Dominic, Your whims and feeling are not historical truths. As you gave the yardsticks on which to judge someone who has just surrendered to death, you too should have thought of your own mortality and think twice, as they say, before drawing up your whimsical yardstick.
For instance, the Amnesty granted the militants, never made your list. Yar’Adua’s gentle mein, never mattered too. That he was not despotic in his relationship with the National Assembly or that he hounded no one was not mentioned.
Instead, you went into one dirty hole from which you dug up the fiction that the hypocritical Ribadu was dragged off the Graduation Hall of NIPPS. That widely believed falsehood never happened. January 2010, on my way back from Yankari Games Reserve, Bauchi state, I spent a night in Jos, strictly to talk to journalists and get a hang of what happened. That was where it dawned on me that Ribadu took the world for a ride and got away with it. If he was dragged off from the Hall, with others fully seated, then he and the security goons that dragged him off would have been captured in pictures, during the dragging. But there was no dragging. Somebody knew he would not be allowed into that Hall if he was not in uniform. And if he wore the uniform of an AIG, he would be arrested for impersonation. If he wore that of a Deputy Commissioner of Commissioner of Police, it could be used against him in court. So he used his phone to call journalists and made legend into a lasting fact. But it was a fiction, one which many such as yourself not only still believe but are redifusing across the globe. He sat in his official quarters and made those calls, then entered into his car and drove off – after he had first taken pictures witht the rest of the granduands.
That Amnesty programme, did not just stop or reduce the militancy in the Niger Delta, it enabled the Oil Industry to function almost maximally for the first time in years, doubling income from oil, owing to which government began to talk about raising electricity supply, reducing tension across the land, and, and, and, etc.
That you do not know of the multiple effects of that Amensty programme, or that unlike under Obasanjo anytime someone retired, he was replaced by anyone Obasanjo wanted, but Yar’Adua would appoint the next person in rank.That became the standard anytime and everywhere.
You “bad-mouthed” Aondoakka, as the worst Attorney General in the globe just because he did not join you in lynching Ibori. Well, the AG after him started by granting nulles prosequi, in cases involving friends/members of the cabal in power. Second, Nigerians saw the charade called EFCC’s invitation to El-Rufai. Though there was a standing arrest warrant from a court against him, it was not invoked. Instead, news organisations reported ahead that El-Rufai would only “show face” and be allowed to walk home a free man. And that was what happened.
Unlike Obasanjo who assumed he was the state, Yar’Adua gave the courts a free hand and respected the rule of law. But Yar’Adua, despite PDP’s losing the Anambra Tribuna judgement to Mr. Peter Obi, ordered that Peter Obi be sworn in; it would not have happened under Obasanjo, who would have sought for ways to delay if not refuse to obey that judgement.
It may not have registered in your whimsical record-keeping, but Aondoakka never invoked nulle prosequi for once in his almost three years stay as AG.
And please remember that the Niger Delta militancy began around 1997. That year I did a story in the Post Express newspaper with the title “Shell on Trial”, detailing the attacks against the oil giant. I did not know then that I was looking at the beginning of a major militancy. I did not, just as you did not know of your whimsical standard of measuring Yar’Adua’s achievement.
Enough! People should not publicly profess their ignorance.
Thanks.
Tony Eluemunor.