Tag: Shehu Shagari

He has aged with quiet, aloof dignity. Since his election as president in 1979 and dethronement four years later in 1983 by the military after his party, the National Party of Nigeria (NPN), masterminded a disputed electoral victory, Shehu Shagari, 91, has carried himself with the regal splendour of a 19th Century monarch: mostly detached and reticent, and with the self-assured imperturbability that would have enriched his presidency in the early 1980s had he summoned it. Alhaji Shagari occupies a unique position in Nigeria today as the oldest living former ruler, military or elected. Apart from being an encyclopedia of governmental affairs, he must undoubtedly feel nostalgic about the past every time he marks his birthday. Most of his political allies are gone, including many of the younger ones, and nearly all his political opponents have long translated to another world. But he is still here, and may still be here many years to come.

It will not be unusual of him to remember just how intense politics was in the 1970s, with the effervescent presence of Nnamdi Azikiwe, the great Zik of Africa whose ardent oratory inflamed whole crowds and sired a generation of Zikists; the roiling and unsparing antagonism of the mercurial and gifted Obafemi Awolowo whose deep intellectualism made the Shagari government squirm endlessly; and the inflammatory rhetoric of Aminu Kano, the closest approximation to the proletarian utopia of egalitarian politics. Alhaji Shagari will of course also periodically remember Ibrahim Waziri, the famous apostle of politics without bitterness and probably the foremost Kanuri politician of the time who suavely rejected the popular dystopian portrayal of Nigerian politics.

But perhaps for ex-president Shagari, nostalgia has already given way to remorse. Did he ever get over the ignominy of the 1983 overthrow of his government? President Muhammadu Buhari dedicated twelve years of three litigious presidential contests to wipe off the memory of being humiliated out of office; and Ibrahim Babangida, the former military president forced to step aside by forces beyond his control, tried to return to office democratically to undo the damage to his reputation which the crazy events of 1993 brought upon him. Alhaji Shagari made no such efforts. He seemed to brood interminably over matters he refused to speak about, and over feelings he seemed unwilling to acknowledge even existed. Given the merciless manner he was excoriated by the tempestuous newspapers of the Southwest, the famous Lagos-Ibadan axis of the press, he seemed in retrospect an earlier version of Goodluck Jonathan, if not a forerunner.

Like many of his predecessors, with the exception of Murtala Mohammed, and virtually all his successors without exception, Alhaji Shagari appeared unprepared for the presidency. He took over a fairly buoyant economy and ran it aground in less than three years; but he also inherited from military head of state Obasanjo a culture of bureaucratic impunity that imploded unluckily on his laps. His idea of social engineering was sophomoric, and his vision of Nigeria’s global standing, barely a few years after the continental dynamism of Gen. Mohammed, was barely longer or farther than his nose. He indulged his ministers and aides with an insouciance only equalled about three decades later by Dr. Jonathan. He doubtless had his failings, and he may constantly smother them with an avalanche of remorse and lugubriousness that is distinctly personal to him, but he also had his strengths and gifts, especially his humanist approach to life and politics.

Yet, Alhaji Shagari was a democrat, and in 1979 was a relatively young politician and president curiously avuncular in an ironic way in his protection of the freedoms and liberties vouchsafed to the people by the constitution. As president, he exemplified the finest attributes of a gentleman, and typified the classic definition of honesty in his earthy and cultured application of bucolic lifestyle to politics. Had Nigerian politics not been unqualifiedly raffish and violently boisterous, his simplicity, not to say his humanism, would have been appropriate for his time. When he was president, the appalling character of Nigerian politics was a given; he was in fact the one that needed to modify his modus operandi, not his intrinsic qualities, to establish control over the nihilistic tendencies of the electorate and political class.

Nigerians may never be able to answer what would have happened to the country had Alhaji Shagari not been overthrown. What would four more years, and perhaps many more, of the NPN government have cost the country? An answer to that should then be juxtaposed against the inestimable damage done to the country by four military regimes whose cataclysmic impact will probably endure for decades to come, if not for all time. Certainly, had Alhaji Shagari not been overthrown, there would not have been the Buhari, Babangida, Abacha, and Abubakar governments. Nor would there have been the second coming of Obasanjo or Buhari, not to talk of the enthronement of the dysfunctional Yar’Adua and Jonathan presidencies.

However, of all living Nigerian former heads of state and presidents, Alhaji Shagari comes closest to the definition of all that is decent and dignified. It is mortifying that when he had the strength, when he was much younger, his talents were not deployed by his successors in the cause of worthy projects domestically and globally. He ruled for only four years. Perhaps biographers did not think he did enough to merit more than a book or two. But if outsiders think him unsuitable for copious study, surely he does not have that self-deprecating sense of littleness to give the country anything fewer than a two-volume memoir.

Former Adviser to ex-President Shehu Shagari on National Assembly Matters Tanko Yakasai yesterday said the National Conference has united Nigeria and dismissed speculations about Nigeria breaking up.

Speaking with our reporter in Kano, Yakasai, who was a Federal Government nominee to the conference, said the most significant decision of the delegates was the recommendation of the inclusion of zoning in the Nigerian constitution.

He said another significant recommendation was that henceforth, two-third of the people to be appointed ministers or commissioners should come from the legislature.

Yakasai said the delegates recommended that five per cent of the national revenue should be dedicated to a Special Fund created for the development of solid mineral resources in the country.

He said this would give the nation another source of revenue.

On the creation of states, Yakasai said it required the support of the National Assembly and two-third of the 36 states.