Monday
August 10, 2009 |
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Last week, a correspondent of Radio
France International hunted me down in Toulouse, France, where I was
making a short visit to relatives. The reporter sought my opinion about
Umaru Yar’Adua’s amnesty for militants in the Niger Delta. Did I think,
he asked, that the gesture was going to address the festering violence
in Nigeria’s oil-rich hub?
My short answer was no. It doesn’t take the gift of clairvoyance to
realize that Yar’Adua’s amnesty, however well meaning, is akin to using
paper to cover deep cracks in a wall. Sooner or later – in fact, sooner
than later – the cracks will show once again.
Yar’Adua’s amnesty, I told the reporter, does little to fix the
underlying causes of the crisis in the Niger Delta. These causes include
decades of economic injustice, the ecological devastation of the area,
and the shortsighted employment of military power to dispose of
legitimate agitation for reparation. Add to the mix the irresponsible
recruitment and arming of the area’s jobless thugs by rogue politicians
– most of them members of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party – and what
emerges is a perfect recipe for social combustion.
A permanent solution to the malaise in the delta, as well as the broader
breakdown of law and order in the nation, lies in pursuing an agenda of
accelerated economic development, the restoration of wholesome values,
and humanization of the Nigerian space. Violence is, in the end, the
recourse of desperate, hopeless, or broken people. Sadly, Nigeria has
become a factory that mass-produces desperate, hopeless and broken
citizens.
Are Yar’Adua and his cohorts doing anything to reverse this trend, to
ameliorate the brutish conditions under which Nigerians writhe and
seethe? Here again, the answer is no. Are they capable of envisioning a
transformed Nigeria? Yet again, no.
There are a few exceptional figures in Nigeria’s public life. For the
most part, however, the nation is in the hands of wretched pretenders,
flight-by-night mediocrities and contemptible usurpers whose mission is
to gorge on the public trough. These men and women are so daft that they
hardly realize how perilously close they have brought the nation to the
edge of unspeakable disaster.
Yar’Adua is a shadow of the kind of visionary leader that Nigeria needs,
and urgently. The man doesn’t come across as understanding the depths of
the crisis in which the nation is embroiled.
Far from grasping the nature and scope of the nation’s challenge and the
rudiments of social engineering required to turn things around, he has
at every turn exacerbated the crisis.
His coddling of the nation’s corrupt league is nothing short of
scandalous. It’s still open to debate whether his amnesty to the delta’s
militants was a success at any level. But there’s no question that his
rule has entailed a bounty of amnesty to those who stole Nigeria to
penury over the last ten years.
Under his watch, former occupants of public office who once dreaded the
prospect of prosecution by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission
have regained their swagger. Confident in Yar’Adua’s harmlessness, men
and women who amassed illicit wealth by betraying the public trust have
since crawled out of their cocoons. They’ve taken to strutting the stage
in obscene pride.
The real beneficiaries of Yar’Adua’s undeclared (but more real) amnesty
are his former gubernatorial colleagues lifted into cabinet positions in
his regime, despite the existence of massive dossiers of their
culpability in money laundering. Other profiteers from Yar’Adua’s
amnesty are past and current office holders who have been spared fear of
the consequences of corrupt acts. In the current dispensation, few
undertakings are as safe and sanction-free as graft and money
laundering.
Herein, then, lies Yar’Adua’s albatross. If he wishes to reduce
militancy and de-criminalize the Niger Delta, then it behooves him to
show a comprehensive distaste for corruption, a crime that acts as
manure for the violence and instability in the Niger Delta. You can’t be
fraternizing with high-intensity criminals like corrupt ex-governors and
be preaching to militants and relatively low-grade criminals to disarm.
Disarm for what? To watch in stupefaction as politicians fritter their
resources?
Yar’Adua’s policies and his body language do not bespeak a man who
wishes to lift a finger in anger at his corrupt fellows. Knowing that
about the man, one can confidently aver – as I told my French radio
interviewer – that the amnesty plan was dead on arrival.
