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Fulfilment of the 'X' Factor
The bulk of this article was first published in the Nigerian NEWAGE newspaper last March at the heat of Obasanjo’s attempt at tenure elongation. It has been slightly edited here to bridge the gap created by time. As you will acknowledge, it is quite prophetic – but really there is no prize for predicting how events would play out because former president Obasanjo was totally predictable in his deep-seated shallowness. One hopes that Umaru Yar’Adua will learn while it is yet dawn by showing what difference good education and a civilised disposition make in determining style of leadership. Unlike Obasanjo, both Yar’Adua and Jonathan are university graduates. One expects that they won’t exhibit the kind of pervasive inferiority complex that turned the former emperor of Aso Rock to a peerless anti-intellectual. They don’t need to be reminded that Nigerians will always outlive their leaders. They have to take a solemn look at the political junction where their Baba was beaten by the rain so that they would not suffer the same fate. There is no armour against the X-factor. Here goes:
The letter X would have been just like any other letter in the alphabet but for the connotations modern man has ascribed to it. The Ex in x-rated films would not allow a dutiful parent expose his/her children to any stuff so classified. The Ex in ex-spouse evokes bitter memories of broken promises and dashed hopes; of what could have been and what could never be again. The prospect of an Ex in the titular description of a veritable has-been makes him dread the day he would have to leave office; for him, it is natural to have a predecessor but frightening to think of a successor. The reason is indeed simple: does anyone know what tomorrow carries in its womb?
Can anyone fathom the comprehensive possibilities of the mathematical X, the unknown? So, confronted with the prospect of becoming an ex-potentate, the incumbent lord of temporal power rallies his troops and weapons to run the two X’s out of town. Gun down the Ex in ex-potentate! Destroy the uncertainty of the mathematical X. Tell tomorrow it will suffer an abortion unless it succumbs to your genetic engineering.
The philosopher, Heraclitus, argued that everything is in a state of constant flux. In other words, the only permanent truth in the world is the impermanence of empirical reality. Everything is subject to change. No matter how hard you try, you can’t step into the same river twice. Some changes, as could be imagined, are generally desirable- like the graduation from the status of undergraduate student to honours graduate; but the fact of graduation itself implies that you have become an ex-undergraduate.
Or, to take the other example that shows that God moves in wondrous ways. In the specific case of Olusegun Obasanjo, an ex-military head of state was consigned by fellow man into the valley of political infamy as a coup convict on death row only to be snatched from the jaws of death, and catapulted by Fate to the State House as President. Such a reversal of roles from ex-convict to executive presidency is the stuff of which fairy tales are made.
General Abacha did not want to keep a date with the Ex in exit. Why allow the wheels of time to grind you to political obsolescence when you can hang on until you become an ex-person- a corpse? Cote D’Ivoire ’s Houphet Boigny and Gnassingbe Eyadema of Togo did it. Kamuzu Banda of Malawi would have died in office if the people had allowed him. Even Zimbabwe ’s Robert Mugabe, Burkina Faso ’s Blaise Campaore and Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea are following the trail. Obasanjo has a copious list of third and fourth termers in many African countries and thought he could swing it here too.
In contrast, Aristide Perreira of Cape Verde showed that there was nothing genetic about the proclivity of some African rulers to hang on to power at all costs when he presided over free and fair elections at which he was defeated – sans rigging - by Antonio Mascarentas Monteiro in 1991, and so won the honour of being the second African head of state in modern times to cede power following democratic elections (Leopold Sedar Senghor made history as the first African leader to quit office voluntarily when he stepped down to give the mantle to his Prime Minister, Abdou Diouf). Monteiro himself followed Perreira’s example by accepting the people’s verdict in 2001 when his party was voted out of power by a margin of 17 votes, leaving the scene for Pedro de Verona Rodrigues Pires of the opposition party.
Today, both Perreira and Monteiro are proud ex-presidents.
The fear of Ex is behind the strange happenings in Nigeria ’s ruling party, the PDP. That is why ex-servicemen are falling over each other to reclaim by ‘democratic’ means what they had misused through military fiat. The ex-generals are all over town gunning for the Ex of executive power (as in His Excellency, the Executive President, the Executive Governor, honourable minister, or the Executive Local Government Chairman). Those of them whose names have been etched on the rock of infamy- particularly at the federal level- have commissioned political excursionists to work hard at total exculpation and revision of history, banking on our collective amnesia. But how does the nation forget the spate of commissioned executions and assassinations? Surely, the Ex in execution will exhume bitter memories; we shall never forget.
Politics is a social science. Things are not usually cut and dried. Reality is not always black or white; it could be grey- or many shades of grey. No one can bring in the exactitude of mathematics into the social sciences and expect the same results. Military ambush in the political arena will breed surprises. When power of incumbency and a policy of comprehensive exclusion of perceived opponents are deployed to perpetuate an outgoing president in power, as the OBJ-forever campaigners were doing so brazenly, they were bound to learn an unforgettable lesson in politics. In the long run, as long as it is a game of numbers, as long as the courts have not been wiped out, antithesis will eventually confound impulsive thesis.
In political terms, any extra minute for a two-term president is excess luggage. The X factor (the mathematical unknown) inevitably came into play. Is there any mortal who has so mastered his environment as to turn his entire country into one huge laboratory for groundbreaking experiments to precisely determine his many tomorrows? That is one area where God does not like competition. He keeps us guessing as only He can. It is His prerogative. That is why He is God. All a man can do is his very best in his station in life. No mortal has a right to ask for more. And certainly no one should pretend that he is in a position to give more than his best because at the end of the day, as a former British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, once noted, “Every man has a House of Lords in his own head. Fears, prejudices, misconceptions—those are the peers ….” Although every man has a mission on earth, no man is a messiah.
No matter the professed good intentions, the end cannot justify the means. So much evil has already been unleashed on this nation under the guise of good intentions. Change is part of life. He/she is a wise man/woman indeed who accepts the inevitability of change, gracefully surrendering expired power so that the people can choose another leader as they had chosen him/her earlier. A man who succeeds himself or extends his tenure in office is both predecessor and successor. Like a lone straggler, sooner or later, he would find out that he’s both in front and behind.
Alfred Lord Tennyson‘s Morte D’Arthur settled the issue of change a long time ago. In the verse, the dying King Arthur told his trusted lieutenant: “The old order changeth, yielding place to the new/ And God fulfils Himself in many ways/ Lest one good custom should corrupt the world…”
No democrat or militocrat is so good as to be allowed to rape the Constitution through an arranged extension of tenure. It should never happen. As we have seen with the Abachas, Eyademas and Mobutus of this world, the favourite inscription on our ill-maintained mammy wagons and Danfo buses rings very true: “Man proposes, God disposes!” We are surrounded daily by forces which sometimes screen us from seeing the obvious. The garbage bin of history is full of otherwise great men who permitted themselves the luxury of listening to self-centred fools.
But not to worry. There was no escaping the Ex this time. Obasanjo took his exit from power on May 29, 2007. Every entrance must have an exit. It was not very taxing to see that whereas OBJ may not wind up as an ex-farmer in the foreseeable future, the Ex in exit inevitably lined him up beside the growing tribe of former leaders and dealers as an ex-serviceman, ex-federal commissioner, ex-Chief of Staff Supreme Headquarters, ex-military head of state, ex-convict, ex-President and Commander-in-Chief and ex-Chairman of the African Union. Someday soon, no matter how hard he tries, he will become ex-chairman of his party’s board of trustees.
To have attempted to tamper with the natural progression from entrance to exit and even play God in deciding his successor was to negate the Ex in Excellency and court the prospect of ending up as an ex-statesman – which is likely to be the way history will remember him.
To Umaru Yar’Adua
The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly.
- Jim Rohn
(Ends)
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