If we were all presidents
The ‘victory’ of the ‘Yar’adua-must-go’ people is definitely pyrrhic. Dispensing of Yar’adua while increasing fear, distrust, tribalism, religious bigotry, and hopelessness among our people is definitely counter-productive. How are we going to replace hope, love, tolerance, trust in our people after Yar’adua? What kind of Nigerians will Goodluck Jonathan and other presidents to come after […]
The ‘victory’ of the ‘Yar’adua-must-go’ people is definitely pyrrhic. Dispensing of Yar’adua while increasing fear, distrust, tribalism, religious bigotry, and hopelessness among our people is definitely counter-productive. How are we going to replace hope, love, tolerance, trust in our people after Yar’adua? What kind of Nigerians will Goodluck Jonathan and other presidents to come after him inherit? To the average Nigerian, life is just terrible, because all the newspapers say so. Having lived abroad, where the most ‘successful’ people are those who are able to live on huge credit, I seem to think many Nigerians are having it good, and the gaps that we notice can be filled, even by ourselves, if only we care enough.
I suspect that those who are whipping up mass hysteria are those who are used to government patronage. They are the ones stoking all the trouble that this country has seen in the past few weeks. They are the ones who concoct and spread rumours that Muslims want to start poisoning Christians and that Christians are trying to bomb mosques on Fridays. Educated people and illiterates on both sides have foolishly believed all these rumours and we as a people are the worse for it.
Nigerians agree on the need to make political office less attractive in order for people of integrity to go and really ‘serve’. Yar’adua’s absence is a test of that hypothesis. But our eggheads seem not to have seen that opportunity. Now they are clamouring for the presence of a president in a way that reveals how we find it difficult to self-govern, and how we would rather be spoon-fed and commandeered about by someone wielding ‘power’. We have always condemned the idea behind the excessive show of power by our public officers, but the total reliance we are showing on the office of the president negates our theories on good governance. Businesses that complain about the president’s absence, should have seized this opportunity to think themselves out of that box.
My take on this issue has always been that we have expended an inordinate amount of time and negative energy on this issue. Let us assume that we believed that Yar’adua was a good president, would we not want him there no matter what? After the decisions of the Senate and House to pass on presidential power to the Vice President, Nigerians are asking for impeachment. Those at the forefront were the same ones who wanted MKO Abiola to be sworn in as president in 1998 despite the fact that many years of solitary confinement had reduced the man to vegetable (as was evident in the only post-incarceration picture taken by the man with Chief Anyaoku and Admiral Akhigbe). The South-West fought the Abiola war for close to ten years, even though as revealed in the man’s autobiography written by Moshood Fayemiwo, he sponsored the coup that took out Muhammadu Buhari with $10 million. But we say he’s a democrat!
The victory is definitely costly for all those who supported Yar’adua’s removal, for now we see odious characters like Femi Fani-Kayode, coming out to say abject rubbish about the President. It is to Yar’adua’s credit that he did not adopt the combative method of hiring attack dogs like Fani-Kayode to insult our sensibilities on a daily basis. But perhaps Nigerians prefer presidents that will treat them like wild animals. I don’t. Fani virtually walked out a sitting Vice-President from a FEC meeting, now he is pushing for a VP to be President. Haba!
Some of Yar’adua’s decisions must go down in history as profoundly beneficial for this country – real banking reforms, amnesty (he rejected UK’s offer to sell Nigeria £250 million worth of arms and ammunition to wipe out militants and went for amnesty instead), reasonability in politics (if not for his life-view, Oshiomhole, Obi, Amaechi could never have been governors. The PDP monster is Obj’s idea), he even released Lagos State funds. People are saying he is a useless president because he didn’t tar the roads to their villages, but one day we will look back in retrospect at his well-conceived and futuristic decisions.
In Yar’adua’s absence, we have missed the opportunity to be presidents ourselves. If we were presidential in our attitude and actions we would have done a lot differently that would have probably mitigated the effects of his absence. Nigerians get on the internet daily and tear themselves and their country apart. Visit saharareporters, 234NEXT and other websites and you would be shocked at how much venom Nigerians are spewing out along tribal and religious divides, while hiding under pseudonyms. And those people think they are adding value to the Nigerian project. That is the same internet that Barack Obama used to engender a generational change for the positive in the US.
If we were ‘presidents’ we would seek unity and progress and would not spread fear, despair and hate. We would not be corrupt, and we would take care of our own environments and people around us. If Yar’adua has failed as a president, we are the ones that have failed in the duties conferred on us as smaller ‘presidents’. What if we had a massive earthquake in Nigeria and the president was buried under rubble, how quickly will we give up the search? Does the constitution say anything about that? And when will we begin to demand, through the crevices of the collapsed concrete, for his handover note? Recall that people are still being pulled out alive from the rubbles of Haiti. Or are we just being flippant because we don’t suffer Haiti’s kind of fate? I am deeply scandalised at our loss of humanity. The King of Saudi Arabia must be wondering what kind of people we are, for while he is showing concern for our president, we couldn’t care less.
Now that Jonathan has been enabled, we should positively rally round him. If we keep behaving like hound dogs, then there is no hope for us as a specie. If we were all presidents, as we should be, we would have all ‘acted’ for Yar’adua in his absence. I am ‘president’, and so I didn’t miss him as much as some did. I am focused on positivism. You think I’m a dreamer?… well, don’t wake me up.