With the state Nigeria now finds itself with no apparent leader, I continue to be afraid that elements within the corridors of power can act as they want without any consequences for their actions. This is a very grave scenario and we need to tackle this very quickly. It is obvious that people in government are taking advantage of the president’s absence to pursue personal agendas and Nigeria is hemorrhaging. I mean for instance, ministers do not appear to have much regard for Vice President Jonathan and this was exemplified by the willful disobedience of a minister to stay behind and tackle the fuel crisis currently plaguing Nigeria. Nigeria is currently crippled by an artificial scarcity of petroleum products and this individual whose responsibility it is to see that the sector is well managed chose to fly out to Europe at the height of the crisis even when he had been publicly ordered not to do so. Now why would he act this way? Because he knows that there can be no consequence since his principal is not around and he rightly knows that VP Jonathan does not have any executive powers to act for his boss. Also we are told that after spending 2.7 billion Naira on foreign trips in 2009, another minister approached the National Assembly to request for even more money for foreign trips which as Senator Jubril Aminu patriotically said were wasteful having brought no economic benefit to Nigeria. It is obvious-when the cat is away, the mice will play!

Now where does this leave Nigeria? Everyday our sensibilities are being abased by outrageous comments emanating from members of the president’s kitchen cabinet. We are told that not only can the president rule Nigeria from anywhere, he may as well stay away for years without any consequence. And now the Niger Delta militants are back to their old practices. What is really going on?

Nigeria is a country that is too complicated to be without functioning central authority and this is an issue that all lovers of Nigeria must realize. It is beyond politics. Take for instance the unfortunate case involving Abdul Mutallab, the son of the respected Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, this is the biggest National Security scare since the Obama administration came into being and it involves a Nigerian and therefore Nigeria and what has been the response of Nigeria? Without our president acting personally on this, we can not be perceived by the International Community as reacting to this issue decisively.

Now, no one seems to know the state of health or mind of our president. The utterances of various government officials have been contradictory at best and comical at the worst and have particularly  embarrassed Nigeria in the Committee of civilized nations. Imagine, how could the FEC have publicly said that the absence of the president does not affect governance?  Even though they think they have helped him, this statement is a first class insult on President Yar’adua and Nigeria because it means that if the president’s absence is not noticed, then his presence is unnecessary making him no better than a rubber stamp. Oh no, FEC! The president’s absence DOES affect the smooth running of governance!

Let me illustrate with one small example. The Niger Delta has been relatively peaceful since the amnesty declared by the present administration. This was to be followed by post amnesty activities to appease the militants and this was rightly catered for in the supplementary budget. Now what is stopping the implementation of these post amnesty activities? Theese activities have been stalled because the supplementary budget has not been signed into law by the president. And yet the FEC wants us to believe that the presidents absence does not affect governance!

Nigeria can not continue like this. We wish the president well and we pray for him, however, the time is ripe for us to be told the whole truth about his condition. If government officials do not know, then those who have the highest stake in Nigeria should step in. The National Council of State should meet on this issue and constitute a panel of its members to travel to Saudi Arabia to verify for themselves the state of health and well being of the president and should make their findings known to Nigerians. Nigeria is not the Yar’adua family where family secrets can be told to only family members. Nigeria is a complex country of over 140 million people who can not continue to be kept in the dark or hoodwinked as to the state of health of their leader.

Once again, God bless Nigeria. PU.

The following is an article carried by the Scince monitor and X Ryas current goings on in Nigeria. See http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2009/1222/Can-Nigeria-still-without-its-president-avoid-a-political-crisis

Article begins;

When Nigeria’s president Umaru Yar’Adua was rushed to a hospital in Saudi Arabia late last month, nobody expected that the entire government apparatus would grind to a halt in his absence.

Government spokesmen assure Nigerians that all presidential functions are now being performed by his vice president, Goodluck Jonathan. But Mr. Yar’Adua appears not to have written a constitutionally mandated letter to the Nigerian Senate delegating key decision making powers to Mr. Jonathan in his absence.

Meanwhile, a number of key policy initiatives are withering on the vine.

Rebels in the oil-rich Niger Delta, recently promised a new round of peace talks with the government, are complaining of government inaction and talking of scrapping the cease-fire completely. Fuel supplies have fallen short at gas stations, as new government contracts for the independent distributors await the president’s signature. A supplemental budget for 2009, to pay for new development programs in the Niger Delta, also awaits the president’s approval, as do several court appointments to the Nigerian Supreme Court and Court of Appeals.

Perhaps more worrisome are the talks among northern Nigerian politicians, calling on Yar’Adua to resign so that they can hold new elections and replace Yar’Adua with another northerner, instead of a southerner like Jonathan, who hails from the troubled Niger Delta region.

“The country is already in a serious political crisis and constitutional crisis,” says Femi Falana, a senior attorney in Lagos, who has filed a lawsuit to clarify just who is in charge. Any decision that the vice president makes, any contract he approves, and appointment he makes, without that official letter from Yar’Adua, will lack legal authority, he says.

And if patience runs out among the Niger Delta rebels, “then you’ll have a major crisis on your hands.”

North-South horsetrading

As in the United States, the Nigerian Constitution has a clear policy on what happens when a leader is unable to perform his duties due to illness: power shifts to the vice president, and government continues to function. But in Nigeria, there is an informal political arrangement set up between the country’s largely Christian south and its Muslim north, to maintain communal peace by alternating power from north to south. After the eight-year rule of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, a southerner, only northerners were allowed by political parties to run for president in the 2007 elections. Yar’Adua, a northern governor from Katsina State, was the winner.

Officially, the Nigerian government does continue to function, with Jonathan presiding over cabinet meetings as acting president.

“The Constitution is very clear on this point: The vice president is in charge,” says Dora Akunyilu, Minister of Information and Communication, in a brief telephone interview. She then quotes the statement of the Nigerian ambassador in Saudi Arabia, saying, “The doctors will decide when he can leave, they will decide what should be done.”

While some northern politicians from Yar’Adua’s own region have called for the president to resign, and for fresh elections to elect a new northern president, Yar’Adua’s cabinet has stood by him.

“Those who are calling for the president’s resignation are unpatriotic,” Olusola Oke, the People’s Democratic Party legal adviser told the Vanguard newspaper. “Resignation is a voluntary thing and the president should not be coerced.

Lost opportunies?

Yet a growing number of Nigerian politicians are now worried about the lost opportunities of a presidency that lacks full leadership authority. It was the personal intervention of Yar’Adua that started the latest peace negotiations with the Niger Delta rebels, for instance, and Yar’Adua’s absence has largely meant that the negotiations have stalled.

Some Niger Delta rebels who refused to disarm have already returned to the jungles, according to rebel sources contacted by the Monitor.

“This power vacuum could put the Niger Delta amnesty [and peace process] into danger,” says Osita Okechukwu, public spokesman of the Congress of Nigerian Political Parties, an umbrella of opposition parties. “The militants are not waiting for anything. If the projects are not working, they will want to take over immediately, but because of the lack of funds, they may give up.”

Pat Utomi, who once ran as an independent presidential candidate against Yar’Adua and is now a lecturer at the Lagos Business School, says the only option is to swear in Goodluck Jonathan as president.

“To fail to do so is to signal to [the people of] the region of the vice president - the troubled Niger Delta - that Nigeria is rejecting them,” he says. “If that were to happen, the demobilized militants would go straight back to the creeks, and the game would even be turned up a notch.”

On the issue of the president’s absence due to ill health, much has been said by various stake holders and pundits in Nigeria and we can generally see three groups emerging. The first are those who are genuinely concerned about Nigeria and want to prevent any rocking of the boat and as such have called on the president to resign or hand over to his deputy as envisaged by the 1999 constitution when the president is indisposed. The second are those who see the president’s illness as a short cut to power and are calling on him to throw in the towel so that they do not have a viable opponent in 2011. Finally you have those whose positions are tied to that of the president and who believe that if he resigns or hands over to VP Jonathan they may not survive and are therefore clamouring for a maintenance of the status quo.

For this piece, I want to focus on this last group. I was really taken aback when the Federal Executive Council said last week that the president’s absence from Nigeria on medical grounds does not affect the running of government. The funny part of this statement is that though the FEC thinks they are helping the president by this statement, they are in reality insulting their principal. The reason being that things that matter in this world are judged by presence and absence and if the president’s absence really does not affect the running of the federal government, it invariably means that his presence equally has no effect on the running of the government. Let’s take an example. If I have a company, and I have workers in this company as well as an MD and my MD is kidnapped by kidnappers, it is naturally expected that my company’s output would suffer. But if I find that my company’s output has not changed and production is still going on unimpeded even a month after the MD’s kidnap, as the company’s owner, I would begin to question the relevance of my MD. If his absence leads to the same result as his presence then it means that his presence is not necessary. As a wise owner I must know that I need an MD whose presence adds value and whose absence is felt.

But going further, some of the president’s men in the FEC and his kitchen cabinet have even gone further to make statements that compel thinking people to question their motivations. For instance, we were told last week by one of highest ranking political office holders in Nigeria that as far as he cares, the president can stay abroad for a year without consequence. When we were just getting over the shock of that statement which meant that the office of the president can be outsourced, another highly placed official told the nation that the president can rule Nigeria indefinitely from Saudi Arabia. But even more shocking is the most recent statement emanating from various high ranking officials that the president is not only well enough to continue in office but is actually gearing up for his second term!

This leads me (and I hope other thinking people) to ask, who do these people love? Do they love Nigeria, or the president or do they love power?

One of the reasons I ask this question is because right now Nigeria is on a precipice. No one wants to rock the boat and rightly so. Every genuine patriot is mindful of our history and the risks posed by our current predicament and we are therefore mindful of the consequence of statements that will be portrayed as insensitive giving our current predicament. And then in these grave times we have people making such utterances. So who do they really love?

As an individual, the most cherished asset I have is good health and our Creator programmed that in us which is why self preservation is one of our most basic instincts. So if I really love myself and claim to love another, the purest form of showing that love is to show genuine concern for my health and the health of others. If I or a friend has diabetes and I want to show that I love myself or my friend, I have to watch my sugar intake as well as that of my friend and speak up when I see my friend consuming too much sugary substances. If I on the other hand continue to feed my weakness for sweet things as well as feeding sweet things to my friend, then I do not love myself or my friend.

Back to president Yar’adua, there have been several rumours about his health situation, but one established fact is that the stress of leading a complicated nation like Nigeria is contributing to his steadily declining health. So if I was a friend of President Yar’adua, and I was concerned for his welfare, would I continue to feed his stress by hurrying him to return to power and where that is not possible by hurrying power to him wherever he is even where I know that the stress of power is what landed him on his sick bed in the first place? Certainly not. If I love President Yar’adua, the thing to do is to preserve his life by getting him to focus on his health and not the source of his ill health.

So then if these people who surround the president and who know better than others how stressful his position has been on him insist in the light of this fact that he returns to face his stressful job when he has not fully recovered, the question then becomes what is their motivation? Only three things that can be considered as motivations are attached to President Yar’adua. The first is Nigeria, then his intrinsic worth as an individual named Umar Musa Yar’adua who is first flesh and blood before he is president and finally there is power! Amongst these three things you would find their motivations. Who or what do they love? As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously said in his portrayal of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, ‘when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable is the truth’.

Once again, God bless Nigeria,

PU

I recently read on the BBC’s website of the arrest warrants issued against Malam Nasir El Rufai and Malam Nuhu Ribadu by the current administration and I was aghast! I know that it is sometimes the practice for an administration to persecute its perceived enemies or demonize certain people either as a way to divert attention from their lack of ideas and performance or because those persecuted are seen as threats to the continued existence of the administration. However, most regimes would be subtle when doing this and not make it obvious to the world that it is engaging in persecution. and the arrest warrants against the duo of El Rufai and Ribadu makes it all too obvious that they are being persecuted.

Yes, these two are controversial and elicit passionate love or hatred from people, but this stems from the fact that they had to break eggs in order to make omelettes. In Nigeria as in other politically vibrant countries, if you want to be seen by the power elite as a ‘nice boy’ you will not be able to achieve very much while you hold political office. Everyone will love you because you conformed to the status quo and gave contracts to the elite, bent the rule to favour them and generally strove to please them rather than the masses. But if you must satisfy your conscience and decide to raise the bar in public office, of course you must step on powerful toes and those powerful toes will never see you as a ‘nice boy’. In fact you will be labeled all sorts of names and marked for persecution when the timing is right. Such is the dilemma that Nuhu and Nasir now face.

For how else can you consider the fact that notorious ex governors and corrupt former and present officials now strut the corridors of power and appear to be calling the shots and now sit in judgment over those who helped to plot Nigeria’s economic reform and exit from the inglorious list of debtor nations, increased our foreign reserve while improving our international corruption rating?

How can we endure a situation where people who have pending and ‘genuine’ international arrest warrants and international corrupt cases which prevents them from going to certain countries, have power in a kitchen cabinet to weaken their domestic cases and even instigate law enforcement to initiate processes to humiliate their perceived enemies. How can we in Nigeria endure this without speaking out?

Was it for nothing that Hilary Clinton said in Abuja just this past July that ‘the EFCC has fallen off in the last two years’? And if you think she made a mistake, then consider that Nigeria’s corruption rating has dropped drastically since Nuhu Ribadu was removed from office.

Or consider further that the judge handling the case instituted against him by the Attorney General’s office, Justice Constance Mommoh of the Code of Conduct Tribunal, has just last week admitted that Nuhu Ribadu did indeed declare his assets contrary to the charges leveled against him.

It has also become a favourite past time of this administration to cast aspersion on the person of Malam Nasir El’rufai. However if you had visited the FCT Abuja when Nasir held sway and pay a visit today the difference is very clear. Nasir showed leadership by running Abuja in a most businesslike manner. He cleaned up land registration by establishing the Abuja Geographic Information Service (AGIS) and restored a lot of the city’s original master plan and stepped on very powerful toes by demolishing properties that went foul of the Abuja Master Plan. He kept the city clean and beautified it, every morning you could actually see workers cleaning up the city. He invested heavily in infrastructure. He showed leadership by beginning with the end in mind and remained focused even when powerful forces agitated against him. But visit Abuja today and see what ‘managers’ have done. What has happened in the intervening years since El’rufai left office is a sharp decline in the physical appearance of Abuja.

In fact, the bible in the book of Proverbs 16:7 says ‘When a man’s ways please the LORD, he makes even his enemies to be at peace with him.’ This bible verse recently showed its truth in the case of Nasir El Rufai and Nuhu Ribadu who have had cause to be victims of the ire of Nigerian legislators at different times. You may recall that members of the National Assembly have had a difficult relationship with El Rufai and on various occasions have had less than cordial things to say about him and have even instituted probes against him culminating in his taking the legislature to court. Both the Senate and the House of Representatives have had cause to clash with El Rufai. However, I was very surprised to find the legislators singing his praises as recently as yesterday when they took their time to make a comparison of what Abuja used to be like and what it now is. In fact it may serve my readers well to quote from excerpts from the House’s deliberations on Abuja which took place on December 10, 2009;

“The House said that the only achievement of the Aliero administration was the increase of land rates and the erection of “speed bumps” on the city’s roads, while it had abandoned the Abuja Master Plan.”

Agoda said, “During el-Rufai, we were all here and we saw the efforts that administration made to develop a clean city that was the pride of this country.”

“The Abuja Green Taxi programme was working and we had many clean urban mass transit buses plying the roads to sustain an efficient transport system.”

“Today, the story has changed; okada riders have returned to the city, there is filth everywhere and the destitute and beggars have come back.”

The Punch, Dec 11, 2009 - Again, Reps accuse FCT minister of non-performance[o1]

You may also recall that some legislators were not too happy with the zeal showed by Nuhu, calling it over zealousness, but today they have cause to be somewhat concerned with the new EFCC that they want an independent body set up to investigate instances of corruption in the post Ribadu EFCC. According to the Punch on Friday, December 11, 2009;

‘The Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Mrs. Farida Waziri, has expressed concern over a Senate proposal to establish an EFCC/ICPC joint monitoring committee to investigate allegations of corruption against operatives of anti-corruption bodies.’

Please see http://www.punchontheweb.com/Articl.aspx?theartic=Art200912112101262

What has happened with the deteriorating standards at both the EFCC and the FCT ministry is a very good example of the difference between Leadership and Management. A lot of people think that these two things are the same, but they are actually quite different. Leadership refers to the proactive seizing of new opportunities and breaking new bounds. It involves a decision to make a way where there was no way and charting a new course. It also involves the setting up of an efficient structure and a hierarchy that hitherto did not exist. Leaders deliver results and the true test of leadership is influence-a true leader has influence and commands respect. Finally, a leader does not derive his influence because of his office, but because of what he/she has done with the office! Management on the other hand refers to keeping watch over structures and hierarchy that have been created and expanded by some other person. It is possible that a good manager may expand the teritory won by a leader, but more than likely a manager will keep watch and maintain what he/she met. Finally many managers deliver activity rather than results and while a good manager may get respect, an average manager usually has to demand respect rather than command it. Remember it is not the title that makes a person a leader. You may be a manager of a bank by official title, but by conduct you are a leader, while you may be the head of an organization, but by conduct be a manager!

The true test of leadership is influence. And to show that Nuhu and Nasir are both true leaders, you need to compare their influence while they held office with their influence now. Nuhu and Nasir have actually met more world leaders, addressed more foreign parliaments, received more awards and commanded more headlines locally and internationally than when they held office.

Now what does this mean? It means that it was not the office that gave them their influence or their claim to leadership. In fact, the truth is that these two gentlemen actually gave their offices the influence that has since been withered away by their predecessors. In fact the question can be asked of how influential their predecessors have been even while in office. An office does not confer leadership on someone. It is merely a pedestal to amplify what is already in you. If you already have leadership in you, the office will amplify it and it will grow astronomically. If you do not have leadership in you, an office will expose you and your status will diminish as well as the status of the office you assumed.

This administration should consider the damage it has done and continues to do to the psyche of Nigerian youths when it’s principal officers condemn the contributions of Nigerians who exhibited leadership in their performance of national assignments while celebrating questionable characters who continue to bask in their in their influence in the president’s kitchen cabinet and take on titles like ‘godfather’ and ‘leader’. I want to seize this opportunity to celebrate Nuhu Ribadu, Malam Nasir El’rufai, Oby Ezekwesili, Ngozi Okonjo Iweala and Bode Agusto.

I want to seize this opportunity to state the dismal disconnect between the Nigerian government and Nigerians on several issues and particularly the issue of this arrest warrant issued on these two individuals. Nothing could have epitomized this disconnect than the fact that on the very day the government released its warrant of arrest, Nuhu Ribadu was awarded the very first ‘Civil Society Anti-Corruption’ award. This was also the same day that Nasir’s ‘sworn enemies’ at the National Assembly did a comparative analysis between him and his successors and found that things have gone downhill since he left office as FCT minister. So to all who aspire to true leadership and transformative change in Nigeria, take heart, refuse to be intimidated and like these men do not relent in your commitment because no matter how far falsehood has traveled, it must eventually be overtaken by truth.

Once again, God bless Nigeria,

PU

I recently read a news item that reminded me of the admonition that the late great poet, Major Gen. Mamman Vatsa gave to the Nigerian army (and by extension the Nigerian people since the army was then in power). He had said ‘And to the Nigerian army, I say to you that when you start to insult yourself, you will not lack people willing to join you’.

Though the comments in the news item below are not really an insult, it certainly gives one cause to remember Vatsa’s words. Please consider the following………………….

Manage your oil wealth well, Venezuela urges Nigeria

By Ngozi Sams November 24, 2009 02:21AMT