Date Published: 06/14/10

The Yar'Adua we knew

by Sonala Olumhese

I write this article in response to “The Yar’Adua I Knew,” (Vanguard, June 6, 2010), by Segun Adeniyi, who served as Press Secretary to President Umaru Yar’Adua. “I want to offer a few words about the late Yar'Adua based on my interactions with him as his official spokesman,” Mr. Adeniyi explains. “In all the tributes that have been paid to him, the common thread has been that while he had his personal failings like all mortals, President Yar'Adua exhibited certain attributes uncommon with people who hold leadership positions in our clime, and that made significant difference. These attributes were: humility, integrity and humanity. I can attest that these attributes indeed defined the essential Umaru Musa Yar'Adua.” I have a simple answer for him: “WE DO NOT CARE!”

And if humility, according to Mr. Adeniyi’s preferred testimony, “is concerned with what is right as distinct from who is right,” Yar’Adua was in no way a humble man because if he ever had a clue as to what was right, he never identified it.

“Yar'Adua,” writes Mr. Adeniyi, “was as honest as he was humble and he had nothing but contempt for the primitive accumulation tendencies of members of the Nigerian political elite who place their personal greed above the collective need.”

Really? Contempt? Did he announce that, or did Mr. Adeniyi imagine it? If he whispered it in Mr. Adeniyi’s ear, are we supposed to break out in jubilation? For three years, surrounding Yar’Adua in both his government and his party were the fiercest, filthiest, greediest, most acquisitive and most corrupt people this country has ever known. I do not recall Yar’Adua arresting two or three of them, let alone in the hundreds in which they should be sent to the gas chamber.

On the contrary, such people as the infamous James Ibori and Lucky Igbinedion were his closest friends and confidantes—entering Aso Rock whenever they pleased, and being shown straight to Mr. Adeniyi’s hero.

“You see, these former governors are my colleagues,” he told The Guardian in April 2009. “We had worked together for eight years. Because I am the President, I cannot just jettison people I know. I am always very careful to separate my personal relationship with people from my state duties.” 

But this loyalty to friends ahead of country was not exactly what he pronounced at his inauguration, when he bragged: “We are determined to intensify the war against corruption, more so because corruption is itself central to the spread of poverty.”  On that occasion he spoke of “honesty, decency, generosity, modesty, selflessness, transparency, and accountability” as the “fundamental values determine societies that succeed or fail.”

It is this chaotic and contradictory world view permitted Ibori, whenever he pleased, to swagger into Aso Rock. The way it appeared from the outside is certainly that the policy of this “humble man” was to protect some of our most corrupt elements. That is not humility.

Perhaps the most curious case of executive protection of crime—and therefore betrayal of nation—is that of his predecessor, Olusegun Obasanjo, who was implicated serially at home and abroad.

In April 2009, Yar’Adua bragged, in connection with the Halliburton mess, as follows: “…We have also set up a committee under the IG to investigate locally any substance of evidence regarding anybody …I promise this nation that once we have a response (from the United States), those names …will be made public and we will take actions and direct that the names should be forwarded to the EFCC and those officials and former officials involved will be arrested and prosecuted.”

The following month, in May 2009, the (Mike Okiro) committee submitted an interim report on that investigation. Among others, it deeply implicated Obasanjo and former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, showing that they shared $74 million with two other men. Obasanjo also took $5 million with the PDP, although we do not know if he gave the party a kobo.

And what did Mr. Adeniyi’s man of “integrity” do with the report? He looked this way and that, staggered to his feet, thrust it under his chair, and sat on it until he died.

Halliburton was only one of many instances in which Obasanjo’s claim to political sainthood was questioned. A few samples: even by Yar’Adua’s admission, he threw away $16 billion in the power sector. He ran the Ministry of Petroleum Resources by himself, and billions of dollars disappeared. At the PTDF, he spent funds on wine, women and assorted malfeasance. He seized 200,000 Transcorp shares. In his hands, N200 billion disappeared from the Ecological Fund. The Presidential Library scheme consumed billions of Naira. PDP campaign funds vanished. Yar’Adua looked the other way.

“Another area where President Yar'Adua's distinction shone through,” writes Mr. Adeniyi, was his abiding faith in the rule of law.”

Yes, Yar’Adua did sponsor such propaganda, beginning from his inaugural address on May 29, 2007, in which he mentioned the concept twice. But what did it mean in practice?

Mr. Adeniyi offers as his proof the fact that the Governors of Edo State and Ondo would never have won at the electoral tribunals but for Yar’Adua. In so doint, he confirms the manipulation of votes and tribunals by his principal and the PDP. The implied threat is that Yar’Adua did those states a favour by allowing the votes of the people to stand. But there are also many states in which the election tribunal favoured the PDP candidate: does this mean that in those states, Yar’Adua was against the opposition, or that he favoured his party? Does this claim not suggest that Yar’Adua was involved in the business of the judiciary? Is that the meaning of the rule of law?

One of Yar’Adua’s most dubious accomplishments concerned Siemens, which Nigeria had blacklisted for corruption. Not only did Yar’Adua lift the order, he awarded Siemens more contracts. His excuse was that he did not want the relationship between Germany and Nigeria to be harmed, and that the German Chancellor had appealed to him that Siemens was born again. That is like a man came to your home and raping your mother, only for you to give him a cash award and midnight visiting rights to your daughters because his father reminded you of the need for peace among men.

Yar’Adua cobbled together a policy known as the Seven-point agenda to enable him run for office. He promptly lost track of it. In his tribute, Mr. Adeniyi tried to reinvent history: “The 'Seven-point agenda' is not an economic blueprint but rather a conceptual framework of the critical areas of our national life that the administration considered of utmost priority.”

This is meaningless gobbledygook. A “conceptual framework?” So it was because Yar’Adua was still conceiving the frame of the work that he never found it fit to transfer power as required by the constitution he swore to uphold?

In all of his tenure, “Baba Go-Slow”  could not even declare his much-advertised state of emergency in the power sector. The closest he came occurred two years after he arrived: “And this emergency I said I want to declare, I want to look at everything,”  he said. “I think by the end of May (2009), I will be ready by the grace of God to declare the emergency in the sector.”

Of course he did not. He could not come up with one megawatt of confidence to do it.

The seven-point hoax did not take cognizance of the Millennium Development Goals, which Yar’Adua abandoned without a glance. And to avoid being embarrassed, the man then started fleeing from the United Nations, repeatedly sending two clowns that, elsewhere, I have referred to as Alao and Shakey-Shakey.

I agree with Mr. Adeniyi that Yar’Adua made a significant impact on the Niger Delta issue, and I give him all the credit for that. But let us not forget that he almost bungled it at the beginning by insensitively or ignorantly trying to foist Professor Ibrahim Gambari on the issue.

Mr. Adeniyi would have attracted more sympathy from me when he spoke of Yar’Adua’s weaknesses, had he been more specific. He identified none, preferring to focus on Yar’Adua’s loyalty to the boys in the palace. In doing this, he provides a clear example of why leadership routinely fails in Nigeria: people sit at the feet of the king, insulated from the tumult outside those gates.

It is clear that on the days Mr. Adeniyi was recruited to make the President laugh, neither king nor clown remembered the suffering and the waiting of the people. Yar’Adua may have benefited from a rigged election, but he was sworn in. That is the only reason I reluctantly referred to him as President, hoping he would rise beyond himself to enhance the quality of life of our tortured people.

The Yar’Adua we knew turned out to be no different from his predecessors. He did not enrich us with his vision or inspire us with his wisdom or uplift us with his energy or humanize us with his compassion.

Public officials must resist the temptation to interpret the destiny of a nation in terms of their privileged benefits. And while we may never speak ill of the dead, we must never neglect to speak the truth about our country. The truth about my country is that I fully regret the Yar’Adua