Nigeria: Yar'Adua cannot resign because of 2015

Party politics influence

Somehow I am disappointed that contemporaneous circumstances are beclouding the ability of people to see the reality of why we have the phantom of a comatose President Umaru Yar’Adua lurking the Acting President Goodluck Jonathan’s corridors of influence.

It goes without saying that party politics in Nigeria has a way of supplanting due process and offers the ruling party the opportunity to become the machinery of state.

Just like we had in the Second Republic [1], the ruling party was the National Party of Nigeria and chieftains in the party seemed to have a higher public profile than the elected executives, face of the government then was Chief A. M. A. Akinloye the chairman of NPN whilst the President, Shehu Shagari was the figurehead façade of rampant kleptocracy.

The snouts in the trough

Now, in the Fourth Republic [2], the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) has progressively dominated all the levels of government with the patronage that allows for the abuse and misuse of power.

Worse still, the PDP operates a constitution that relegates the Nigerian Constitution to a subsection of their procedures and rules of engagement – that has become so evident with the saga surrounding the departure from the public space of the President Yar’Adua due to suspected ill health.

In order to appease the conflicting egos and forces of influence in the ruling party they arranged that executive power would alternate between the Christian South and the Muslim North, neither the North nor South is exclusively Muslim or Christian but that is the accepted view of Nigerians.

8 for us and 8 for them

A Christian Southerner held power for 2 terms adding up to 8 years with his Muslim Northerner running mate and from May 2007 a Muslim Northerner with his Christian Southerner running was selected to run the country and approved to take power through one of the most widely rigged elections ever in Nigeria.

The little detail in this matter was that the Muslim Northerner had a pre-existing illness which probably has been exacerbated by the burden of office and forced him out of public view since November 2009.

We now have an Acting President who was the running mate and a Christian Southerner as well as a conundrum that leaves the ruling party in a quandary.

Resignation leaves them with 7

Their perverse constitution requires for power to be vested in the North until 2015 which is the two terms of 4 years each starting from 2007, but if the seemingly incapacitated substantive President were to resign the ruling party would have a Christian Southerner in charge, albeit for just a year because they do not intend the Southerner to run in 2011.

By 2015, the Northerners would only have had 7 years with their snouts to the trough, the Southerners would want their candidate for 2015 and the clamour would be around fulfilling the 8 years with the Northerners running for 11 years and all the mess that would be a right old mess.

For that supposedly obscure reason, the ruling party would rather have a comatose Northern President lurking in the background of the Acting President until the next elections in 2011 than risk the trough-sharing opportunities they have projected for the future.

The issue is in 2015

That way, the 2-term 8 year power sharing arrangement of the pre-eminent constitution of the ruling party is kept without much regard for the Nigerian Constitution or Nigerians.

It is the reason why the entire clamour around the presence or absence of President Yar’Adua must stop and we should start to bolster the authority of Acting President Goodluck Jonathan, thereby, forcing the hand of the ruling party to bow to the inevitable.

The issue today is not about the health of the President or 2011, it is really about the consequences actions of today might have on 2015 – that is where the problem really is – in 2015.

Sources

Nigerian Second Republic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nigerian Fourth Republic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Arise! Sir Easy

Of monarchies, republics and value

I had only a few days ago been commenting on the value systems of republics, monarchies, chieftaincies and so-called hereditary privileges.

Also, it is interesting to note that generally, those left of centre are more inclined to prefer republics whilst those to the right would rather retain the monarchy although that probably would be in countries where a constitutional monarchy exists.

Sometimes, I shed parts of my liberal cloak to reveal conservative inclinations to the monarchy, to their value in terms of historical, traditional and cultural heritage; which for me weigh more than the nominal cost of maintenance and the hereditary aspects of it.

In the United Kingdom where many have fought tooth and nail to eliminate the class system only to find a new hierarchy developed in the under-class of the deprived, the upper class of the wealthy and privileged, the middle class of the taxed to the hilt and the working class of the barely getting along – the problem is not so much the monarchy or the republic but the quality of political leadership and government.

Honour the doers

However, one thing does get celebrated in the United Kingdom, the honours system, though over time it has been abused for political patronage and messed up in the House of Lords where hereditary peers have been replaced by appointed “stooges”.

Every year at the new year and the Queen’s official birthday which is in June rather than April which is the real month of her birth, a list of peerages, knighthoods, damehoods, CBEs, OBEs, MBEs - in decreasing order of significance – is released laudable people for their services to society through their work, professions, charity or vocations.

Some get honoured over time as they are promoted through each honour title and some just get placed in the hierarchy.

Some of the awards of the MBE have been opened up for nominations by the public, of people they believe have contributed significantly to their communities which might not necessarily come to the notice of the government.

Honours and information

People might argue that an honours system is not worthy of a 21^st Century democracy, but how then do we acknowledge and reward service beyond the benefits of a salary or some international award like the Nobel Prize?

Beyond that, the list this year contains interesting information like James Goodfellow who is awarded the OBE for the developing the concept of Personal Identification Numbers (PIN) for Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) in the 1960s – a global phenomenon that we use everyday.

In many cases, you might wonder who the person is, what they have done and why they have been acknowledged, but then these things have for all sorts of reasons and the system is usually vetted thoroughly. Whether we agree or not.

easyHonour

This years’ list includes Stelios Haji-Ioannou, an entrepreneur and chairman of the easyGroup group of companies which started off as easyJet and has diversified into every Easy idea you can imagine.

Whilst easyJet brought cheap air travel to the masses, it lowered across the board the quality and level of service we received for short-haul flights in Europe.

There was a time before easyJet, I could expect a meal on a economy flight for the hour flight from London to Amsterdam, now, you get a bread-roll and a bar of chocolate with a drink that not a millilitre more than a gulp down.

Cutting out the frills definitely brings down the cost of travel, it also means you cannot demand quality service and the streets of Amsterdam, Prague and Dublin get filled with lager louts who drink to excess and foul the cities leading to campaigns against those of that ilk.

Not all cheap stuff is good stuff, but if you do have to count the pennies you can fly easyJet, hire an easyCar, stay at an easyHotel, surf the web at easyInternetcafe, do all easy stuff and return with more oranges than an orchard.

The man has done well – Arise! Sir easy.

References

Tycoons knighted in birthday list

Guide to the honours

easyGroup

God Save the Queen - Long live the Queen

History of England

A History of England poster takes pride of place on the wall of my living room, a poster I bought from the museum shop of Arundel Castle, the seat of the Dukes of Norfolk, with title of Earl Marshall and one of the great offices of state in England.

This office organises coronations and the State Opening of Parliament, as a catholic family, their influence in a protestant monarchy makes interesting reading.

In general, I am a monarchist, a royalist and a keen supporter of constitutional monarchies. It is evident from the event that culminated in the First World War that our world of today has no place for absolute monarchies.

Where they seem to exist like in Nepal where the police have been ordered to “shoot to kill” protesters clamouring for real democracy or Swaziland where the king with his propensity for taking young wives squanders scarce resources on a luxury life they can ill afford.

Learning by visiting

Having spent my developing years in Nigeria, my returning to England left me bereft of the history and culture of a country to which I claim citizenship allegiance.

Rather than reach out for thousand-page books of England, I joined both the National Trust and used my visit to stately homes to piece together events of our history; supplementing that with visits to English Heritage sites all around the country.

Somehow, I like the lineage of reigns that help us document our history in lengths of time that speak of people, events, ideas and their relationships. Victorian values signify conservative outlooks to life, the House of Tudor hosts Henry VIII and the break-away from the Roman Catholic Church, the last of that lineage being Elizabeth I.

Times of the monarch

This follows the time honoured practice found in the Old Testament of the Bible where the Israelites document reigns in the Book of Kings and events in the Book of Chronicles.

It sounds grating to document times in the name of politicians, you never hear of the Lincolnian times related to Abraham Lincoln (Victorian) or the Churchillian times in relation to Winston Churchill (George VI and Elizabeth II from the House of Windsor).

Where there is no monarchy to maintain a human grip on our history and heritage you have to revert to dates and years.

Above the political fray

Beyond that, one can see how the jostling for political position in the presidencies of the United States and France creates a stop-start sense of leadership which can at times thrive on base populism and give rise to dictatorships in other places.

A monarchy subjects the inordinate quest for power to a lesser element of governance with the politicians ceremoniously answerable to a supposedly higher authority.

We would lose a lot to becoming a republic, as some people feel that we live in a time when people should not be born to positions of privilege.

More than value you can quantify

Also many complain about the cost of the monarchy, well, I would be hard pressed to find any other person or group of people who can market the brand of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and the Northern Ireland better than our monarchy. Even so, the head of the church cannot be a Prime Minister no matter how religious.

They are more than good value for money now, for our history past, for our heritage preserved and for our sense of belonging as we look to the future. That position would be wasted on a politician no matter how much of a statesman they may be.

This is not the most forceful piece about the monarchy, but the sentimentality of what they mean would have me supporting our constitutional monarchy without reservation.

God Save the Queen

As the Israelites said at the anointing of their first king – God Save the King – I say, God Save the Queen.

God Save the Queen makes more sense to me than God Save the President or the Prime Minister.

Even more importantly; at 80; Happy Birthday, Ma’am.