YARDUA’s ONE YEAR: IN SEARCH OF AN ACHIEVEMENT TO ASSESS?

 If the past nine years of democratic tutelage have taught Nigerians anything, they have surely taught that premature canonization is an almost certain guarantee of subsequent deep disappointment. President Yardua is in some ways far more dangerous than the immediate past president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, because he stands for everything and nothing at the same time. He never has to defend a position because he embraces all views only to turn back and reject all. The biggest noticeable handicap of the Yar’Adua’s administration within the first one year in office has been the lack of policy or rather vision clarity in everything it has said or done so far.

 From obvious indications, our President is rather puzzled. It was true that Nigerians became bored with Obasanjo, and felt frustrated that the national and international media claims of success seemed to run so far ahead of the reality on ground. However, Yar’Adua’s failure to articulate his vision for the nation and get his own reform agenda or glasnost off the ground has created a vacuum.

 The National Assembly has not helped matters either. All that our lawmakers have achieved in the last one year was to float an array of probe panels, some well informed and desired, most ill -conceived with absolute naivety.

 The general perception of the administration is that the government had blown one full year looking backwards, rather than taking steps forward, and this is true.

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 When asked by the Financial Times what he thought his achievements for the first year in office were, the President brandished the successful efforts at instituting a strict culture of adherence to rule of law and due process as his greatest achievement so far.

 Talking of rule of law, if there were obvious electoral frauds in the April 2007 polls, then it would be very apt to describe all the re-run governorship and other elections including the local council polls conducted under the Yar’Adua government as electoral armed robbery. Maybe we need to differentiate between perversion of justice and strict adherence to the rule of law. The abysmal failure of INEC under the present administration to do anything transparent can also be taken as an achievement on adherence to a strict culture of the rule of law.

 Also, as part of the achievements of the President’s efforts to institute strict adherence to the separation of power, the National Assembly has spent one full year doing nothing but probing everything and everybody that had anything to do with the Obasanjo administration. The lawmakers did not make a single people-targeted law in one full year.

 Yar’Adua’s government reversed everything that was done before his coming into office under the privatization programme of the same PDP federal government and up till now has not come up with an alternative.

 Remember, the Obasanjo Government had plenty of ideas on good governance (though most were fraudulent) up to the early years of the administration’s second term until 2005 that the demon of third term possessed him. Yar’Adua’s cabinet lacks compass- pure and simple. The ministers are colourless with zero kinetics for initiating and/or implementing programme to affect the lives of the real Nigerians.

 Remarkably, there was a lot of optimism when Yar’Adua came into power that there’d be a rapid resolution of the conflict in the Niger Delta. He actually declared the region a special project for quick intervention. One year after, he has turned round to say that “When people thought a rapid resolution, I think they were expecting me to wave a magic wand, which I don’t have. The Niger Delta problem has been a very protracted and old problem… we are just at the stage of holding a comprehensive summit of stakeholders of the Niger Delta region.

 “I can assure that within the next few years we’ll make tremendous progress, because it’s a problem that cannot be solved overnight. It’s a problem where there is a lot of interests, there is a lot of criminality…The central interest in the area is the issue of bunkering of crude oil. It’s not an easy problem to solve, and we are working out serious measures to deal with the problem comprehensively, and I can assure you it is not an easy problem because of the vast criminal activities taking place, and in particular because of the huge interest, and huge activities regarding bunkering of crude oil and petroleum products in the area.”  Haba Mr President!

 These are the President’s priority list: Agenda 1: Power. “We will declare a national emergency in the power sector, which we are working out the programmes to do that. We are still planning to declare it.

 Agenda 2: Unbundling of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).“The restructuring of NNPC, which is aimed at making NNPC a national oil company that will go out and compete with another oil companies like IOCs, use its assets to access funds from the capital market It is going to be quite a major shift in policy and restructuring.

 “This will mean that the national budget will be freed from the joint venture cash calls, which will make funds available to put into providing adequate security, maintenance of law and order which is Agenda 3. we are still planning on how to be serious with addressing the poverty- induced near-zero security situation all over the country.

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 “The other thing that we are doing is ensuring that we bring in the private sector to invest in infrastructure. We are working out the regulatory framework so that the private sector can come in and provide infrastructure, railways, waterways, take over the running of airports, sea ports, major trunk roads, so that they provide services, they charge for these services, and that will relieve government from heavy investment.” This is Agenda Four and we are still planning on it.

 The unspecified interventions or rather reforms in the health and education sector occupy the fifth and sixth positions in the seven -point agenda and may be we have not even started to plan on them. In agriculture which is the agenda seven, the importation of billions of naira worth of rice from South East Asia in reaction to xenophobia of food scarcity may be part of the plan to make the Nigeria self sufficient in food production. Three happy cheers to Mr President!

 As was rightly pointed out by the ADC Presidential Candidate, Prof Pat Utomi, while speaking to the media on behalf of The Shadow Cabinet of the Rainbow Coalition of Political Parties “The luxury of blaming past administrations can not be accepted or tolerated any further because a PDP Government has been in power for nearly a decade.

 “Such excuses suggest a lack of imagination, an absence of compassion for the Nigerian people, and a failure to see what has been happening in many other countries with our similar kind of endowments.” On this, I declare that: A word is enough for a wise!

 

BY: SENIOR FYNEFACE
 SENIOR FYNEFACE: ELELEWON STREET GRA II, PORT HARCOURT
(senior_fyneface@yahoo.com)