This piece was scripted on November 16th, 2005 and subsequently published in my back page column in Daily Trust then under the title, ADAMU CIROMA COMING? Apart from changing the title to what it is now and cutting off T. Y’s quote to beat length specification, it is being republished here virtually intact. It is being re-published as an uninvited contribution to what I believe to still be an inconclusive search for resolution of the current disarray via the instrumentality of a candidate in whom elite unity is achievable and in whom Nigeria would have, for once, settled the leadership question. That was the issue in 1998 as well as in 2007 and the context in which some people thought that a Ciroma was a plausible answer as at 2005. Now, it is 2013, and, apart from say Audu Ogbe, the Ciroma gene is all but gone from Nigerian politics. Who are the political leaders about whom we can write what was written on Adamu Ciroma less than a decade ago?
This is something beyond the printed matter now in circulation to that effect. More than that, some political engine is revving, arguing that Nigeria today is a replica of 1999 when there was a fundamental contradiction on the ground and on which there was consensus among the stakeholders that only a particular individual of a particular antecedent was needed as a resolution. This was how OBJ came in.
This is the same message coming from a certain quarter again in terms of Nigeria’s President, come 2007. And the argument follows basically a same trend-the need for an individual of a particular antecedent whose leadership can restore Nigeria through governance. Of course, it is a tendential and idealistic argument which places too much emphasis on the so-called exceptional individual except that those pushing the line are already pointing at a number of things about Adamu Ciroma that give them great confidence and enthusiasm. Their argument is the same as demonstrated by Karl Marx in The 18th Brummaire of Louis Bonaparte- that it is the prevailing social matrix that determines the kind of leadership that emerges at any moment. My gut feeling is that even though many Nigerian politicians do not read, most especially Marxist literature, the book is a companion material of certain category of them, particularly retired Generals. Recall how T.Y. Danjuma, the more cerebral of the retired Generals, successfully invoked the democratic credo in November 1998 when project Obasanjo was challenged. Remember that it was after this argument that there was the memorable clincher from those marketing Obasanjo that there were good soldiers and there were bad soldiers.
The strategic argument this time is that Adamu Ciroma is the last of that generation of Nigerian politicians whose leadership would get Nigeria out of cycles of revenge and recriminations. This is on the ground that present front-runners lack the neutrality and distance from the volatile issues of the last 15 years as to be OBJ’s successor.
Of course, other factors are being considered. The factor of a graduate northerner as President of Nigeria is being stressed. Adamu Ciroma obtained his first degree in History from the University of Ibadan in the 1960s before he got additional qualifications in France. Associated with this is the fact that he reads. Although politics and political power is more about being accepted and trusted and much less about academic laurels, the point about formal education is no longer lost on anybody in the advent of the knowledge based economy.
Also cited is his in-depth knowledge of the system, derived from the broad range of areas he has served: from the regional bureaucracy to becoming editor and later Managing Director of the New Nigerian Newspapers, then a Director and later Governor of the Central Bank. He was the NPN’s first National Secretary in 1978, becoming minister of Industries and later Agriculture in the second republic. In 1992, he almost won the Presidential primaries of the National Republican Convention, NRC, before the primaries was annulled. He became the minister of Finance in 1999 under President Obasanjo.
Equally associated with him is a sense of moral propriety, typified by his declaration at a public lecture in Lagos in 1991 that before his appointment as CBN Governor in 1975, he had built up vast contacts in the manufacturing and modern business life of the country and perceived himself “as being in danger of making money.” He is perhaps the only Nigerian who could make this statement, describing money making as being dangerous. He could, therefore, declare at the Lagos lecture that when he was hauled into detention in 1984, he had no fears of any secret deals, funds stashed away anywhere, a Bank Account or a house anywhere, which could be uncovered.
In September 1983, he presided over Shagari’s Presidential Transition Committee whose report brutally asserted thus “The ‘new morality’ which has emerged from the military era is such that there is general acceptance among most members of the power elite that power is for profit rather than for responsible exercise of its privileges or for service …The ‘new morality’ encourages and protects chaos because members of the new elite have vested interest in chaos despite its long term danger to social stability and their real or permanent interests”.
The masterminds have their fears though. One is that neither they nor Ciroma have got money in real terms. And since money is everything in Nigerian politics, the whole project has a big question mark there. Two, the northern establishment does not consider Ciroma a pliant fellow and that could become a problem.
Third problem so far is that no one knows Ciroma’s position on market reforms anymore. Before he became OBJ’s minister of Finance in 1999, his refrain was that if we “allow market forces to perfect and govern us, we would be the fools of the market place”. So, many thought that he would, therefore, not be able to work with a market reformed OBJ. But he did. It was under him that IMF concretized its take over of the CBN and the Finance Ministry. But he is certainly a modernizing elite, not a buccaneer or hit-and-run bourgeois.
His last problem would be where the early starters like General Buhari, Vice-President Atiku, and IBB refuse to yield him any grounds. And each of them is formidable. Last November in New Delhi, I was shocked to hear a Diplomat I thought would be ignorant about Nigeria say that Buhari is the only person who can repair Nigeria. He was making a statement, not begging to convince me since he neither knew nor bothered to know my opinion of Buhari. Or is it IBB whom many Nigerians thought to be the perfect evil genius until OBJ turned up with a SAP with baboon face, escorted it with ministers who demolished people’s houses during the rainy season, aside from selling state owned enterprises to organizational white elephants. Since all judgments must stand on comparison, how would IBB not walk even taller in Nigerian politics?
Or is it Buba Marwa, who can boast of experience of governance and relative youth. He has served as Defence Attaché in Washington DC which means he must know a thing or two about negotiating presidential and reform space with the Americans, the IMF and the World Bank. As Chairman of DIC, he was not just selling DICON salt since the position provided any occupant with links to arms industries around the world.
Vice-President Atiku remains the candidate to beat in 2007. In fact, current efforts at neutralizing him may end in his magical ascendancy at the end of the day because those behind it are using military tactics against him. They may beg him again.
The scenario experts are working on the assumption that with Buhari’s emphasis on principles and integrity, he and Adamu Ciroma should be able to tango. And that IBB will be willing to make any sacrifice because he is already totally fulfilled, having brought OBJ to power in as a compensation for June 12. That is to say that without him acting in concert with northern military retires and the Abdulsalami government, OBJ could not have made it. Atiku already defers to Ciroma, which may not be unconnected with Ciroma’s categorical statement in 2002 that, like Shagari and Ekwueme in 1983, so would OBJ and Atiku be a pair in 2003. This must have translated to such an unforgettable political IOU Atiku pays by referring to him as a godfather. OBJ is expected to be the happiest person to be succeeded by a Ciroma if only because he has the systematic and personal capacity to absorb anti-Obasanjo sentiments in the post regime period.
But these are mere scenario building exercises, all of which could crumble. OBJ in particular could mess up a lot of things, though not if there is a solid ruling class consensus in favour of Ciroma. But he remains an enigma in all these. It is barely half a year to another transition politics and there is no presidential aspirant on the stomp yet. The President assures everyone now and then that he is not a candidate for 2007 but he never really allowed anyone to advance to be recognized. And everyone considers it a tactical error to cross his path. This is basically because he is reckoned with as having an armoured personality in these matters. The tank battle is elephantine because the armoured car is omni-directional in its firing. In a manner of speaking, it has no back, front or side ways restrictions. That’s why its arrival was a revolution in land warfare. Just as the arrival of President Obasanjo has marked a revolution in Nigerian politics in the capacity of one individual to fire at everyone and everything omni-directionally; from the legislature to his own party to any individuals who challenged him, to labour and to the people as a whole, if one takes his fuel price regime as an example. So, almost everyone has chosen to be obedient and ‘mature’ by going into what the late Chuba Okadigbo would call dynamic inactivity. So deep is their ‘slumber’ that since this year, Nigeria has been no more than Obasanjo! Obasanjo and Obasanjo in the way Chief Tom Ikimi verbalized the cumulation of cards for aspirant Obasanjo in the PDP Presidential Primary in 2003.
This would be the second time Adamu Ciroma would be the choice of a caucus for the presidency of Nigeria. In 1977 when the military’s transition programme gathered momentum, a caucus of activist intellectuals and politicians who had been meeting to screen for leadership in post military governance concluded that it had to be Adamu Ciroma. They gave many reasons for their choice but the main one then is that Adamu Ciroma comes from a small ethnic group. Sometimes back when I spoke with one of the intellectuals behind this at that time, he told me that the attraction in having a leader from such a small ethnic base was that he could never transform into a dictator. He would not because dictatorship is sustained by kinsmen in the military, police-both regular and the secret police, the bureaucracy, Foreign Service, academia, the civil society and business. His analysis is that a President from a small ethnic base can never find enough kinsmen to fill these places to do his arbitrary biddings in power. Unfortunately, Adamu Ciroma withdrew in the third round of the voting in the 1978 race, which had narrowed to him and Shagari then. Many people, again like T.Y.Danjuma, never forgave Ciroma for withdrawing. If Ciroma had been the President and concretized the strategy of zoning as a mode of power sharing which he and his core-group developed when he was NPN National Secretary in 1978, Nigeria might have gone beyond today’s ethnic acrimonies. There is no doubt that Ciroma will elevate Nigerian politics with high decency and a modernizing vision that we so much lack. But at 71, though physically fit and intellectually alert, can Ciroma push his luck in the cloak and dagger atmosphere of politics in Nigeria today?
