Remembering Umaru Musa Yar’Adua (August 16, 1951-May 5, 2010)

How many Nigerians remember that it was on this day in 2010 that President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua died in active service? An ungrateful nation would not likely remember. You can bet that there would be few if any newspaper adverts remembering him. This is not surprising, Nigeria is littered with friends of public office holders whose only allegiance is to the office that dispenses largesse and not the person occupying it.

Yar’Adua was a good man. He was a servant leader, who applied the Servant Leadership Principles in the running of the country. However, I remember him today more for the events leading to his death, which exposed the fact that our fault lines are still as wide as the Canyons.

In the last days of Yar’Adua, he was held hostage by what came to be known as the Katsina Cabal. The cabal was so strong and menacing that the vice president, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, was not even considered as a ‘spare tyre’. With a president that was incapacitated by ill-health the cabal were running the show. It is still doubtful in some quarters that it was Yar’Adua that signed the 2010 budget. He allegedly signed it on his sick bed. We may never know.

The cabal that was provided legal cover by the then attorney general and minister of justice, Michael Aaondoakaa even told the nation that there was nothing wrong when the president left the country without writing the National Assembly to transfer power to his vice. We were told that a president can run the country from anywhere and thus was not limited by geography. Every road block was put in place by this cabal to stop Jonathan from emerging acting president. The senate through the wisdom of Senate President David Mark had to invoke what they called the Doctrine of Necessity to confirm Jonathan as acting president to the chagrin of the cabal.

Even after he was made acting president, Jonathan was never in charge. Ideally the acting president becomes the commander in chief of the arms forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. But was Jonathan the commander in chief? If he was how come the then chief of army staff and the military brought back sick Yar’Adua to Nigeria in the middle of the night, with Jonathan reading about it in the morning papers like the rest of us?

Jonathan was also denied access to his principal that was brought back to the Presidential Villa sick. The cabal eventually surrendered on May 5, 2010, when Yar’Adua sadly died and Jonathan was sworn in as president to see out the rest of their tenure. That is why I consider it height of mischief when some misguided people claim that Jonathan was president for six years. He was president for only five years, while Yar’Adua and the cabal were in charge for three years.

Those who fought against Jonathan becoming acting president did everything to stop him from emerging the PDP presidential candidate in 2011 claiming that only a northerner should be allowed to complete Yar’Adua’s expected eight years in office that was cut short by his death. Jonathan won the PDP presidential primary and eventually became president through his victory in the 2011 general election. His victory led to the killing of many of his supporters in the north including youth corps members, even as thousands of properties were burnt down. It was obvious that Nigeria despite its pretensions to national unity is deeply divided along ethnic and religious lines.

Sometimes I shudder when I imagine what would have happened had Jonathan been declared the winner of the 2015 general election. The Rwanda Genocide of 1994, in which hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were killed by Hutus, would have looked like a child’s play. The prediction by United States that Nigeria would disintegrate would have been a fait accompli. As a matter of fact, on the eve of the elections, the United States government had landed gate-away planes in the neighbouring countries to ferry their citizens in Nigeria to safety when the killings start. Jonathan turned the hate to love, when he made that all important call to President Muhammadu Buhari, and a nation was saved at least for now. As we remember Yar’Adua today, and lament over the apparent divisions in the country, let us not forget, “Where the rain start to beat us”.