By Hugo Odiogor
IT is becoming apparently clear that Nigeria,, the most populous Black nation on earth, is on the precipice. The country is exiting from the radar of relevance to sink into irrelevance and President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua may be the man who will sign the epitaph of a country that was destined to be great but sank into the abyss on account its human failure, particularly from its political elites.

Beyond the daily hysteria and shenanigans associated with the prolonged absence of President  Yar’Adua from work, on account of his failing health, there are some issues that have been thrown up that a country of over 150 million people would grope in the dark because the collective destiny of the nation has been tied to the health of one man. Like Louis XIV, President Yar ‘Adua can declare L’ tate, cest moi, since we may not equate him with Nero, the playboy emperor, who was fiddling and fumbling while fire was ravaging Rome.

First we have to look at the fact that Yar’Adua, President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, may go down in history as the last man to govern a united Nigeria, and he would join the rank of the likes of Mikhail Gorbarchov of the Former Soviet Union and Slobodan Milosevic, of the former Yugoslavia.

The events taking place in the former Soviet empire and in the Balkans show the dismemberment of the USSR and Yugoslav federation have released bottled up energy as each of the new social units are striving to record their place on the world stage. There is nothing to suggest that Nigeria will not replicate those experiences.

From what has emerged over the past 40 days that President Yar’Adua has been away we can safely see how the President, who was presumably elected by Nigerians, has been held captive by a few selfish men and women who see Nigeria as their private estate.

In the process, Nigeria as, nation is held hostage by President Yar’Adua on account of his ill-health. In keeping with the well known antics of all the ill- bred African dictators Yar’Adua is telling Nigerians that he holds the manifest  destiny of Nigeria in his hands and only he and members of his house have the wisdom on how to exercise power. In the case of Nigeria, we may soon hear that President Yar’Adua has willed power to a member of his family.

That may be the script that his cohorts are working on while Nigeria grinds to a halt. As far as the President and his men believe that the functions of Nigerians should standstill while the President recovers from his ill-health issues. It follows that if the President should go the way of all mortals the Nigerian state would probable cease to exist. In the event of such happening, President Yar’Adua would still have proved the theory that he wants to be the last president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

This is a strange prospect for a country with a written constitution that clearly spells out the fundamental objective and directive principles of state policy were clearly enshrined, including how the state functions should be performed in the event of the president taking ill. Yet, President Yar’Adua, had difficulties understanding the working of the constitution that he swore an oath to protect and defend. President Yar’Adua has no confidence in his second in command, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, to hold forth for him while he is sick.

The President so loves Nigeria to the point that he cannot give attention to his health while Dr. Jonathan busies with himself with Nigeria’s intractable problems.

The President certainly regards Nigeria as his private estate, and to that extent, no other Nigerian is worthy enough to handle the country’s problems. Obviously, President Yar’Adua is so enmeshed in the born-to- rule ideology of the Caliphate that no other Nigerian is fit to preside over the affairs of Nigeria. Even in the face of any external aggression against Nigeria, there will be a huge leadership vacuum that would constrain the Nigerian state from responding promptly.

President Yar’Adua, has damaged the last vestige of trust and attempt at forging national unity, by telling the whole world that Dr. Jonathan is incapable of holding forth for him, even as a symbolic gesture of nation building and strengthening the culture and practice of democracy in a country so traumatized by ethnic and religious divisions.

President Yar’Adua has demonstrated that he so patently distrusted the South and the Christian population of the country that such sacrifice is too grave to make and he  was not prepared to do so even with the last gasp of breathe.

There is no doubt that one of the reasons for selecting Dr. Jonathan as the Vice President was to douse the fire in the Niger Delta which got so bad as to reduce the oil exploration and production activities to about 40 per cent. The restiveness in the Niger Delta had become a national and international security embarrassment that a solution had to be found.

Many people hailed President Yar’Adua for extending an olive branch to the fighting youths in the region.
By the grave act of indiscretion of treating Dr. Jonathan  as unworthy to deputise for him, President Yar’Adua and his cohorts have exposed as a lie, the very idea for which Dr. Jonathan was chosen as the Vice President. They have told the whole world that the amnesty project is a hoax and that there is no reason to trust a minority person, much less an Ijaw man with such a high office.

Simply put the North is brazenly telling the whole world that there are second class citizens in Nigeria, a country that spent so much time, energy and resources to fight the apartheid regime in South Africa.

The lesson that is lost on those pushing the idea on indispensability of President Yar’Adua is that at no time was the North asked to field for an election as a president, a candidate whose health was imperilled. There was never a time that the North was denied the opportunity to put its best foot forward. Nigerians, irrespective of ethnic and religious background voted for President Yar’Adua as a Nigeria president, no the president of a section of the country or a president that will for any, hold Nigeria and Nigerians to ransom.

It is worrisome, therefore, that the lessons from the break up of the Yugoslav federation are lost on the political elites of this country. The attempt by late Slobodan Milosevic to promote Serbia hegemony over the other groups namely the Croats, the Slovenes, the Ethnic Albanians, the Montenegros and Kosovo, precipitated the collapse.
Mr. Odiogor, a journalist, writes from Lagos.