This is the moment of truth.
Our country is
adrift. Our president has disappeared, terminally ill in a secret
location in a foreign country. Our government is paralysed, hijacked by
a cabal of predatory officials who claim to be acting on the
instructions of a brain-damaged president. Our citizens are trapped in
a country with a reputation so soiled they are shamed daily.
And we can’t even
get the cabinet, supposedly composed of at least a handful of ministers
with the education, the upbringing, the exposure and the character, to
rise beyond self interest at a moment of national peril.
On Wednesday, at a
meeting of the cabinet, a lone minister finally stood up and said,
enough. Dora Akunyili, whose once-sterling reputation has been somewhat
tarnished on account of having to constantly defend the indefensible in
her job as information minister, asked her colleagues to face reality
and start the constitutional process of getting the fading president to
step aside.
By all accounts,
she was immediately set upon by the usual mad dogs doing the bidding of
our own Imelda Marcos, by the name of Turai Yar’Adua. These included
the attorney general, Michael Aondoakaa, and the likes of Sayyadi Abba
Ruma, the agriculture minister. The secretary to the government, Ahmed
Yayale, failed to stand up for her. Even the vice president, Goodluck
Jonathan, who presided over the meeting, felt compelled to go with the
mob.
We were not at all
surprised by the actions of the cabal, personified by the coarse Mr.
Aondoakaa, who always seems to carry a whiff of scandal about him.
But the rest of the
cabinet sat in stony silence, with no one coming to Mrs. Akunyili’s
defence except after the fact, in private, when no courage was required
except for self congratulation.
In this cabinet
sits, at a time of constitutional crisis, such eminent lawyers as
Kayode Adetokunbo, the minister of labour, and Odein Ajumogobia, the
petroleum minister Both are distinguished and reputable lawyers, Senior
Advocates of Nigeria, refined in language and dignified in bearing.
They are the very picture of the genteel middle class, welcome at all
the better dining tables of the Lagos suburbs of Ikoyi and Victoria
Island.
But everyone can be
cultured and of sturdy character when there is no cost to professing to
be so. When the true test came on Wednesday afternoon, and days and
weeks before then and since, these legal luminaries failed to stand up.
Instead, they sat down. They ceded the stage instead to Mr. Aondoakaa,
also a SAN, it must be said, but one who has never pretended to any
sort of refinement, both of character and of carriage.
Passivity and
constant accommodation are the Achilles’ heels of our educated and
cultured class, who are geniuses at analyzing our many troubles and
utterly hopeless when it comes to taking any action that requires
having skin in the game. Such people exhibit the classic attributes of
the MAFA-those who mistake articulation for action.
The most learned
people in our cabinet are, in a sense, fitting representatives of our
rusting middle class, a shrinking pool of highly educated but totally
ineffectual people clinging to tales of the glory days when no one was
allowed to press the car horn in Ikoyi. They have read Kant and studied
Donne and can recite chunks of Paradise Lost from memory, but are
totally at sea in their own country. With each passing year they cede
the public arena just a little more to the roughnecks and the uncouth.
They adjust and they accommodate and they explain and justify, as we
circle the drain.
When our country
cried out for help, and a bit of courage was required, the most
reputable members of our cabinet were nowhere to be found except to sit
in stony silence. As they have for the past 76 days, which is how long
our president has vanished from public view.
Some of them have
argued that it is necessary to build consensus in the cabinet before
any action can be taken, that the constitution requires two-thirds of
the cabinet-30 of the current 45-to agree to trigger the process that
might lead to declaring the president medically incompetent. But there
has been no evidence, until Mrs. Akunyili challenged the malevolent
silence,that the cabinet had even once brought up the subject of a
missing president, let alone explore the options available to bring the
matter to a wise and productive resolution. There also is no evidence
of how long they are prepared for Nigeria to be in limbo before they
will say, enough. Is it 50 days of presidential absence, or 75, or 100?
We do not at all
mean to single out the most accomplished and reputable lawyers in a
generally supine cabinet. We do so only because this is first and
foremost a constitutional crisis, during which their leadership could
make a difference in steering the cabinet towards a reasonable outcome.
A few others with similar pretensions to decency, people such as Mansur
Muhtar, ---the finance minister, also deserve to be accused of
cowardice in the face of a clear and present danger to our country.
We are just
particularly disappointed by the evident silence of Messrs Adetokunbo
and Ajumogobia, who are well equipped to lead the cabinet in a rational
conversation but have so far failed to do so.
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