it culled the resignation rumor from the official
mouthpiece of the Yar’Adua government itself, the News Agency of
Nigeria, shows that the regime is being run ragged by the many problems
that assail it. First of these crises is the legitimacy overhang that
has dogged it after it steeped up to appropriate the rotten fruits of
Obasanjo’s criminal mutilation of the country’s electoral process to
install his stooge who would be trusted to ensure his many sins remain
buried under the carpet. Because Yar’Adua never won any election, it is
sorely scared of its own shadows and in this state; it has formed a
fetish of seeing treason in every move aimed at questioning its
scruples.
Again,
because the Nigerian people never elected it, it has wandered into the
paranoiac state where it sees enemies in even innocuous issues that
could be laughed away. It is haunted by its own shadows, frightened by
its own infirmities and thinks that it would secure its base by scaring
all of us to live it with it, no matter its manifest shortcomings. Its
illegitimacy has manacled it and made it ineffectual that it has
betrayed the most confused, unclear and scrambled attitude to
governance. It revels in the mantra of rule of law but had been often
found jittery when occasions demand a demonstration of such lofty
intent. Failing to convince Nigerians of its great intent and bugged
down with inactivity, it had resorted to ambushing Nigerians and
enacting into a blasphemous decree any discussion of its failings and
the failings of its members. It makes treasonable any suggestion that
it gives way for a better election process and deigns the discussion of
the incapacitation of its principal as a cap0ital offence.
The
second major crisis facing the Yar’Adua presidency is that a sick and
infirm man that finds it hard coping with the stringent demands of
governing Nigeria heads it. Governance that had suffered tremendous
blisters in the past nine years mainly under the negative activism of
Obasanjo, had been whittled down to suit Yar’Adua’s weak state. While
Nigerians quite sympathize with Yar’Adua on his health condition, they
need a strong and positive-driven president to drive it to the
satisfaction and glory of all Nigerians including Yar’Adua himself.
Nigerians who have been neighing for change and progress from the
damned Obasanjo years are now stranded with a man that sleeps through
duty. Policy confusion and somersaults have become an integral part of
the flailing Yar’Adua presidency and this was aptly demonstrated when
he went for a health pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia recently and the
country was fed with a mish-mash of horrible concoctions and puerile
gibberish by the men that manage his image. The nation watched in awe
and shock as the king’s horses and dogs struggled among themselves to
invent fables to ostensibly cover the facts of the president’s ill
health and take advantage of a nation, pummeled into a state of stupor
by marauding governments and their agents.
The
third major crisis bedeviling Yar’Adua’s presidency is that it has
assembled its men and women and had not been able to form a government.
Sure, party speculators, ravaging ramparts and space fillers have
appropriated portfolios and high offices and the facade of a government
has been formed but the workings of government resemble an organized
chaos. Men run riot with their intuition and control is weak and lax.
In this state, discipline is slack and the aficionados of the PDP and
the contriving nabobs that people the party mart all manners of selfish
contrivances to flower their narrow interests. Plots, schemes,
intrigues and conspiracies thrive and because there is a dearth of a
strong figure to reign in the mullahs that rove at the presidency, his
government, at best, resembles a thriving tempest! Because the PDP, as
a party, exists as a loose confederate of desperate power mongers, with
eyes trained on the control of the nation’s treasury, nothing is spared
to prey on every other party man or Nigerian to achieve the
machiavellian ethos of the party members. Yar’Adua, feeling ingratiated
to the soiled and decrepit system that brought him to power, subscribes
to this carnivorous tenet and his attempt to play along has made him
incapable of controlling the politics and events around him.
Finding
itself consumed by the intricate web of inconsistencies that birthed
it, the Yar’Adua government thinks that the best solution to its
problems lies in making a sin of any suggestion of re-thinking the mode
of its emergence or its fitness to govern. It has come out with an
elaborate master plan of burying its own failings under a thick maze of
instilled blackmail and fear such that we would see him as God’s gift
to Nigeria and any contrary view would be taken as amounting to
questioning God. That accounts for the reason why it descended so
heavily on a hapless news organization that merely reported what the
official government news agency parroted. It merely zeroed on some
staff of its own mouthpiece from where what turned out to be a hoax
about the purported resignation of Yar’Adua emanated and clamped down
fully on the news station that reported it to its audience. It rolled
out its propaganda machine and tried to make such a heavy show of the
false news item that was allegedly smuggled into its own news agency by
ubiquitous hackers who many Nigerians swear are not far from the fifth
columnists within Yar’Adua’s own party and government that thrive in
such dog-eat-dog syndrome. It went to the mountaintops to chorus and
yell about the resignation hoax as if suggestions of Yar’Adua’s
resignation when it is becoming clearer that he cannot simply govern
this country is a taboo. That way, it wanted to mitigate the stupid and
witless manner it handled the issue of Yar’Adua’s recent health crisis
and the tar such careless handling invested on the government. Again,
it wanted to censor Nigerians against further suggesting that a
president on sick bed should give way for the country to discover its
soul, stolen by the ineptitude of the PDP governments in place since
1999.
But
I don’t think that the hoax in itself is indeed a big issue and I fail
to see the grave security implication being painted around the issue. A
rebuttal from the presidency would have sufficed to rest the matter and
the heightened melo-drama of the present is unnecessary. Going about to
close a television station and breathing hot airs around has turned out
to be a hare-brained option that had burned its own fingers. If it was
intended to cow Nigerians into silence over the present floundering
ship of state occasioned by Yar’Adua’s incapacitation, it had failed.
If it was aimed at creating a fabled figure of Yar’Adua and to frighten
Nigerians to cease demanding that things be properly done or that
Yar’Adua ship out because he is not healthy, it was a misfire. If it
was created so as to ensure that Nigerians stop believing the reality
of the fragility of this rudderless government and the apparent lack of
direction or focus ravaging it, it wont work. For as long as he sits
pretty and watches the Nigerian state drift under his sick bed,
Yar’Adua will have to contend with speculations of his resignation or
related options open to Nigerians to move forward. He can do
practically nothing about it and this constitutes a bigger operational
space for insecurity than the works of hackers that may well be
certainly operating from the inner coves of his presidency and his
party. He should know that in a crisis situation, renegades and
scoundrels who abound in great number in Yar’Adua’s government and
party make heavy gains and so long as they exist, they would be working
to undermine him. However, suggesting or speculating that he should
quit because he is sick does not pose a greater threat than the manner
of his emergence and the aimless drift of his government presently.
Peter Claver Oparah.
Ikeja, Lagos.
E-mail: peterclaver2000@yahoo.com
|
Authors 
Posted by Robot| 19.09.2008 22:34