Lagos — For quite a while since our mild-mannered President, Umaru Yar Adua took ill and was evacuated to Saudi Arabia in November 2009 and the consequent pussy-footing of the traditional sinister cabal of king-makers terrified at the stark reality and prospects of a Niger Delta chap, Good luck Jonathan, becoming king by design or default, you had marveled at the prevalent elite belief in the invulnerability of the geographical space called Nigeria.

This belief-system was given ample vent during the dark days of military rule by no other than Ibrahim Babangida (President from 1985-1993), who reportedly wondered why Nigeria's economy had not since collapsed but was still ticking on, despite what the likes of IBB, his predecessors and successors, may have done to cripple the country in their official capacities.

Many had interpreted IBB's reported remarks as a sign of his robust belief and confidence in the Nigerian - his rugged resilience, his resourcefulness and never-say-die mentality and spirit. Maybe. But this reading is valid only on the personal, individual level. Nigerians are truly all that people say about them, and more. The purveyors of the invulnerability doctrine of Nigeria will also point at her human and natural endowments and resources that they claim ensure Nigeria's perpetual relevance in continental and global affairs.

The question is: Is Nigeria really invulnerable? 'Too big to fail' and too strategically important that she could not be ignored by the rest of the relevant world?

These are questions that the nation's rulers and their ideologues appear not to have given much thought, considering the unfolding events in Abuja where a simple matter like interpreting the 1999 Constitution in ways that would not create a power vacuum, has now been made complex by self-serving hirelings of the state, taking orders or issuing them, to prevent a straight-forward hand-over of executive powers from the President to his Vice.

And they call these sundry acts 'politics' when they are merely acts that undermine the peace and stability of the nation and place everyone in the geo-political region in danger.

The nation's Assemblymen simply have gone under-ground, running around in circles and hiding under the fig-leaf of 'constitutionalism' when, in fact, as many believe, they are merely jostling to see who gets what or not, in a subsequent Goodluck Jonathan administration. This is as they are expected to do, being largely rigged into power.

It was not until former President Olusegun Obasanjo came out in his unique and inimitable way to bell the cat of the imperative of transferring power to his Vice, that most Nigerians, who had merely contented themselves with mere preachments concerning what the laws say or do not say about presidential absence or incapacitation to rule, came out to make pious noises. Except for some civil society types like Balarabe Musa, Wole Soyinka (Ikemba Nnewi, Emeka Ojukwu, lent his name to the project) who marched to force the hands of federal authorities to resolve the power vacuum, no notable former leader said a word concerning the Kafkaesque anomaly of a 'missing' leader that only a few can say anything about. And who, though invincible, still rules through telepathic communication to his acolytes in Abuja.

If these former presidents and such caliber of statesmen and women had had any atom of patriotism in their hearts, they would have spoken up early enough. They would have set the terms and tone of the discourse concerning Yar 'Adua's ill-health and a safe transfer of power and authority to Goodluck Jonathan as Acting President. But they had sat back in splendid detachment and haughty isolation and watched as some irredentist power hawks attempted to re-write the rules of governance and run the nation by proxy committees (the kitchen cabinet, including allegedly, Turai Yar 'Adua)

This system of 'rule by committees' is reminiscent of practices associated with extreme ideologies like fascism, communism or the old-fashioned Africa's rule by impunity.

But, rather than look at the national security implication of hiding behind President Yar 'Adua to exercise power by a group of hired hands of state, everyone has been having a field day abusing Gen. Obasanjo!

What an irony! And on what grounds do his traducers abuse OBJ?

They say he is an opportunist who never won power on merit, but on contingency basis and through sheer 'luck' of being at the right place at the right time.

They say OBJ is an ingrate who customarily pays back evil for good done to him. They call him a cunning betrayer who would drop any person once it is expedient and is capable of causing maximum harm to those who believe in him. OBJ's critics from the North particularly and among his party, PDP, stressed the point that it was the 'North' who gave him power on the occasions he had ruled - as though 'power' was theirs to give to whomever they chose! Ironically, these wooly-headed critics of OBJ today accuse him of foisting Yar 'Adua on the PDP, the nation and their all-powerful Arewa Club!

The most bizarre charge against OBJ is that he single-handedly imposed Umaru Yar 'Adua on Nigeria, knowing full well that he would expire in office and that power would then devolve back to Jonathan (and the South) who would now be controlled by an OBJ that had carefully picked the Bayelsa politician to be VP to Yar 'Adua. What illogic! Is OBJ God? Does he give and withhold life? Is OBJ now a necromancer? This is insane and to believe in this bizarre charge against OBJ, one would have to believe that OBJ has supernatural powers that could hypnotize all Nigerians to do his bidding, including such famed king-makers as the Arewa fraternity!

And we ask: If Yar 'Adua is not compelled by the constitution to hand over to his VP, why was he obliged to accept OBJ's beckoning to be President? And where were all the present-day critics of OBJ when a suspect horse was being sold to the Nigerian public? What was (were) ACF, PDP interests in going along with OBJ when he was planning all this iniquity against a hapless Nigerian nation?

They always claim that they (the North) made OBJ president. They claim that they sprang him from life-imprisonment, pardoned him, and persuaded Nigerians that he was the right man for the occasion. What did those who brought about OBJ's second coming in 1999 aim to achieve, despite Yoruba opposition? It appears today that the king-making cabal only needed an OBJ to hold forth while they regrouped and worked out new strategies to acquire and retain power in the North!

But did all these statesmen crawling out of the wood works today reckon with OBJ's own thoughts, his likes, dislikes, and political preferences? Did they believe that, as he did during the civil war, that OBJ would repeat a post-Murtala Mohammed stunt of handing over to the designate of his so-called slave masters, in 2007? And if OBJ is really as mischievous, Machiavellian, opportunistic and imbued with anti-national feelings, why is it that whenever the traditional ruling elite mess up themselves and the polity, they would invariably run to OBJ to bail them out, and buy time?

As Machiavelli famously pointed out in his The Prince, history shows that since most people want to be deceived, there are those who are willing to be deceive them. Why do Nigerians who want to deceived blame OBJ by obliging them, if at all?

The question now is: Should those willing to be deceived blame those who actually deceive them? Who is most at fault?

So much for the importance of real mavericks like OBJ, in environments of dysfunctional politics.

Assuming, for the sake of argument that OBJ pre-positioned Yar 'Adua and Jonathan with the aim of claiming through the back-door what was denied him by the abortion of his third term gambit, what were other members of the ruling class doing at this time? Why did they go along? Why did no one blow the whistle, especially from Yar' Adua's power base in the North?

Too Big To Fail!

Is Nigeria too bid to fail? To explore this dubious hypothesis one would quote from the recent take on the issue by former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. Princeton N. Lyman and Adjunct Senior fellow for African Policy Studies, Council on Foreign Relations, who has his doubts.

As Mr. Lyman sees the matter, though Nigeria has all it takes to take its citizens and nation to great heights, the fact is that the leadership is doing none of that. "Among much elite today," Lyman wrote, "I have the feeling that there is the belief that Nigeria is too big to fail, too important to be ignored, and that Nigerians can go on ignoring some of the most fundamental challenges they have..." These challenges include disgraceful lack of infrastructure, the growing problems of unemployment, the failure to deal with the underlying problems in the Niger Delta, the failure to consolidate democracy..." Does it mean anything that one in five Africans is a Nigerian? Are all the potentials of the nation being tapped? Does it matter that Nigeria produces oil which the West needs?

"The answer is no". And one agrees. "Nigeria is today NOT making a major impact on its region or the African Union or on the big problems of Africa that it was making before."

Nigerian leadership has been busy in the last few decades "de-industrializing" their nation and become an import-export economy relying on the rent from oil. Nigeria is already irrelevant to the rest of the world, Lyman argues.

He spoke at the Achebe Foundation Colloquium on Nigeria Election last December. With no election power, 'unbelievable' level of corruption according to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the sad conclusion is that Nigeria is on the way to becoming a failed state.

But our starry-eyed and deceitful elite and their apologists would insist otherwise and brand critics of the status quo as unpatriotic citizens.

As Ambassador Lyman and a former British High Commissioner had observed at different times and for a, the tragedy of Africa's leadership corruption is not so much that they steal public funds but unlike their South East Asian counterparts like South Korea, Indonesia, etc, the elite (Generals and all) ensure that the contracts for which they had collected 10-20 per cent of costs up front are good projects that would help turn their economies around for the better, and are executed.

What has OBJ got to do with this habit of thieves not to respect their unwritten codes and conventions? Rather than applaud OBJ's brutal candor, Nigerians are being deceived into believing that OBJ is the problem instead of a sinister cabal hiding behind the illusion of invulnerability to hijack power that belongs to all Nigerians. This is all very amazing, you thought.