Soludo-Yar’Adua love letters

By Nosa Osaigbovo

Many Nigerians know that Professor Chukwuma Soludo was a star student, but he has never, to the best of my knowledge, given the impression that he is a breed apart because of his capacious intellect. He knows that brains are not hawked and cannot be bought. Brains are gift-wrapped by nature. Truly very intelligent people are not proud, as a duck does not flutter its wings in self-salute after gliding on water. A duck’s superb swimming skill is inborn and not imbibed.

Genius is not limited to having a good memory. Indeed, raw regurgitation—or what someone has nicely termed total recall—is inferior to mediocre analytical and number crunching ability. One Indian is said to have memorised the entire Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, but he is not a very intelligent man if his mental equilibrium is violently shaken by elementary equation.

And as people like Professor Soludo should know, genius comes in different forms. There are luminaries outside the lecture room. A carpenter who produces woody wonders, that achieves stunning symmetry with bits of wood, that makes the bits of wood converse charmingly, is a genius. The French are likely to value a creative chef more than a consummate chemist.

In Nigeria, illiterate farmers feed the legends of learning. The farmers have the mark of genius.

Professor Soludo tried to show that he has brains and balls almost in equal measure by announcing a major monetary policy without first getting the approval of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. Or so the president claimed. Professor Soludo is lucky that this is the 21st century and not the 11th century and that President Yar’Adua is not like Geoffrey of Anjou.

The Christian Association of Nigerian (CAN) recently elected a new national leader. They did not seek the permission of the Vatican or Lambeth Palace before electing their leader. A similar vote by the clergymen of Seez a millennium earlier cost them their balls. The clergymen held an election for a new bishop following a vacancy. The election was free and fair.

Geoffrey, who was a ruler and not a religious leader, was livid that the clergymen of Seez had dared to sneeze without first getting his permission. He sent men to castrate all the clergymen and the man they had elected their bishop.

The April general election in Nigeria was not as free and fair as the one held at Seez or the CAN vote.

It is possible that Professor Soludo does not recognise Yar’Adua as the president of Nigeria. Nigeria, he may believe, does not have a legitimate president. The April elections, after all, were said to have been brazenly manipulated in favour of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), on which ticket Yar’Adua ran for office.

The April elections were like the ones held in the United Kingdom in August 1852: ‘A fresh election is proceeded with, and here a scene of bribery, corruption, violence, drunkenness and murder ensures, unparalleled since the times when old Tory monopoly reigned supreme before. We actually hear of soldiers with loaded guns, and bayonets fixed, taking Liberal electors by force, dragging them under the landlords’ eyes to vote against their consciences, and those soldiers shooting, with deliberate aim, the people who dared to sympathise with the captive electors.’

The incidents described above took place in Ireland. But the situation was not very different in England: ‘In England they have employed their police to break the stalls of those opposed to them; they have sent their organised gangs and midnight ruffians prowling through streets to intercept and intimidate Liberal electors...they have showered the gold of corruption, as at Derby.’

— from Surveys From Exile by Karl Marx. The article was originally published in the New York Daily Tribune of 4 September, 1852.

In one contest, Ernest Jones, Chartist and author, won 20,000 votes but Sir Charles Woods, who got only 500 votes, was declared the winner of the election.

Professor Soludo was given the job of Central Bank governor by then-president Olusegun Obasanjo. Chief Obasanjo as president held the Nigerian people in contempt. Some people, like the grovelling Bode George, called him baba and he began to see himself as a patriarch and Nigerians as children to be controlled and not consulted. He took important decisions without asking the views of his deputy, even before their disgraceful but revealing name-calling. Both men said venality, even villainy, was in vogue in the Villa.

Could Professor Soludo’s unilateralism with regard to the re-denomination of the naira have been influenced by Obasanjo’s decision-making by menace and diktat?

Brigadier (as he then was) Muhammadu Buhari as a General Officer Commanding a division of the Nigerian Army sent soldiers to engage foreign invaders without seeking and getting the permission of the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He expected to be celebrated but he was censured by the Shehu Shagari government.

Buhari did not apologise for his unilateralism, indeed contempt, for the commander-in-chief. He boasted that he gave the invaders ‘a bloody nose.’ Alhaji Shagari proved an even weaker opponent than the invaders. Buhari, with the help of treasonous military officers, scored a knockout against Alhaji Shagari and he became head of state.

The suggestion that Professor Soludo’s now scuttled monetary policy was an attempt by him to snatch the reins of executive office from President Yar’Adua is utter nonsense. Yar’Adua may have graduated—there are allegations that his electoral grades were inflated by the Independent National Electoral Commission— from governorship to the presidency. But Professor Soludo, someone has argued, was Yar’Adua’s superior when he was the governor of Katsina State. A Central Bank governor controls more money than state governors.

Professor Soludo has written President Yar’Adua a letter of abject surrender. It was released to the press as a statement. ‘The Board of the CBN,’ Professor Soludo wrote, ‘recognises and reaffirms Mr. [sic] President’s approving authority in matters relating to the denomination, forms and design of our national currency... The CBN is committed and ready to do all that is within its mandate and powers to accelerate Mr. [sic] President’s agenda for a stronger Nigerian economy.’

The CBN governor’s letter sounds as apologetic as the love letter written by Wallis Simpson to Edward VIII, 14 months before the king gave up his throne to marry her: ‘It makes me quite unhappy to think how neglectful I have been as usual about writing.’
Professor Soludo had been neglectful by not writing to the president to seek approval for his naira re-denomination policy.

President Yar’Adua’s response was warm and forgiving, a true love letter. After all, ‘love means never having to say you are sorry,’ according to Oliver Barrett in Erich Segal’s Love Story. The president wrote: ‘Under Soludo’s leadership, the CBN will continue to make immense and significant contributions to government’s efforts to accelerate the pace of economic development in Nigeria.’

Edward VIII in his abdication speech said ‘...I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love...’

President Yar’Adua says he needs the ‘help and support’ of Professor Soludo to succeed in reviving the economy. So Professor Soludo will not have to do penance like ‘Fulk the Black’, the father of Geoffrey of Anjou, who walked to Jerusalem and back three times, a journey of thousands of kilometres. And the penitent weighed himself down with shackling irons, in imitation of Jesus who was forced to carry a cross. Professor Soludo and the president have settled their lover’s tiff.

Meanwhile, the economy is weighed down by corruption, blackouts and unnecessary imports, among other things.