Each time I write about this President, Umaru Yar’Adua, it is with a measure of indignation, a cold anger caused by his colossal inability to seize the opportunity that time and circumstance have afforded him with grace to shape his presidency and give a direction and a sense of purpose for Nigeria and its citizens who for decades have been yearning for good leadership.
An attempt to find why this is so, leads inexorably to a few gritty, poignant questions: why, for instance, is the performance of any of our sitting President worse than that of his predecessor? Why is Nigeria’s present generation of politicians, including President Yar’Adua, not measuring up on the scale of leadership test? Or is Nigeria jinxed on that scale?
More pointedly, why is Yar’Adua missing it all, even if he was compelled to assumed the Presidency? Undoubtedly, Leadership is never easy. Perhaps it’s even more challenging now than before. But it seems to me that Mr. President has forgotten, and nobody around him seems to remind him that a crisis period, as we currently have it, (political, economic and sectarian crises), provides a unity of purpose and rare opportunity of a life time for a leadership that is rarely present in peace times. And that throws up again the question: why has President Yar’Adua become, despite himself, the emblem of what we loath to see in our leader, a disappointment of sorts of what we don’t desire to have in our President?
So far, nothing from the President or the leadership of the ruling PDP to inspire us to shade our doubts that the President possesses the talent to ‘fix’ things. Accepted, he inherited a presidency torn apart by his predecessor and an economy in dire straits as well as a party in disarray, but what has he done to heal the wounds? Rather than ‘fix’ these problems, the president has deepened them. I doubt if any Nigerian outside those who have profited from the divisive politics of PDP can genuinely say or feel that this country is not sicker than he or she has imagined.
The worry is the absence of genuine efforts to heal it. Let’s get this point straight: no one expects Yar’Adua to solve all problems of Nigeria, but one expects that 27 months is enough time to show genuine efforts and commitment towards tackling these problems of power supply, insecurity, infrastructural decay, education, food crisis, etc, all of which are contained in his Seven Point Agenda.
These are supposed to be the president’s ‘Seven commandment,’ a platform of sorts upon which he can be judged, not only by Nigerians, but by history.
Sadly, instead of focusing on his own agenda, the president is forcefully ‘annexing’ more states to the PDP – controlled states by masterminding carpet-crossing of some governors. The hypocrisy and double standard in this is that this is the very same problem he claims he would want to eradicate through the Electoral Reforms. By this act, the President has allowed rough patches to run deep into the political clouds. This is a big threat to democracy. And that is the looming danger of one party state.
For sure, for any President in a democratic setting, politics provides a good platform to do good for himself and for the citizens who voted for him and those who didn’t. That is what life in the presidency ought to be. It’s about learning and knowing what the occupier of that office never knew before. No president is supposed to remain the same in terms of experience and understanding of both local and global happenings. It is still in doubt how much Yar’Adua has learned and how (if at all), he has changed his perception of problem – solving. At least, at the moment, everything remains at a critical juncture.
The result is that opportunities are slipping him away, fast. Is this a result of failed leadership or a crisis of leadership? Lets take a brief trip to the USA. When Americans insist several decades after he was dead that Franklin Delano Roosevelt raised the edifice of their dream and saved the country at a time of great difficulties – the depression and world war II, it was because Roosevelt gave them reason to believe in themselves, that hope can supplant despair.
No wonder when Roosevelt died, among the thousands of mourners, a man was seen with his young son on his shoulders as the funeral train passed by. The man asked his son. “make sure you see everything”. The boy answered, “That’s good, dad”. And the father said: “now make sure you remember”. Remember what, you may ask? A great man has passed on and had influenced many lives greatly.
This is what is called transference leadership. Roosevelt had it. It is the ability to connect with people and shape their aspiration. He had the aura, the influence to move public opinion. Such was his influence that even in death, his most partisan foes felt compelled to acknowledge that he touched their lives in many immeasurable ways. Can we say that of any of our leaders, past and present? Yar’Adua appears to me the most awful of the lot. How many times shall one say this.
That President Yar’Adua has made himself an uninspiring, shrinking man. What we see is a president with a goody-goody moralism that is not matched with any real commitment to the oath of office he swore to uphold. No clarity of purpose on where he wants to take our country and the citizens. It is partly because of this that militants and sectarian leaders are holding the nation hostage.
In Yar’Adua, they see too much ambivalence, too much fear, too much hopelessness and even helplessness and timidity. This may be true, it may not be. But it is not good to be labeled with such a sinking sticker, but again, that’s what you get when a president is widely believed to be lacking firmness and faith that he can indeed use politics to bring about the desired change in the country.
For me, this much is plain about the President: he behaves like a stranger in Aso Rock.
He also lacks a sense of timing in most decisions he takes. He does not know exactly when to invoke the prestige of the presidency and when to hold it in reserve. He spoils for a fight when it is absolutely needless.
The current conflict with the Lagos State government over the creation of Local Council Development Areas (LCDAs) is a case in point. Here you can see a president in want of idée fixe. In a bid to bring relevance to a shrinking presidency, he forces action when he needs to move with caution.
He maintains an imperturbable calm when urgent action is needed. Some people insist that the President’s action against Lagos borders more on envy, ego and raw power than anything else. I don’t completely agree with that. However, I believe that if the President must get things done, he must show firmness and stop been timid, he must show boldness, not fear as he is being perceived now.
Success in governance requires diligence and adjusting course when errors are made. Yar’Adua’s shortcomings are not irredeemable. He needs to ask himself this hard question: are Nigerians happy with my leadership style? These Nigerians exclude the political jobbers who harvest in crisis and never stop telling the President lies about how he is loved so much for the work he’s doing?
I don’t agree that the President has “ got his groove back,” as Steve Ayorinde of The Punch put it last week in his column. Yar’Adua is still a wimp. This is time for the President to decide whether he likes to be an emperor with clothes or a field marshal without troops. Don’t be a chicken in flight, Mr. President.
