Nigeria our country, Nigeria our motherland, Nigeria ..Nigeria..Nigeria. Nigeria is a very special country, it’s a country which has shown and proved that nothing is impossible and anything can happen. Someone once told me that God loves Nigeria as much or even more than he loves and protect Isreal, and after careful thinking and pondering, i have come to believe that sentence, and why would i belive it? I’ll tell you, Nigeria has been cooked to a point where all the ingredient for war has been put in the pot, with the high level of poverty, the killing of inoccent lives due to enviromental poison and pollution by oil companies, to the rise of Niger Delta millitants, to the heavy fustration of the people in the nation watching the public looting of the nations wealth by some so called politicians, to the lack of basic needs (electricity, water, shelter) etc, to killings of innocent people bythe police and millitary, but yet we are still one as a nation Presently. I can’t think of any country that has balantly turned it’s constitution to joke, or a country where in the name of God and ethnicity brothers, neigbhours, families kill each other, where public officers are not held accountable for offences commited ( looting, electoral fraud, political assasination, embezelment, lies, creation of poverty etc….), where the office of the first lady is stronger than the executive arm of the nation, where the first lady tries to determine her people or the nations life, where the nation has been told that the health of its democracticaly elected president is none of it’s business ( this she did not say verbally, but showed and expressed it by her physical actions, constant manovering and power games), So the question i ask is this…Would i be wrong by calling her President Turai Yar’dua? well suprisingly tha answer would be NO! i wont be wrong. This nation has been held captive for months now by this woman, we have been forced to endure her greed for power, her hold on the arms of the president, her lust for controling and caling the shuts when it comes to the nation and even her trying plot to become the vice-president of the country. One off my hobbies is diving into the web world and constantly updating myself on articles, blogs and general informations. I came across this page and read an article there titled ”Her Imperial Majesty, Turai Yar’adua-TELL magazine”. It would be very unjust of me if i decide to keep it to myself, so being a concerned citizen i present to you, Her Imperial Majesty, Turai Yar’adua. Please note that the article was quite long, so i had to edit it.
For discerning persons who know how the Yar’adua administration has worked since inception, the controversy that Vice President Goodluck Jonathan called Turai Yar’adua, the first lady, to get directives on performing the duties of the president is really no news. With the structure at the seat of power in Abuja, it would not have been surprising to Aso Rock insiders that Jonathan called Turai to intimate her of political developments. A few weeks ago, the Federal High Court, Abuja ruled that the vice president could perform the duties of the president in the latter’s absence. Controversy broke out in the media when it was reported that rather than follow the ruling, the vice president was awaiting the reaction of President Umaru Yar’adua or his wife. Specifically, Jonathan was said to have telephoned the first lady to intimate her of the ruling by Justice Dan Abutu and ask for directives on what to do. However, the vice president in a statement signed by Ima Niboro, special assistant on media, denied calling the first lady to take directives. Stating that Jonathan last spoke to Turai on January 5, after he had spoken to Yar’adua, the statement declared that the vice president was not indecisive but was in charge and able to discharge the responsibilities of the office of president without seeking instructions from anyone.
But Turai, in the power structure in the presidency has before now been one who has always called the shots. Her authority and hold on the levers of power have not even diminished by her absence due to her husband’s illness. Turai has always been the power behind Yar’adua — in the home, when he was governor and now, that he is president. An incident of many years ago perhaps best dramatizes the power that Turai has always wielded in the president’s life and work. The words, words of wisdom as it turned out, were sown over two decades ago. But they have germinated in the pregnant belly of time and have finally been born in the political events that currently haunt Nigeria. In 1991, Umaru Yar’adua, then somewhat a political neophyte, aspired to contest in the governorship race in Katsina State. Ordinarily, the election would have been a walk over. After all, his elder brother, Shehu Musa Yar’adua, a retired major general, was one of the most influential men in the Social Democratic Party, SDP, and the strongest political force in the state. But the older Yar’adua would not support his brother. In fact, he was reported to have given tacit support to his brother’s opponent, Saidu Barda, candidate of the National Republican Convention, NRC. When SDP stalwarts went to the retired general to appeal to him to change his mind he reportedly asked them whom they wanted to put in Government House, Katsina; Umaru or Turai, his wife.
For some of those present that day, the retired general’s words are proving uncannily prescient. And any one of them still alive today would wonder at how prophetic those words have become not only for Yar’adua and his wife, but also for Nigeria. For, those prophetic words, few as they were, provide a simultaneous psychoanalysis of both Yar’adua and his wife.
No. Turai is naturally a domineering person who not just loves power but is wielding it and letting all around know where it lies. An intelligent and calculating woman, she has only exploited the circumstances of her life to strengthen her natural instincts. Interestingly, in an ironic twist that amplifies Turai’s selfish streak and bizarre love of power, the same woman who would not allow her husband, a Muslim, the pleasure of having a second wife, has conveniently undertaken the task of giving out her young daughters away as second and third wives to rich, powerful but much older men. In fact the last daughter to be given out in marriage was already betrothed to someone else, a big businessman in the oil industry before the first lady married her off to another state governor. For Turai, matrimonial bliss lies in wealth and power. Apparently it is more important that her daughters be married to powerful governors who would be able to sustain the first family’s aristocratic heritage. In the first lady’s thinking, she must imagine that in case her husband cannot continue as president, she can still somehow, however remotely, remain politically relevant, and even possibly continue to hold some lever of power through her daughter’s marriage to men in political authority.
What the ambitious, and some say, rather assertive, first lady has done is to exploit both Yar’adua weaknesses and sickness to catapult herself into the position of a shadow president of Nigeria. In the early days, other people in the Yar’adua administration noticed this power lacuna and tried to exploit it by creating power blocs for themselves. Thus was born a clique comprising the likes of Abba Ruma, minister for agriculture and water resources; Tanimu Yakubu, the national economic adviser; Yayale Ahmed, secretary to the government of the federation, SGF, and initially, in the early days, Babagana Kingibe, former SGF. However, Turai soon showed everybody who held the lever of power. And she was in a very strategic position to do so. For the often ill Yar’adua, the role the first lady plays as the president’s permanent nurse thrusts upon her a rare opportunity to occupy the center stage in the power equation at the villa.
Ministers who wanted to see the president were “fenced” by the first lady who then took over official files and, they suspect, influenced what her husband did with them. The magazine learnt that more than anything else, what hastened the exit of Lieutenant General Abdulahi Mohammed, former chief of staff under President Olusegun Obasanjo who was retained by Yar’adua, was the interference by Turai in official matters. Mohammed who played a strategic stabilizing role in the Obasanjo government had free access to the president and his advice was well respected. But with Yar’adua, the situation changed as Turai was carrying out some of his duties. Or in other cases, Mohammed allegedly had to hold meetings or discuss with Turai, official matters, before seeing the president. Within a few months, Mohammed was fed up and wanted out but was prevailed upon by a prominent Nigerian to stay a while to help stabilize the new administration. The experience of Kingibe was not too different. Kingibe, as secretary to the government, ran the engine room of the government as his office saw to the implementation of government policies. But Turai soon started to look through files from the SGF meant for the president. Initially, Kingibe left files for Turai to pass on to the president but when he observed that the first lady was being deliberately manipulative, he demurred and stopped leaving files in her care. That some insist was probably the last straw for him in the power game in the administration and he was soon on his way out. There are other ministers and senior government officials who are tired of the first lady’s manipulative ways. Others are equally concerned. A top Nigerian, a statesman once had cause to cautiously express concern to President Yar’adua that he learned that the first lady was virtually running the presidency. Yar’Adua’s defense was that the only reason why people say Turai is the one running the Villa is because he was not quarreling with his wife openly. So enormous and gripping is Turai’s hold on the levers of power and authority that even with her absence from Aso Rock due to the president’s sickness and admission to a Saudi hospital, she continues to call some shots. In fact, the near crisis that Nigeria has been thrown in the last two months of the president’s absence from office has been virtually orchestrated by Turai in far-away Saudi Arabia.
Yar’adua was unceremoniously flown to Saudi Arabia on November 23, 2009, without duly handing over to Vice President Goodluck Jonathan. Constitutionally, to prevent a power vacuum, whenever the president knows that he would be away from his duties for a period, he should hand over to the vice president who would act as president. Also, the president failed to transmit to the National Assembly the fact of his trip for medical attention and absence from duty as required by the constitution. Taking off without doing these many things that needed presidential attention such as signing of the supplementary budget and swearing in of Justice Aloysius Kastina-Alu as the chief justice of Nigeria, CJN, raised controversies.
Beyond the issue of properly handing over, the information about the true state of the president’s health condition has been terribly manipulated that for a long time even the vice president and cabinet ministers could not say exactly what the truth was about Yar’Adua’s health. First, she limited the number of people who knew anything about the president’s true health situation to just a handful of people she could trust or manipulate. In fact, apart from the president’s aide-de-camp and chief security detail who by security protocol always stays with him, the only persons that Turai communicated with in official circles for a few days about the president’s health were Ruma and Yakubu.
While speculations and rumors walked on all fours in the nation’s streets with people becoming agitated about their president’s health, the first lady kept mum. Worse still when some state governors, including Bukola Saraki and Isa Yuguda of Kwara and Bauchi states respectively, went to Saudi Arabia to see things for themselves, they were denied access to him. Bukola has gone to Saudi Arabia twice now without being allowed to see Yar’adua, That is in spite of the fact that he is very close to the president and is also a medical doctor.
A politician said cynically that Turai would rather her husband die in office than willingly allow him to resign from office. In fact, some others say that she actually expressed such sentiments when a delegation of women from the North visited her sometime ago and suggested that the president resign to deal with his health. Turai reportedly retorted that he would not be the first leader to die in office, citing or apparently referring to Generals Murtala Mohammed and Sani Abacha, both former military heads of state.
Interestingly, this first lady who has succeeded in virtually holding the nation to ransom has absolutely no role to play under the constitution. But in a democracy, ruled by a constitution, Turai has succeeded in creating such a powerful role for the first lady that not even her predecessors under the military ever envisaged. The effect has been for the nation a not too pleasant experience.
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