One of the things that confound the world about Nigeria is the qualification for public office. In our debate about leadership, none of the criteria on which people are considered for public office features. Nigerian politicians do not bother to tell the people whether they can perform in office. They know also that such things do not matter at elections. They know that Nigerians, the very poor and oppressed Nigerians, will kill themselves to defend them, once they are from their ethnic or religious stock. Such truth limits the extent to which you would want to defend the poor, for they would sooner or later defect to ethnic factions. Nigerians are the only people I know who oil their own shackles!
Since independence, what has informed the leadership of this country has been where the ruler comes from. This has degenerated from a struggle, to a full-scale war. Today, the decent face of this national embarrassment parades itself as power rotation or turn-by-turn or hol’am-small-and-give-me-back concept of leadership. Mind you, I am an advocate of power shift. That concept, however, is rooted on the philosophy of a level-playing field, which promotes equal access to power, unimpeded by a conspiracy between an ethno-political group and an ethno-military wing!
People, to a great extent, mistake Obasanjo’s presidency when they fail to see its origin in Abiola’s June 12, 1993 election victory. People are right when they argue that Obasanjo’s presidency is a placatory overture to the Yoruba as a result of Abiola’s annulled election. If so, Obasanjo or any other Yoruba was, to that extent, destined to be president. That truth immediately discounts the idea of a contrived award of power to the Yoruba. What do I mean? Let us go back to Abiola’s election. Apart from those who held those nocturnal meetings with Abiola at Muri Okunola Street, Victoria Island, many of them, and all those who worked for his victory and those who voted for him, no group, or persons can claim to have given Abiola victory. And that Abiola won that election on his own steam and without the “authoritative allocation” of power by any group, was central to the annulment of that election.
They saw Abiola as someone they could not control since they did not make him. But the point that I have continued to make is that twenty annulments could not obliterate the fact that power had shifted. And I think I also said it many years ago that no matter what happened, the politics of the future would take its bearing from Abiola’s election victory. That was probably why even long after the Shonekan, Abacha and Abdulsalami Abubakar interregnum, it was still compelling that a restoration of Abiola’s mandate had to be canonised by the election of a Yoruba, Obasanjo! In other words, Obasanjo is in loco president for Abiola! That being so, his mandate dates back to 1993, and all those who lay claims to making Obasanjo are simply whistling in the wind!
On the other hand, we may concede the fact that when Babangida was annulling the 1993 election and Abacha was killing people in the streets of Lagos, they were working for a Yoruba president! There was no way a Yoruba man could not have been elected the president in 1999. That it happened to be Obasanjo was a matter of a predetermined result for the election. It could have been Chief Olu Falae. I suspect that Obasanjo was aware of this fact. That was probably why he did not take seriously, those who were prancing about, claiming they were dashing him the presidency and giving him pre-conditions to sign. But then, I think Nigeria ought to have moved beyond the fallouts of the annulled election and the expediency of the 1999 elections.
I say this because of the report credited to Alhaji Mohammed Hassan, a former Minister of Mines and Power under President Shagari, by Thisday, the Sunday Newspaper (18th July, 2004). Alhaji Hassan regurgitated the same old story that made the rounds during the debate about Obasanjo’s second term bid, that the North tried to force Obasanjo to sign a pact with the North before they could support him for the presidency in 1999. We were told that he refused to sign. The immediate question then should be why did the North not insist that he signs or else…? Was there really any option left for the North? Was the North in any position to call Obasanjo’s bluff as he quietly called theirs? No! They could not do anything, just as IBB’s machinations could not stop Abiola in 1993, and this buttresses my point above.
Except that every group and every contender is desperate to grab power in 2007, I fail to see why Alhaji Hassan would want to vault unto power with this rotten pole! Two quick questions to Hassan and his group, which North does he represent now? The North of children who could not get education, health facilities, water or electricity for all the years the “North” was in power? The North of children who were excluded from jobs and other opportunities unless they were privileged? Secondly, what else is Hassan bringing to power except the fact that he is a Northerner? Will that fact alone eradicate polio, and other dangerous communicable diseases that afflict children in the North? Has the ordinary Northerner fared worse or better just because a South-Westerner is in power?
Why do some privileged Northerners continue to live and propagate this lie that the interest of the Northerner can only be served by a Northerner? What is on ground to support this logic? When will people admit the fact that the only tribe in Nigeria is the troublesome tribe of the political elite who use their people as cannon fodder in the war for political turfs? Look at the number of people killed in the Niger-Delta in the last three months. How many of them are the sons of the elite? And how many of them do the South-South governors know their names? Poor people internally displaced due to political wars of the elite are littered across the country in miserable camps. Who cares?
People who lay claim to power not on the quality of leadership they can offer the country, but merely on the disingenuous claim to sole propriety, loaning, donating and collecting power as dictated by their whims and caprices, are simply racing forward while looking back! Neither anthropology nor heredity is enough qualification for the highly priced public office like the presidency anymore. The world around us is moving away from all such primordial considerations. Progressive societies today are knowledge-based.
My own expectation from a National Conference is that it should prescribe common values and standards for our governance so that at elections, we look all over the country for those who meet those criteria for public office. And there is abundant evidence that the North of today is not lacking in people who can serve Nigeria at that level. It insults such people if their qualification to govern is diminished by a negotiated pre-condition written on a piece of paper! I suspect that there are people all over the country who have lost their relevance in their various communities who believe that it will help to rehabilitate them if it is said that they brought power to their ethnic group!
What Nigeria must look for this time around is someone who can run a modern economy, manage the nation’s wealth for the peace and happiness of the majority. Time is running out on us while we supplicate at the altar of ethnicity and religion. We must at least be seen to be facing the right direction, even if we can’t keep pace with the rest of the world!
