THE EARLY STAINS OF MAY Chapter five They all fall down In the eyes of the Yoruba elite in and out of government Chief Olusegun Obasanjo will remain an evocative symbol of all that they could have gained since the 1979 presidential election in the second republic, because no son of Yoruba land since his coming into Nigeria politics in 1975 have had the opportunity to facilitate the appraisal of their empirical political knowledge for the benefit of constitutional federalism which they have come to believe remains their best game changer in the Nigeria project. Twice the Nigeria economy was left in the hands of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, but under his leadership the yearnings of the Yoruba people was never allowed to become implicit in democratic covenant, to which the south west region gradually began to suffer the predictable effect of the nation’s moribund economy, making it ironic that the Yoruba people that could boast of being the most educated ethnic group in the country was fast becoming the ethnic group with the biggest number of unemployed graduate in Nigeria. They have had the privilege of been in power for eight uninterrupted years since the coming of the fourth republic but rather than become complacent they simply became orphans of economic power except for some few privilege technocrats trapped in an endless media war of corruption charges and a prolong dilemma between the love for self immolation and the fear of its uncertainty; because not many of this technocrats were mindful of the fact that Nigeria politics is like the remnant of a Bagdad folklore where public office is equivalent to a den of thieves and where integrity is nothing more than a death certificate to those who walk the corridors of power with an empty pocket full of abhorrence, a reminder that the average Yoruba man is not greedy by nature but only have the unfortunate disposition of being politically careless with the issues of his integrity. Under the Obasanjo administration the Yoruba elite became more characterized by the necessity of a political gambit that left them less economically potent than they could ever boast of been politically strengthened, so that fourteen years down the road the nation have been reminded in an unusual way that even if the current administration of President Jonathan cannot afford to lose power in 2015 by losing majority of the vote in the north it also cannot afford to fail in the south west by failing to form a profitable alliance with the Yoruba elite in the ruling party who have simply become the most valuable to the administration but yet least most accessible political asset in the country today; for while the former threat to President Jonathan is nothing more than a ‘political drama’ anchored on his sense of ‘poetic license’ the latter is to the president an affront, and since he cannot shy away from the enormous powers of incumbency without the temptation of deceit the logical conclusion therefore is that sooner than later the Yoruba elite in the ruling party will have to confront the growing concern of President Jonathan’s extreme approach to power with a form of superior bargain that leaves them less venerable to the intrigues of zoning by the simple reason of their ability to realize how much political influence that the Chief Obasanjo administration had given to the Yoruba elite in the ruling party since 1999 which comes as a simply exchange of praxis for the south west economic vulnerability since 1976. As far as the history of the Yoruba nation is concerned the Yoruba elite have not been kind to the sacrifice of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo as it relates to their progress; the issues have always been if the south west region should be allowed to continue to ‘bleed’ from the random thoughts of its beggar economy created by the penchant for opposition politics that over the years have become too dependent on the foreign trade at Lagos port that gives it no economic value outside of its political posturing or the options of making political imperatives equal to the dimensions of imperialism, because the essence of being called one of the major tribes in Nigeria was already lost to party resolution that forbid the objectives of its political gain to trade off the fortunes of the region in the name of economic interest alone and no one have come to understand this obstacle better than Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. The only reason why the Yoruba elite will fail to see things the same way that Chief Obasanjo reasons in the interest of the Yoruba nation is that they already have a political mindset deeply rooted in a not too convincing economic ideology that does not embrace the politics of inclusiveness outside of an alliance. The history of this cognitive economic autonomy is far but not uncertain since it is found in the clout of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the undisputed leader of the Yoruba nation, but what is often mistaken for Chief Awolowo’s economic ideology is his preference for egalitarianism, which though strengthens all forms of economic social life does not however mean an economic ideology, because its main focus of attention is not the economy of a society but its justice system that regulate the economy and other forms of social cohesion. The truth is that Chief Awolowo cannot be said to be truly identified with a particular economic ideology because he was too much of a maverick politician that advocated for nation building on an open ended option of economic solutions that should concentrate on what works and can stand the test of time on the basis of acceptability, it is this mindset that enabled him to make capitalism his first choice of economic hypothesis. Chief Awolowo was a misunderstood politician in several respect including his economic views which were never melt to come with an extreme approach of seclusion in the defined context of an ideology but rather in the context of what was applicable to the issues of pragmatism, also there is the issue of Chief Awolowo’s leadership objectives which was never melt to lead the Yoruba nation that was too much of an heterogeneous society, of which any attempt to have done this would have amounted to a form of dictatorship and would have put him in the same category of Yoruba leaders as Bashorun Gaha; rather what Chief Awolowo set out to achieve for the Yoruba nation was responsive leadership from the remnant of its hegemony, so that it is surprising to know that there is nothing that Chief Awolowo made the Yoruba elite aware of politically that they could not have known if he had never led them politically, because even the issues of federalism which is very dear to the heart of the average Yoruba politician and which Chief Awolowo himself advocated all his life at the federal level is nothing more than the lessons from the fall of the old Oyo empire reconstructed from the struggle for power between the Alafin , the Bashorun and the Kakanfo. It remains to be seem if any of this misconception will create more disrespect for Nigeria erstwhile political leaders by their continuous association to a stereotype form of politics, that now threatens to include the political behavior of the protégées of that era which appears to make their political mentors look as if they cannot fall down, so that more often than not one get to see that there is nowhere in Nigeria today that politicians so easily hesitate to realize that the most relevant of personal opinion is not even the slightest form of political conviction which by implication means the emergency of a collective interest than the south east region, a region where political fortunes cannot escape the colossal loss of ethnic rascality which is needed to prevent a region from becoming a political space of ‘internally displaced politicians’, and that the Igbo nation is yet a replica of the fall of the Roman empire is most amusing because it is forty six years now since the end of the Nigeria civil war and the frontline politicians of the Igbo nation are yet to have a well articulated ambitious plan outside of the incidence of statism which appears most likely to remain an Achilles heels on the tracks of their accidental marathon, because in Nigeria political power is not known to exist in vacuum. In the last fourteen years the glory of the Igbo nation have been so easily found in the ‘short sightedness’ of the National Assembly where long serving federal law makers reign supreme in the three arm zone even though it has been more of sunset than sunrise for the Igbo nation because these politicians are but prisons of the nations multidimensional challenges that can only be understood from the single perspective of the politics of party loyalty which remains inseparable from the fantasies of self aggrandizement. The Igbo leaders of today are too evidently weak and almost helpless to state policies that favor the Igbo nation, because they simply cannot get much done for their own region without first sustaining a political loss or suffering the transformative condition of their own financial commitment to the federal government presence in the south east. It will continue to be so as long as the Yoruba and Hausa/ Fulani political elite still see the Igbo nation as an extension of the Ojukwu bunker. The Igbo ethnic group is still seen as the custodian of the post civil war mistrust in the political game of ethnic skirmishes in the country; but much more interesting than this is the fact that the Igbo leaders themselves have created the reasons for their own prolong national suspicion by their refusal to value principle over wealth, it is not that the rest of the country have not forgiven the Igbo ethnic group for the provocations of the civil war but that they cannot forget the level at which they had sustained their collective success in those dark years with so little in such a short time. These are the two main reasons that constitute the major setback for an Igbo presidency; it is the simply knowledge that the Igbo man’s energy is superior to his knowledge even though the rest of the country cannot boast that they yet have evidence of a superior knowledge to his own; in other words the Igbo nation have too much of an enterprising advantage which in itself is equivalent to the powers of a president, so that for an Igbo man to become president of Nigeria will only put the Igbo nation ten years ahead of other ethnic nationality and that will be the equivalent of another civil war, because the Igbo man by the simple reason of his individualistic tendency will never accept political power not unless he can use it as a weapon of monopoly that can transform the nation into a village square for the connivance of tribalism to succeed in his favor, a political curse which have the opportunistic tendency to encourage all forms of political disharmony with the instructiveness of national interest for the sake of a selected few which does not necessary mean the next Igbo man. All of this plays out in favor of President Jonathan because since the Igbo man knows that his opportunity to be president is not visible any time soon the wise choice will be to support the ambition of the incumbent, a development that will leave the northern elite with no better option than to revive the political fortunes of men like Alhaji Yayale Ahmed because from the solemn view of the nation comes the end to the need that shows solidarity with the issues of zoning and only politicians like Alhaji Yayale Ahmed who have a solipsistic view of the nation and the ability to help it end its somber mood without calling for a revolution can be of help to the north in 2015, a reminder that the success of the opposition parties in the 2015 election will be their ability to present a compromise candidate from the south for the state house. Those who lampoon the President for governing the nation by ‘luck’ so easily forget that Nigeria is lucky to have a president who is constantly in search of his humanity without altogether allowing the executive arm of government become a goliath with an expose forehead because anything less than this would amount to making the next generation of politicians members of ‘the same club of aggrieved citizens’ so that on the issues of the economy President Jonathan is a complacent leader because it does strengthens his political objectives, but the fact still remains that he is not made aware by his advisers that in the eyes of the Nigeria public he appears more to be complaisant than he should be anything close to being complacent. The situation is made more difficult by the fact that while President Jonathan remains the equivocal hope of the Niger-Delta Mujahid Asari Dokubo remains its self-conscious pride because he is only among a few of the ‘creek generals’ who can still boast of remaining very audible for its collective agitations, though the two men are seen as agents of change in the eyes of the people of the Niger-Delta, however only Mujahid Asari Dokubo cuts the picture of an Ijaw warrior this is because unlike Dokubo President Jonathan simply does not see the wisdom of bringing trouble to himself or his government, the difference lies in the fact that Mujahid Asari Dokubo do not hesitate to insist on the fundamentalism of the regions internally generated revenue as the first step to going back to ‘the right drawing board’ on the issues of community development, so that the capacity to sustain the reappraisal of what constitute fairness to the people of the Niger-Delta only rest on perception that no longer depend on the realpolitik of open rebellion to the state; but President Jonathan on the other hand have become more of a Nigerian citizen who sees himself less of an Ijaw man from the Niger-Delta, his allegiance now lies with the Nigeria people and its constitution and not the people of the Niger- Delta and its kaiama declaration of the late twentieth century, besides he alone understands the benefit of conservative politics that does not oblige the Ijaw elite unrelenting criticism of his perceive war against corruption because it seems to strengthen the death of the zoning arrange and give birth to the argument of continuity by merit that favors his political permutation of 2015; the implication of the president’s ‘new found love’ in party constitutionalism is that his administration have lost the ‘convergence point’ necessary to make patriots out of Nigerians because for the citizens of any nation to become patriotic, patriotism must be presented by government to the people as a form of hope where the fundamental principle of citizenship becomes the realization that the basic issues of a peculiar society are always resolved by general consensus, and not superior force which in this case means the continuation of corruption in Nigeria, the irony of this development is that the Ijaw nation only have a single option to their continued political ascendance because sooner than later they must accept the inevitable and come partner with the so called ‘northern element’ the PDP which remains the most visible political machine that can bring their dreams to fusion, and that the party remains in the full control of the same northern elite that they have come to so easily despise remains one of the comic relief of the politics of the 2015 election. The implication of the Ijaw elite supporting the PDP in 2015 is that they have no political party that they can truly call their own for now since their vision of the future do not align with that of the northern elite in the same PDP who do not believe that the economic recovery of the Niger-Delta should be made a political agenda of the party at the federal level. The Ijaw elite may not yet be conscious of the fact that they really have not gained anything from the Jonathan presidency politically because as it is today they are being held hostage by their own inability to practice a more complicated form of politics that can replicate a genuine alternative political agenda outside of the politics of oil. It is on the basis of this failure on their part as the lack of creativity in political terms had cost the former National Security Adviser General Andrew Azazi is job in 2012, because his speech at the South -South economic summit now known in many quarters as ‘the Azazi ultimatum’ have been considered by many political observers as a political outburst without a specific target outside of the threat of the arbitrariness of oil politics, politically he did call for the end of the zoning arrangement in favor of the president which he tried to explain was a matter of national security against the politics of attrition, but professionally he did not call for the end of the growing sense of treasonable felony among politicians in the ruling party without getting himself involve in the President politics of compromise that left him totally vulnerable to the hawks of the ruling party and there is no doubt that the PDP as a political machine had the final say on the issue of ‘the Azazi ultimatum’ and that the President was at a loss on both end of a zero sum game, because he was ‘advised’ to sack one of his closest loyalist ;his own kinsman who was the NSA and the first ever to occupy the position, he was also ‘encouraged’ by the circumstances of the politics that came from northern politicians in the party to down play the issue of zoning in favor of the party establishment which for now is partly controlled by some of the strongest but not too much of a public opponent to his second term ambition, and since there is no fair game in the field of public opinion the question of when the overall interest of the nation over shadows the interest of a political party in respect to its undesirable agenda never did find a convenient answer in the issue of the ‘Azazi ultimatum’ because the answers are never really searched for within the context of an institutional framework, however the corresponding effect of this development is that there are too many unequal parts created by the logjam of zoning which makes it impossible to make a complete scene from an incomplete political form in the PDP, so that every moment spent on reversing the political trend only amounts to nothing, and does denial the nation’s political class in the PDP the opportunity to discover something new outside of the ordinary.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Jun 2013 14:06:26 +0000
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