Yar’adua: Between morality and legality
The pro-Yar’adua group see the ailing president as a regional candidate who represents a regional interest that must be protected even at the risk of the nation being riled or divided. The anti-Yar’adua group live by incensing the first group and they usually make a few cash from such ventures. The charlatans are mainly opportunists […]
The pro-Yar’adua group see the ailing president as a regional candidate who represents a regional interest that must be protected even at the risk of the nation being riled or divided. The anti-Yar’adua group live by incensing the first group and they usually make a few cash from such ventures. The charlatans are mainly opportunists who cash in on any issue either for the nuisance or monetary value or for both. The charlatans have no scruples and if the tide turns, they also have no loyalty other than to their belly. The last group do not know what to believe, and I guess they are amused by the political chiaroscuro. But at the time of crises, they are easy casualties.
While no normal person should be happy about the bad tide of events in the Yar’adua saga, the event has brought to fore which one takes precedence – political or moral expediency and legality. On the political or moral line, a president who has not warmed his bench for upwards of 30 days has no business taking the job in the first instance and ought to resign his commission and occupy himself with whatever has occupied his time.
Our President has been invincible and incommunicado for almost six months now. In that circumstance, the country has two options, to explain what this sickness translates to in monetary terms for the average taxpayer and on the basis of that information, decide whether the economy can continue to carry it or seek the moral or constitutional option which is – institute impeachment process or offer him or his minders an easy way out – resignation. That is one option.
On the moral level, there are those who feel that the President has become like a sick child. No parent kills his sick child or pushes him out of the home just because he is sick. In fact, against all odds and medical opinion, a good parent will keep spending until the inevitable happens.
This is a way of satisfying the moral conscience that they did their best. It is only human. Now, in the case of Nigeria, it is hydra-headed. The most corrupt country on earth cannot lay claim to any tissue or fibre of morality, not with the level of morass in which we are swimming as a nation. But then, it can also not be legalistically tackled as it seems; simply because of its political state of incomplete metamorphosis in which public office has many sides. There is to it, a quasi-legal, quasi-divine and quasi-constitutional side to these issues. This makes it divisive and indeed dangerous to invoke the moral or constitutional code and also dicey to strictu sensu insist on pure legality.
This is why the polity is being heated up daily by reports of Yar’adua apparitions and the penchant by religious and all sorts of so-called leaders of opinion to turn the Yar’adua wing of the Presidential Villa into a political holy of holies, accessible to only an anointed group of priests and ‘saints’. Is there going to be a meeting of minds between all the contending forces in such a way that our current rating in the comity of nations is enhanced? That is the question to which I have no clear answer. It also poses a political precedent as well as a public relations challenge.
Today, I publish the reaction of a reader to my piece published here three weeks ago.
Re: To Keep Nigeria One
I have just read your article on the caption quoted above. Nobody is against those of you who call for caution concerning the peace and security of Nigeria. The question we have been asking is:
Why are northerners bloodthirsty, so that at the common sight of the eclipse of the moon or the sun, they descend on other Nigerians and kill them because they are the Kafirs who brought the geographical phenomenon about?
What makes northerners think that their own blood is thicker than that of other Nigerians?
Why do they hate Christians so much?
Can’t they worship Allah without killing other Nigerians shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’?
Tunde, why do you deceive yourself because you are an employee of Daily Trust? How many of your kinsmen have been killed here in the North over what they know nothing about? Take the case of 2006. One man in Denmark made a caricature of the Prophet of Islam. Muslims, northerners in Maiduguri here in Nigeria decided to slaughter over 1,800 christians. Many of those christians do not know where Denmark is located on the globe.
Is it not better for Nigeria to be divided as suggested by Gaddafi? If I chose to pick a visa to travel or sojourn in Northern Nigeria, I will at least be able to write my will knowing that the barbarians there will one day slaughter me just because one man and his wife had a quarrel in the neighbourhood.
You must think and think and think …. Tunde, think ……
Yours sincerely,
E A Felix