News
Abba Kyari: The contradiction of a man!
The Insight by Lateef Adewole
“Ojó a bákú làá d’ère, èèyàn ò sunwòn láàyè.” (It is after one’s death that people build monument in one’s honour, even when vilified while alive)
Let me express my condolences to the immediate and extended family of Mallam Abba Kyari, who passed away on Friday 17th of April, 2020. Also, to his friends and associates, especially President Muhammadu Buhari, who has lost a “loyal friend and compatriot” (according to him), the people of Borno state and Nigeria (afterall, he was our Chief of Staff). May Allah forgive his shortcomings.
In the last one week, I have read as many commentaries on Abba Kyari as I could lay my hands on, there were tonnes of them and were as diverse as they came. Friends and foes did not hold back in their personal opinions of him. The common cliché: “don’t speak ill of the dead” could not silence those who did not like him. Likewise, despite his controversial public image, his lovers did not shy away from eulogising him and telling the world how “angelic” he actually was as a person, without fear of condemnation by the public.
While it was “understandable”, the criticisms that followed his death, the praise-songs were alien to many, especially those that came from some quarters. And I am not talking about “fake, hypocritical” ones from some politicians. Some people who are respected and whose opinions often count, spoke well of him. Some, who are considered as the thorns in the flesh of the Buhari administration which Abba served, even had generous commentaries about him. These were actually strange. I do not want to start mentioning names.
It was the contents of what were written by the latter group that brought tears to my eyes and there are reasons for me to feel like that. Firstly, I wondered that if all they wrote about him were actually true, how could one person then be this vilified and greatly misunderstood as we have seen concerning Mallam Abba Kyari in the past five years? That would have amounted to great injustice to his person.
Secondly, his admirers made a note that Mallam Abba was the “moderating factor” in the current administration. Which means, all the “unpalatable dishes” that the government fed the citizens were still “moderate”. I again wondered what the “unmoderated” ones would have been? Does it mean we would have been dealing with a “monster” of a government?
Thirdly, deriving from the above, the team-Abba Kyari also implied that many things that the administration – he served -was accused of, were actually orchestrated by some other “unseen” hands. And that if not for Abba Kyari, things could have been messier. And also that it was these “devils” who planted all the negative stories we read about Abba Kyari, just to malign and discredit him, and to make him exposed to public attacks which were expected to lead to his sack by President Buhari. If this is also true, it again portrayed the president as incompetent and someone who has not been in charge of his government.
Finally, if all the above are correct, and now we have lost the “Mr. Moderator” in the Buhari administration, and except a miracle happens that President Buhari rises to the occasion and takes charge of his government, what fate then awaits our country, Nigeria and we, the Nigerians, going forward in the remaining years of this government, as well as the transition to the next? How much instability and cantankerous behaviours should we expect? All this moved me to tears. How did we get here?
As a person, I have my template with which I evaluate the performances of appointees in a government in relationship to their principals. It goes thus: if an appointee performs excellently well in their assignment, I commend the capability of such appointee while I acknowledge the support of their principal, because, an appointee can only do well to the extent that their principal want them to.
President Muhammadu Buhari and his late Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari
Conversely, if an appointee performed woefully, I blame the principal, while I acknowledge the incompetence of the appointee. This sounds like double standards. Ok, let me explain. I believe if an appointee is not performing well and bringing down an administration, the power of “life or death” is with their principal. He should fire or redeploy such appointee. So, to condone such incompetence is to be ready to take responsibility for it. Let me cite some examples.
Mallam Nasir El-Rufai did wonderfully well as Minister of FCT because he was very competent but would not have succeeded if former President Obasanjo did not give him the required support. Professor Iwu of INEC conducted some of the worst elections in Nigeria under the same Obasanjo. Iwu was and still is a globally respected scholar but he did badly to the extent of what the former president wanted. He could have sacked him. So, it was the former President Obasanjo I blamed.
This must have informed my position about Mallam Abba Kyari over the years. In all my writings, many of which were about the wrongdoings in the country and were critical of the current government which is responsible for them, I have never singled out Mallam Abba Kyari for condemnation. Whatever he must have been accused of, I put the blames squarely on the president. He appointed him, he allowed all those things to happen if the president was not responsible personally, and he still continued to tolerate such by not sacking him. In fact, he reappointed him for a second term in 2019, against all expectations and even empowered him the more. So, if all that were said by his allies were true, I did not fall into misjudging him.
To be fair to Mallam Abba, all his critics based their grouse against him on his involvement in the current administration in the past five years. None made reference to any historical antecedents of such behaviour from him while he traversed life in his previous 62 years before he joined this government. And his supporters also spoke glowingly of him based on his personality which they claimed he deployed to “moderate” the excesses in the government, contrary to what the public believe. So, what went wrong?
The people who made case for Abba Kyari did so from their personal knowledge of him based on their relationships. They tried to exonerate him from all the misdeeds he was accused of. Their claim was that, on every occasion, he “explained” the true position to them in the closet, which they believed. Yet. he took blame for those actions with equanimity. One then wonders to what purpose was his service as Chief of Staff to the president? Was it to simply take all the bullets for him or advise him to do the right things?
This brings us to another issue of his purported influence on the president and in the government. No doubt that he was loyal to the President and that the president loved him and “supposedly” listened to him. The president made this obvious when he re-emphased publicly by directing that all communications to him should be routed through Abba Kyari. That was a forceful message.
So, while several issues that troubled the country were agitated against by citizens, what did Abba Kyari do? Did he advise the president based on the feelers from the public? What advice did he give the president? What were that consequential actions taken by the president based on his advices? If many things that happened in the country were to be used to judge, it is either that Mallam Abba Kyari was guilty as charged in the court of public opinion and he did not advise the president rightly or the president did not heed his advices, if Abba was truly not responsible for those issues.
Let me cite few instances to elucidate this point. The MTN bribery allegation against him and the accusation of his involvement in the Maina saga were two distinct examples of corrupt practices, for which President Buhari was said to have disdain and will not tolerate. We are now being told that he was not involved, though, he was aware. Then, what did he do about them? Did he advise President Buhari to deal decisively with the issues and punish those who were actually involved and responsible? If he didn’t, then he was guilty as charged. If he did and the president still condoned them, then the president is the guilty one.
Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari, and the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Winifred Oyo-Ita once had an open altercation during the Federal Executive Council
What about the appointment of himself to the board of the NNPC and appointment of his daughter to Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA)? Were those actions to protect Nigeria from the thieving elites? Let us even concede to that. In 2017, a leaked memo from former Minister of State for Petroleum, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu (who Kyari was said to have facilitated his appointment), complained of not following due process in the award of contract worth 25 billion dollars by the former GMD of NNPC, Dr. Maikanti Baru. Dr. Kachikwu claimed not to be carried along in the process.
The defence by the GMD was that he got approval from President Buhari. Incidentally, President Buhari was hospitalised in London at the time and on leave, with Professor Yemi Osinbajo as the Acting President. Sadly, he too was not carried along. And the person who was responsible for transmitting such important deal document to the president in London was Abba Kyari. What then was that about? To protect our oil business from corrupt elites? Did that include the Acting President Osinbajo and Kachikwu?
The allies of Mallam Abba painted him in “nationalistic” colour, a well educated, cosmopolitan, detrabalised and non-religious bigot. With what they narrated, let us accept them to be true. However, all these are completely contradictory to all that the government he served seems to represent. For five years, there have been endless complaints about the nepotism, tribalism, favoritism and religious bigotry that have characterised the lopsidedness in the appointments made by the president.
The most obvious were the appointments of service chiefs. A situation where almost 90 per cent of people involved in the security architecture of the country come from only one section of the country, which is the president’s region. How justifiable is that? Apart from that, countless other appointments that only required the discretion of the president, without the entrapment of federal character, followed in the same manner.
Worse still, a trend was established in the past five years that made it almost predictable where the next appointee of the president will come from once there is a vacancy in government position, whether due to retirement, expiration of tenure of the occupant or a “forced” exit. Most often than not, once an appointee from the southern Nigeria leaves or is removed from office, many Nigerians simply predicted that another northerner will fill such position. And 90 percent of time, they were right. Numerous examples can be stated, even in not too long a time. The cases of replacement of the heads of DSS, NIA, FIRS, NIMASA, PEF, CJN and numerous others, are few examples. These are public knowledge.
Now, let us come back to the cosmopolitan moderate nationalist in such government with the ears of the president, Mallam Abba Kyari. Sadly, he was accused of being responsible for every single one of these cases. Where were all his detrabalised dispositions while all these happened if we are to accept his friends’ pleas that he was not responsible? But, what did he do? If who he is now being painted was who he truly was, one would have expected that he would have advised the president to the contrary. If he did and the president was the one who refused or that some other people were responsible, then, we are doomed as a country since it means our problems did not die with Mallam Abba.
Lastly, let us interrogate what happened within the presidency, especially since the beginning of the second term of President Buhari, in relation to the office of the vice president. The president is at liberty to give or not to give any responsibility to the vice president, apart from the constitutionally assigned duty as the head of the National Economic Council (NEC). So, nobody should query if the president did not deem it fit to empower his vice.
However, this was contrary to how the government started in 2015. As bad as it was then, the president must have trusted his vice so much that he gave him much latitude to operate and drive the business of governance, for the benefits of the country and the people, a job he performed excellently well to the admiration of many. The peak was when he stood in for the president in acting capacity in 2016. He held forth effectively and reigned in the sliding economic situation. He rallied the whole country behind the federal government. Many felt his stellar performance of that period was his sin to the “cabal” purportedly represented by Abba Kyari. The next time the president went on leave, he was made incapacitated with an ingenious title of a “Coordinator” of government activities in Buhari’s absence.
At another time recently, he was not even handed over to at all. The Buhari’s men claimed he could operate as president and run the country from anywhere in the world. Despite the unrivalled contributions of Professor Yemi Osinbajo to the reelection of President Buhari in 2019 presidential election, he was a target of deliberate systematic decimation and all the socio-economic and political influences he previously enjoyed were curtailed. NEMA, SIP, economic management leadership, and many others, were removed from his office. Many of his personal staff were sacked. He was relegated to the background. Even there were attempts to trump corruption allegations against him.
In this time of national and global crisis where world leaders take charge of the situation, from USA to UK, from Canada to China, from India to South Africa, from Ghana to Rwanda, and so on. If the president is “unavoidably” indisposed to leading this charge during this Covid-19 pandemic, many had expected that the responsibility should automatically have fallen on the vice president but that was not to be. Not until the pandemic began to rain calamity on the economy that the president drafted the vice president to the rescue. Otherwise, his office might still be in “comatose”.
All these endless allegations were heaped on the late Abba Kyari. Was he guilty as charged? If he is not, what advice did he offer to President Buhari in all of these? Were his advises not accepted or what? If so, how do people reconcile his public image and the “exceptional” person in private some are now telling us he was? I guess many of these questions will never get answers given the current reality of his death.
In all, Mallam Abba’s life and death are lessons to all of us, particularly the people who are saddled with the responsibilities of governing the country at all levels, as well as people of influence and power, who may not have any specific elected or appointed offices, they should realise that power is transient and life itself is ephemera. No one lives forever. And whatever anyone does is what they will be remembered for after their departure.
When God sees you, let the people also see you, not in the light of show-off, but for them to know who you truly are. And let that explicitly reflect in your choices, actions and what people will associate with you after you might have gone. Otherwise, people writing eulogies and praise epistles after may not make much impact or change people’s general opinions by then.
I can only say that, may God reward him according to his deeds.
May God continue to guide us to always do the right things.
God Bless Nigeria.
Lateef Adewole is a political analyst and social commentator can be reached by email lateefadewole23@gmail.com or via WhatsApp +2348020989095 and @lateef_adewole on Twitter
