Africa
As Yar'Adua Sleeps On Duty, Let Nigerians Act
By Peter Claver Oparah, NVS 13/5/08
May 14, 2008 - 12:26:52 PM

Short of charging those that nursed that hope that Yar’Adua would open an inquest into how the ship of state was torpedoed between 1999 and 2007 by a regime that has become synonymous with primitive kleptocracy, with committing treasonable felony, Adeniyi was said to have expressed strong reservations that the present probe of the power sector by the House of Representatives is constituting distractions to his master’s regime. Even as many Nigerians wonder whether the distraction is to the present regime’s penchant to lull itself to self-delusive deep slumber while the ship of state flounders, the obvious fact in Adeniyi’s tirade against those that seek Obasanjo’s probe is that this regime seeks to play true to the letters of its emergence and not ruffle the smelly feathers of its benefactor.

To understand why Nigerians may be hoping in vain for the lifting of the state of rot Obasanjo and his thieving cabal deftly institutionalized in the eight bizarre years they lorded over this country, we must always call to mind why this regime that is a study in self-contradictions, perambulation and indecision, wants to always distance itself from a full probe of its predecessor but would not mind secretly provoking the scintillating lurid stories of the wholesome brigandage that happened in that eight disastrous years. To see why nothing is programmed to change by the wily Yar’Adua and his men, we must analyze and factor into the pranks of the present regime, the present laughable hide-and-seek Iyabo Obasanjo is playing with the EFCC and we must seek to know why Yar’Adua hides under the canopy of the rule of law whenever he is required to act decisively but would waive such rule whenever the interests of the cabal he is presiding over comes into scrutiny.

As I am writing, the nation is practically on its knees with nothing, absolutely nothing, but official stealing working in Nigeria. The roads are wearing desolate looks with the imminence of the rains, the petroleum sector waffles through a permanent state of fragility, unemployment nears a dizzying height, insecurity of lives and properties equals that in war-strafed Kandahar, official stealing is fast becoming legit, impunity of all manners reign uncensored, the health sector has become moribund, the educational sector has been consigned into an intractable miasma, the poverty circle widens and life dons the Hobbessian fringe because with each day, government records incremental defenestation and leaves no known discernable meaning with the Nigerian people. The power sector continues its journey to certain extinction with The Guardian reporting in its editorial yesterday, May 12^th that power generation has plunged to a miserly 860 megawatts, from the over 3,000 when Obasanjo made his regrettable entry into the presidency nine years ago. The big corruption industry carefully nurtured in the last nine years is in full bloom

On the other hand, the revenue profile of the country burgeons by the day and with oil prices appreciating each passing day, the sky remains the limit to what this country will make from this providential windfall that lubricates perhaps the largest corruption complex in human history. It is not surprising therefore that most of this revenue is guided into private pockets and accounts through ingenious fonts that were franticly invented during the Obasanjo regime. Through the excess crude account, an unaccountable cesspool that has served as a slush fund for emptying the difference between this skyrocketing revenue and the under-valued benchmark that are employed in drafting the highly ineffectual annual budgets, the excess crude account has grown to become the largest pool of unaudited and unaccountable idle cash available to thieving governments in Nigeria in very recent times. It is this fund that those in government occasionally raid to fund their personal vanities and satisfy their gluttonous financial libido. Nigerians are made pitiable spectators in issues that affect them and are told to mind their businesses when they try to question the grand larceny being committed in the name of governance in their country.  The most obscene pilfering goes on in so many guises and in all these, Nigerians are the direct victims and this is where a government is needed to protect the weak, the downtrodden and the disempowered. That was the least expectation Nigerians reposed in whoever took over from the organized scam Obasanjo ran for eight years when he and his menservants were more interested in feathering their nests and putting a deceptive foil about it. That is what Yar’Adua is not giving and he is pleading he is being distracted by the increasing call for the probe of the many acts of indiscretion that made Obasanjo’s eight years an unprecedented den of treasury plunderers and serial looters. God have mercy!

But come to think of it; is it not too tall to expect a Yar’Adua that never won any election to turn against the same benefactor that treated the electoral process to howling scam to install Yar’Adua and his confederates in the PDP to power? As a nation, are we not being excessively naïve to entrust in Yar’Adua and his government the hope for a cleansing from the putrid Augean stable Obasanjo left behind? Are we not being too trusting to believe that in Yar’Adua lies the hope for a cleaner and saner order when he was forced on Nigerians with the implied understanding to keep Obasanjo’s sins under cover after that adult trickster failed to secure a diabolical tenure elongation? Do we really expect Yar’Adua to send Obasanjo to his deserved second term in jail-apology to Yakubu Danjuma-when he owes his twisted ascendancy to power to the same Obasanjo’s crooked sleight of hands? Do we expect that Yar’Adua possesses the radical flair needed to strike a clean and needed break from the intentionally scrambled order on which Obasanjo and his self-advertising lackeys tied the progress of the country after eight years of unabated marauding?

When we consider the above posers, we would find out why the country is presently suspended in a dangerous pass where a government is content reigning while all manners of vicissitudes take turns in whacking Nigerians from all fronts. We would find out why we have a president that is sleeping his way through duty and who feels his sleep is disturbed by any suggestion that criminals that have accounted for why this country’s progress is perpetually arrested should be made to account. The same people were responsible for criminalizing the electoral process to pave way for his emergence. When we look further, we would discover that in Yar’Adua, we have a boneless president who does not reserve any guts to even enact the negative activism of his predecessor, which provoked movement, even if it was in the reverse direction as the eight years of infamy lasted. We have in our hands a president and a system that is eternally shackled by the contradictions inherent in his emergence that he cuts his integrity foil in preserving the rotten order that brought him to power. We would find out that we have a president that seeks strength in selling deceptive pictures of integrity to the extent that it helps him to sustain the inherent rots from where he sources his strength.

The latest postures of the Yar’Adua presidency throws a clearer light on the shameful forgery that happened in April 2007 and advertises its consequences more than anything. It throws more light on the melodramatic pursuit of the third term project by the amoral Obasanjo presidency and the vow to wobble the process in the do-or-die effort to enthrone a choice lackey that would be trusted that the sins of Obasanjo and his hirelings are kept under cover, once it became official he would not die with them in office, with the failure of the third term. It accounts for all the political gambits, all the plots, intrigues and shenanigans sold into the electoral process to deface and mutilate it in the manner it was compromised in April 2007 and for it to churn the kind of scandalous outcome it spewed in 2007. It is the reason why Yar’Adua plays deaf and dumb to the earth-shaking call for the probe of INEC and the rustication of the dramatis personae employed in inflicting the kind of electoral larceny against Nigeria and inflict so much dishonor, shame and opprobrium on the image of the country.

But more than anything, Yar’Adua’s commitment to keeping Obasanjo’s sins under cover is the reason for the faltering ship of state that is afflicting Nigeria presently. It is the reason for why government has gone on a long break and Nigerians are left to stew in their own juice while Yar’Adua has suddenly found strength in re-enacting the same perfidious political interests his predecessor employed in hewing him as a great liability to the country, neighing from redemption from a consistent strings of locusts. It is the reason why we have the sort of compromised present we are slaving under now, why there seems to be no ray of light at the end of the tunnel and why Nigerians are increasingly getting fed up with a system that is programmed to return the kind of disastrous output we are weighed down with now. Building on a foundation of rot and corruption remains the best way to not build and Nigeria is an advert copy of what turns out when a country is structured on the debris of consistent acts of corruption and impunity. Yar’Adua is only proving to be same of the same, with a mandate to ensure that no skin pain ever comes the way of the source of his heavily-tainted mandate and he is merely living to that oath by the angry statement he caused to be issued last week. It is to Nigerians to decide whether to continue slaving under this noxious order or to revolt and the time is getting increasingly short for us to make that important decision