The Presidency — By Prince Emeka Obasi
Business Hallmark Newspaper, March 1–7, 2010

Yar’Adua’s return last week has compounded what was clearly a very complex situation in Nigeria’s fragile polity. It was a development no one, not even the most astute political pundit, could have scripted. The impact has been reverberating all over the country. The question on the lips of many Nigerians is, why did he really come back? But frankly, that should not even be the right question. More appropriately it should be, why did they bring him back. It is now quite clear to everyone that Yar’Adua is a very sick man indeed, and perhaps too incapacitated to perform the duties of his office as President, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. In case of such an eventuality, the constitution is very clear. The President should be removed from office and be replaced by the Vice President.

If the constitution is so clear on the issue, the question perplexing millions of us is why the delay? Why hasn’t the Federal Executive Council (FEC) and the National Assembly moved to effect the impeachment? Well, to those who may not know, the answer is politics, simple and short.

When the PDP created its rotational presidency model, little did it realize that it might pose grave dangers to the stability of the country. But that is the situation now.

There is a latent fear by many Northerners that the removal of Yar’Adua and the ascension of Jonathan to the Presidency will be detrimental to the socio-political and economic interest of the North. The Northern logic is that since Olusegun Obasanjo, a Southerner, ruled for a full eight-year term, the North must complete its own quota. Many people have lost sight of the fact that rotational presidency is not a constitutional provision. But it can be logically argued that since it is an article of faith in the PDP constitution and since the PDP is the ruling party, the provision has acquired the force of law.

Nevertheless, it is not the legality of the issue that is causing the palpable tension which has enveloped the land. Rather it is the old ghost of ethnic divisions and mutual distrust among the various groups and peoples of Nigeria.

A skewed political arrangement in 1960 allowed the North to dominate political power to the chagrin of the two other dominant ethnic nationalities, Igbo and Yoruba. The stresses arising from the deepening distrust provoked a calamitous civil war which lasted all of thirty months. Interestingly, the war succeeded in uniting the rest of the country against the Igbo-dominated South East. When the war ended, new discontents emerged. The South West and the new-fangled South South developed feelings of discontent and marginalization. Two incidents, or as some would say, two famous deaths, brought their anger to boiling point.

The first was the advocacy and subsequent death of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the famed Ogoni environmental activist. Saro-Wiwa brought to national and international focus the deprivations of the minority groups of the Niger Delta. He catalyzed actions in militancy and socio-political struggle. His arrest and subsequent trial and execution marked a turning point in the hitherto smooth political alliance of the North and the Niger Delta. Before then, the basic political tendency of the Niger Delta was to align with the North against the Igbo South East or even the Yoruba South West. It was an alignment that was forged in the blood of thousands of Biafran lives which were lost in the civil war. Then Saro-Wiwa happened and changed the entire equation.

A similar development happened in the South West. United by the civil war, the South West and the North had presided over Nigeria since the end of the war. It can even be logically argued that what emerged at the end of the civil war was a coalition government in which the North was the senior partner and South West the junior partner. Between them, they shared the booties of war.

Then the June 12, 1993 Presidential election result announcement happened in which Chief M.K.O. Abiola was denied his hard-won election mandate. The crisis engendered by the annulment ruptured the North/South West coalition. The emergence of Olusegun Obasanjo as President in 1999 can be interpreted as a desperate move by the North to preserve the coalition and retain the North’s dominance of political power in Nigeria. Obasanjo tried to re-arrange that equation by seeking to extend his tenure in office. The North felt betrayed and torpedoed the gambit. In the end Obasanjo remained loyal to the principles of North–South West coalition and, after goading the South South on, passed the baton for the presidency in favour of the Northern aristocracy Umaru Yar’Adua. In what can be described as sublime brinksmanship, he tried rekindling the dying embers of the South South/North alliance by putting a son of the South South, Goodluck Jonathan, on the Presidential ticket as the Vice President.

THE ROAD TO HELL The road to hell proverbially laid with good intentions is now made bare and he is now desperately fighting to salvage some modicum of order and stability. Can he? Obviously there are powerful forces against the impeachment of Yar’Adua. The North is in a deep quagmire. It is confronting its worst nightmarish scenario — a gang-up of the rest of the country against it. In the past, the North would have responded characteristically, wanton destruction and murder of Southerners to precipitate a military coup which would be led by Northern officers. But the operating environment has drastically changed.

It is not quite easy anymore to construct a common enemy. A bogeyman in the mould of the Biafran Igbo.

What is more, a more potent problem — Niger Delta militancy — has developed and it is quite clear to all that any reckless handling of the current problems will unleash the fires of hell from the Niger Delta, a fire capable of incinerating everyone. Beyond the emergence of the South South militancy is the rise of the progressive wing of the South West, a wing that is clearly intolerant of the North’s claim to national pre-eminence and privileges. This wing, led by the Action Congress and supported by a coterie of Human Rights Organizations, Pentecostal churches, activist journalists and sundry crusaders of different hues. All these groups are against the old order. They are the children and grandchildren of the late Chief Awolowo, products of the famous Awolowo’s School of Thought that was and still is decidedly against the Northern perspective of Nigeria.