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faith, everything would have been known.
Full disclosure is the name of the game. By the time the president is elected, Americans already ‘own’ him, and are ready to go through thick and thin, swim or sink with him. But that does not happen here. We never really know the people that get thrown at us as presidents, until they are already in office, and begin to deal with us for ill or for good. It happened with Shehu Shagari, Same with Olusegun Obasanjo, And now Umaru Yar’Adua. The only one we knew, whom we virtually took through an inquisition before electing, M.K. O. Abiola, was not allowed to rule by wicked powers in high places.
By the day, I get more and more convinced that in Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, we have a total stranger as our president; A completely obscure governor in Katsina, not known beyond the borders of his state. I doubt even if those outside the state capital really knew the man that ruled their state for eight solid years. No wonder when his name first came up in December 2006 as the one Olusegun Obasanjo had anointed as successor, many people asked, Umaru who? He was a complete stranger to Nigerians, anonymous, except for the family name.
Even among his fellow governors, not many could claim to know him. The governor of a neighbouring state had specifically told some of my colleagues: “Umaru? As president? Ask him the phone numbers of his fellow governors, and he won’t be able to give you. We are neighbours, we have been fellow governors for about eight years, but he has not for once left his state capital to say hello to me, or to any of his other neighbours. How can you then make such a fellow president?”
Now, I’m not necessarily saying that only cosmopolitan, footloose people can make best presidents; Not exactly so. But you at least need to know, to a great extent, the man that would rule you. We never did. Obasanjo never gave us the chance. He just picked the man he wanted, installed him, and told us to go to hell if we didn’t like it.
Two publications in recent times have reinforced my conviction that the man ruling us is a complete stranger, and we are just becoming privy to information we should have known about him long before he became president. Not as if it would matter much, as Obasanjo and his co-conspirators like Maurice Iwu, Nuhu Ribadu, Nasir El-Rufai, and others, made sure that we didn’t have any choice. Yar’Adua was rammed down our throats, willy-nilly. The fact that we were almost choked, asphyxiated in the process did not matter to them.
Two recent sources of revelation about the true man Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, both are from what you can call opposition camps, but no matter. One is Nasir El-Rufai, former Federal Capital Territory minister, and power broker in the Obasanjo regime. The other is Ya’u Shehu Darazo, spokesman to General Muhammadu Buhari.
Many have described the recent treatise by El-Rufai as sour grapes. I agree. After thinking he would still play a major role in the new Yar’Adua regime in 2007, the former FCT super minister was force-fed with unripe grapes, and his teeth were set on edge. He fled abroad, from where he now takes pot-shots at the administration.
Nasir El-Rufai recently released on the Internet a publication on Nigeria with the headline, ‘Umaru Yar’Adua: High Expectations, Disappointing Outcomes.’ It was like a research thesis, serialised over many days by some Nigerian newspapers. What he said was a damming verdict on the character of the man Umaru Yar’Adua.
At Barewa College, he was a chain smoker and drank a lot of alcohol, contrary to school regulations. Other students thus gave him the nickname, ‘Bad Man.’ He was rebellious and held strong anti-establishment views. Later in life, he developed interest in mysticism, and discovered the works of Lobsang Rampa, the Tibetan mystic, which introduced him to oriental thinking and superstition. He is still steeped in it today.
More revelations: After retiring from public service, Umaru ran the businesses of his elder brother, Gen Shehu Musa Yar’Adua. And he ran them aground. “Under Umaru’s non-business supervision, the family fortune was virtually disappearing,” El-Rufai claims. He later became Katsina State governor through funds contributed by friends and political associates. If you needed any favour in Katsina then, approach two people – Turai and Zainab – Yar’Adua’s wife and favourite daughter respectively. It was done, pronto.
And more: As governor, Yar’Adua was autocratic and insecure, and eventually decimated the opposition through patronage, coercion and intimidation. He hated travelling, and so rarely visited Abuja, preferring to send his deputy to attend meetings. He interacted minimally with Obasanjo, and even pretended he was not interested in becoming president, after the latter asked PDP governors to indicate, following the collapse of the third term gambit.
Not done yet, El-Rufai put in this clincher: Umaru Yar’Adua’s name was originally on the list of corrupt governors prepared by Nuhu Ribadu, but the latter was persuaded to remove it, because “Umaru’s corruption was not personal, and was productive.” See how they play Russian roulette with our nation? Some people just decided who could run for the 2007 polls, and who could not, according to their whims and caprices. No wonder the elections were so thoroughly messed up. So Shambolic.
There are yet many revelations on Yar’Adua by El-Rufai, but my own position is: why is he just making all these disclosures? Would he have spoken out if he became Minister of Power under the regime as was originally designed? When people are too crafty, they get consumed in their own craftiness. But on the flipside, the publication also clearly shows that we have a man we do not know at all as our president.
Even Obasanjo that handpicked him did not know him.To Ya’u Shehu Darazo. On June 8, Buhari’s media man had a publication on Page 17 of Daily Sun. The title was, ‘Why Yar’Adua can’t be trusted.’ It unearthed how our president ran Katsina as a governor, allegedly bought over opposition figures, sacked those who refused to be induced, suffocated elements of democracy within his own party, and conducted the worst local government elections in the whole country. It is said many people were killed in the violence that erupted after the polls.
My worry after all these revelations is whether we can ever expect electoral reforms from an individual with such character portrait. I know he cleverly shut out Aminu Masari, the then House of Representatives Speaker from the gubernatorial polls in Katsina, but I never knew he was such a typical Nigerian politician- an artful schemer. How then can we dare expect political reforms under him? We are done for, or so it seems.
We eventually got to know Obasanjo for what he was- A thoroughly bad man, an Evil. But what of this president we don’t know, but whom we were earlier told was a good man? I think Nigeria is in greater trouble than we ever imagined. Our political redemption truly is not as near as we have been made to believe.
Do we know this president enough?
By Femi Adesina (
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