Rotimi Fasan
13 January 2009
column
President Yar'Adua's emissary to the military usurpers of Guinea, Ibrahim Babangida, came back from his mission with a message at variance with the position publicly championed by the President.
One would not know what exactly Babangida's brief to the upstarts in Guinea was but it couldn't and wouldn't be expected to be different from the position earlier advocated by Yar'Adua, which was that the new junta in Guinea should follow the path of responsibility and restore power to those constitutionally authorised to wield it - the elected officials.
But Babangida, himself a serial coupist and former head of a military regime who went by the oxymoronic title of military president, returned, we must assume, with better insight into the situation in Guinea and therefore an endorsement of the coup led by Moussa Dadis Camara, a captain in the Guinean army.
Camara and his men had seized power in the immediate aftermath of the death of Lansana Conte who died after twenty-four years of playing Russian roulette with Guinea following a coup he had led immediately after Ahmed Sekou Toure, Guinea's independence president died in 1984.
In the fifty years since it became an independent state Guinea had been ruled by two dictators whose tenures ended only when they died- in office. Camara's coup is a reprise of the Conte tactic.
Thus if Guineans now find their teeth on edge it is only because of the sour grapes eaten by their past rulers, especially Conte, widely praised by the coup-makers as the father of the nation in the few hours after the latest coup.
The coup was roundly condemned around the world and, perhaps, for this reason African leaders and indeed the African Union had no choice but to follow suit by suspending Guinea from its rank.
With the possible exception of Senegal's Abdoulahi Wade and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, the Arab irredentist who passes himself off, somehow, as an African nationalist, most African leaders have so far treated the Guinean coupist with cool reserve.
But President Yar'Adua has been direct, even scathing, in his condemnation of the coup. And his emissary to Guinea could, it would be expected, only have gone to Conakry with the President's message.
But Babangida has done a volte-face and Nigerians are at once surprised and upset. Their criticism of the former 'president' is understandably harsh. Yet, for me, such criticism is misdirected.
The person to blame in all this is President Yar'Adua once it has been established that he didn't send Babangida on a mission to find mitigating explanation for the coup in Guinea.
Babangida stands blameless because he has only acted in character as a former military head of state and leader of several coups who has the dubious distinction of managing an interminable transition that ended only when he was cornered and virtually chased out of office.
Yar'Adua might have been persuaded that Babangida's military credentials stand him in the best position to understand the psychology of Camara and his fellow soldiers but, I insist, he was the wrong choice in as much as it had, it would seem, not been made clear to him that he could only do the President's bidden, deliver his message and no more.
The practice of employing former leaders as emissaries and shuttle diplomats in troubled situations like the one that took Babangida to Guinea is not a means to provide international standing or extend political patronage to just anybody without regards to their records in office.
The one Nigerian leader who has functioned with any form of effectiveness in such capacity has been Olusegun Obasanjo whose choice rests on his role as a former military man who kept to his promise of handing over to an elected administration.
Despite his many shortcomings Obasanjo, in his about three decade's career of shuttle diplomacy, has always managed to deliver on his responsibilities in this regard.
Neither embarrassing himself nor his country. To extend such responsibility to Babangida simply because he was a former military ruler is to invite the kind of embarrassment that Yar'Adua must now suffer as a leader whose emissary is singing a tune different from the one he might have been sent to deliver.
While the AU was meeting in Abuja to consider what more to do to make the coupists in Conakry back down and return to their barracks if not prison, Yar'Adua would have been busy trying to explain the meaning of the discordant tunes coming from both him and his messenger to Guinea. T
his is the President's doing, he has brought it upon himself- brought home ant-infested faggot and, like that writer sagely warned, he must not mind the visit of lizards.
This is his handbag- walking stick or whatever and he must carry it. When next he has an important message to deliver to the rest of the world, he must be sure of who to send.
A coup is not the only much less the best solution to a country's problems. And as examples from Africa's many coups have shown they are mostly part of the problem.
After the initial euphoria and welcome of the coupists, mostly given to populist acts at that stage, they invariably go the way of those they replaced and end up creating more problems than they met.
That was what happened after Conte took over, manipulating elections and hounding opponents while promoting ethnic strife, and it is reasonable to assume that the same might happen should Camara be welcomed with open arms and given room to dig in till 2010 as he has proposed.
There is no guaranty that the handover date would be respected or that another adventurer in the polarised Guinean military wouldn't see Camara's example as worthy of emulation and plunge Guinea into further trouble.
Despite the attested excesses of the country's political elite and the system's seeming lack of self-correcting measures, the coup that brought Camara into office was not inevitable. An orderly retreat to the barracks should not be impossible.
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