WikiLeaks’ sobering realities

By Idowu Akinlotan 11/09/2011 00:00:00

• Ribadu

We may never fully understand the nihilistic spirit behind WikiLeaks’ unauthorised leakage of confidential United States diplomatic cables, nor even try to justify or defend it, but we have the whistle-blower website to thank for providing Nigerians an unflattering image of their leaders. For the past one week, WikiLeaks has helped us to an ample supply of stories profiling our leaders’ greed, follies, foibles and short-sightedness. If Africans were capable of blushing, everyone would be going around with a red face, given the saddening and humiliating details of what the whistle-blower site has published so far on Nigerian rulers. As it is, both physiologically and psychologically, Nigerians don’t blush, otherwise someone like Chief Olusegun Obasanjo would have been felled by his blushes on account of what WikiLeaks released on him.

It is not certain whether the site is done with Nigerian stories. However, what it has published so far on Nigeria can be easily classified into two categories: the greed and incompetence of Nigerian rulers; and their cheapness and loquacity.  After more than five decades of weak and most ineffective governments anywhere, African leaders have established beyond dispute that the widely held opinion of their ineptitude is neither an exaggeration nor racism. We always suspected that to keep Africa so underdeveloped and so poor, African leaders, of which Nigeria is an archetype, must require a weakness of mind incomparable to any other. WikiLeaks has confirmed our suspicion. It gives a portrait of weak and feckless leaders, some of them so vain as to be completely oblivious of the nuisance they constitute to our national self-esteem, but nearly all seeking to ingratiate themselves with white men or their black representatives.

Many top public and private officials mentioned in the leaked cables are likely to deny all or part of the allegations of their complicity in the humbling of Nigeria. In some instances, the allegations are so gross as to draw natural scepticism, if not of the magnitude of the crime or the indiscretion of their prattle, then at least of doubts as to whether they in fact ever happened. When the leaked cables, for instance, indicated that about $57 million was used to procure Yar’Adua’s victory from a mercantilist Supreme Court, we must wonder whether those allegedly bought by such stupendous sums – and they were said to include military officers – would not be flustered by the troubles of hiding those sums. This is in view of the fact that the same leaked cables affirmed with literary flourish and enthusiasm that the Chief Justice of Nigeria at the time, Idris Kutigi, had scorned three attempts to compromise him with N600 million over the Atiku Abubakar case.

But when WikiLeaks alleged that a former First Lady and other top politicians and military chiefs conspired to steal an estimated 91 million barrels of crude oil annually between 2004 and 2009, the story seems wholly believable, especially when we remember the unsuccessful campaign by civil society groups to force a proper auditing of the NNPC. Given the almost Bacchanalian fervour with which government officials and their criminal agents feather their nests, no Nigerian will give them the benefit of the doubt in the face of exaggerated allegations by US diplomats, authors of the famous cables. There is also the story of top traditional rulers from the North who seemed to have successfully persuaded the secret service and law enforcement authorities to placate northern terror suspects. Even if this was an exaggeration, it explains why many of us were puzzled that it took the UN House bombing to ginger the government into a definitive action, not only in terms of arrests, but also in the use of clearer and more forceful official language in condemning terrorism and promising action.

Probably one of the most delectable stories to come from WikiLeaks is Mallam Nuhu Ribadu’s grandiose description of the Obasanjo government as cleverly corrupt. He seldom offered proof for his assertions, but who cares? In the alleged interaction with the American ambassador at the time, Ribadu, as hyperbolic as ever, was quoted as saying that the Obasanjo government was comparatively more corrupt than the late Gen Sani Abacha’s military government, which many of us thought to be unmatched both in the brazenness and magnitude of its stealing from the public treasury. The cables offered other instances of ingenious filching under Obasanjo, and of his anti-democratic predilections, with some of the diplomatic cables couched in sarcastic tones. Of all Nigeria’s former rulers, the cables gave the impression Obasanjo was the most daring and retrogressive, and Yar’Adua the most languid and pitiless. We don’t know whether the rustic general will deign to answer. In any case, what is there to defend? If neither the cables nor Ribadu offered proof of Obasanjo’s villainy, it is enough that majority of Nigerians, including his very few friends and innumerable enemies, are satisfied that he embodies all that is impure about Nigeria.

As I said, much more than the issue of corruption and ineptitude, the most unflattering portrait the cables give us of Nigerian rulers is their loquacity, their befuddling eagerness to play the house negro, their irritating genuflection before whites, their irrecoverable native intelligence lost when they suffered colonialism, and their inferiority complex. Given the volubility of virtually all those interviewed by the American diplomats, among whom were military chiefs, top security officials, top politicians, traditional leaders and the intelligentsia, neither the US nor Europe needed to spend huge sums on the construction of a spy infrastructure in Nigeria. It is sometimes necessary to loosen a man’s tongue with wine or women; it takes nothing dear or exotic to loosen the tongues of the animated Nigerian elite. If they were not invited by embassy officials, an act they had no courage or desire to decline, they invited themselves into the presence of Western diplomats, for they coveted diplomatic interactions and the inevitable cocktails that follow.

The hollowness manifests clearly in the top echelons of government. It was, for instance, said of the Obasanjo administration that all it took for a Nigerian investor to get an audience with him was to look for a straggling white man, or failing that, a Chinese or Indian, to accompany the local group. The stories are not apocryphal, for apart from the many published photographs to prove the point, he drove Nigerian embassy officials in the US up the wall with his frequent, needless and unwelcomed visits. Other rulers too, like Yar’Adua and President Goodluck Jonathan, never felt fulfilled until they received invitation to the White House. In a classic portrayal of our leader’s low self-esteem, Yar’Adua was reported to have described his visit to the White House as his most memorable day, and a fulfilment of his dream.

It seems that before WikiLeaks is done, no fake or true Nigerian icon would be left unscathed. Without prejudice to what denials or rebuttal they may come up with, see what mess the cables are making of Nasir el’Rufai, who while in office was sometimes deliberately opaque or mendacious, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the woman with the cherubic face and inscrutable expression, and a host of others, including at least one Chief of Army Staff. The country despairs for lack of a courageous, intelligent and confident Nigerian leader, for they are all driven, sometimes by the adversity of their poor backgrounds and sometimes by their natural fecklessness, into offering themselves as willing tools in the hands of foreigners or as collaborators in the humiliation of our people. We are yet to live down the shame of slavery and colonialism; now we must add the burden of garrulous state officials who think it dishonourable to keep state secrets, or who consider it even noble to reveal them unsolicited to the first American or European they come across.