Yar’Adua, Our Puppet President: A Response to Reuben Abati

Reading Reuben Abati’s piece titled “Between Obasanjo and Yar’Adua” one comes off with the impression that our puppet President currently a hostage to his masters, caught between his own now famous tendency to be indecisive and the dictates of his godfathers, is actually a victim of a political ambush by the “ex-president”. Any sane observer of the April polls will confirm this is far from the truth. Yar’Adua’s leg was not bound and thrown into Aso Rock and he is well aware of the circumstances that led to his emergence as both the PDP candidate and the eventual successor of Obasanjo. If anything, this is a case of two criminals trying to share the loot of their criminal activities and one asking for our mercy in doing so. There is no doubt in my mind that far from being ambushed, “Yarasleep” or Baba Go Slow as he is now famously known, is a co-conspirator and co-gang leader of the Mafioso group that stole the mandate of the people and perpetrated the worst political fraud in the history of our nation.

Why should Abati of all people pity Yar’Adua? This is my very problem with Nigerian educated elite. Like their illiterate counterparts, they uniformly suffer from severe amnesia and counter productive spirit of forgetfulness. Were we not all witness to Yar’Adua accepting the poisoned chalice? Were we not witnesses to Yar’Adua participating in the coronation and anointment of his predecessor as Life Leader, Father of Stone Age Nigeria and Chairman, Board of Trustees of the armed robbery group that now presides over our national affairs? If anything, these twosomes should be cooling their feet in jail; we should stop pretending as if this is the case of good guy vs. bad guy. I was alarmed following the last elections when some so called educated Nigerians begun to naively succumb to the superior gun power of PDP by throwing around such phrases as “give him a chance” and “let us see” to describe the criminal government of Yar’Adua.

Far from giving it a chance, courageous people that have proper home training, where simple ethos of honesty, integrity, and love of country were taught will make a deafening call for righting the wrong of the April polls. Not Nigerians. Acquiescence to the perversion of the people’s mandate, wrapped in assassination, murder, and intimidation, is like cheering on rapists while they have carnal knowledge of your mother. It is an act of complete cowardice on the part of vast majority of Nigerians-educated or illiterate that has made many lame arguments to give Yar’Adua some semblance of legitimacy when it is well documented that no criminal is deserving of it no matter how minor. Yar’Adua, as Obasanjo are both culpable criminals in my book and it is a disgrace if we sit down to adjudicate between two thieves.

Yes I am not deaf either. I have heard the morally bankrupt theory about Yar’Adua being the best material anyway who could as well have won in a free and fair poll. But in the absence of such free poll how are we to know? Will a son be acquitted of stealing, if he were to raid his own inheritance while his father was still alive? People that make this argument fail to realize like Abati that the impact of the armed robbery called elections was beyond the presidential polls. The crime perpetrated against the people, will breed ills such as indecisiveness and corruption that are already on raw display on the issues of negotiating an end to a crippling national strike and the current ongoing crisis in Oyo, Ekiti and many other states while the anointed, undemocratically selected President watches on in awe because he lacks the popular mandate to take action. Add this to the fact that the polls threw up various criminals across the thirty six state houses and the ability of these criminals to foist eight hundred or more fellow criminals as local government chairmen; you will realize the gargantuan proportion of this crime.

There is no doubt in my mind that Yar’Adua will and will always stand in as a puppet president. Only a full rebellion on his part (the courage which he simply lacks) or a stroke of divine luck on his side that obliterates his godfathers will neutralize this position. Yar’Adua like Shagari is a Greek gift from the militricians. If Obasanjo or his cronies were to plan a military coup today with his scions in the barracks, and notifies Yar’Adua by cable, my bet is that Yar’Adua will simply sit and await the execution of such coup. It makes perfect sense, because he does not have the people’s mandate and as such lacks the will to protect what he does not have! We saw this in Shagari after his famous moon-slide in the 1983 elections and also in 1995 when Shoneken was removed in similar circumstances. In both instances, the palace coup that produced the demons that succeeded these two lily-livered civilians were expected and not resisted because they lacked popular mandate. We only pray Umaru sees the handwriting on the wall before it is too late. Contrast this behavior to that of MKO Abiola, who was willing against all odds to die for his mandate even when he had not tasted office for a single day!

It is in this direction I salute General Buhari and Vice President Atiku for resisting the temptation of participating in the fraudulent Government of National Unity. It does not take any soothsayer to see that this is part of the grand plan from day one by the PDP to hush the opposition: a cleverly executed strategy that worked in 1999 and eventually led to the political demise of AD and then APP. We remember Chief Bola Ige being sucked in and eventually murdered which laid the groundwork for the crisis that have enveloped Oyo, Osun and Ekiti states since 2003 and how that tadpole called Alhaji Waziri the then chairman of APP was sucked into the PDP machine and his eventual political demise.

If there are any lessons to be learned, you do not make a deal with the devil. The government of today can make the necessary political reforms if it is willing to do so, with or without the opposition parties coming to chop. Last I checked, you are least likely to be reform minded when you don chop The five ANPP governors are only acting a well known script of putting cronies in high places while paying lip service to democracy and true opposition politics. One cannot rule out the fact that seeing the nascent judicial activism of the bench, the PDP is truly scared of losing the upcoming court battles. Soldier on I say. Aluta Continua, Victoria Ascerta!