Should we hang Abba Kyari on the crucifix or beatify him?
Last week, conversations on the kind of man and the type of life lived by Malam Abba Kyari, late Chief of Staff to President Muhammadu Buhari – especially in the last five years or so of his life – almost deposed the narratives of the tragic coronavirus war Nigerians are fighting. Lest I forget, I apologize for my last week err of affixing 82 years as the late CoS’ years on earth, instead of 67.
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As Kyari was shrouded in shawls of panegyrics by those who encountered him, those who saw him as a villain didn’t allow themselves to be outmaneuvered. While a few who whitewashed his memory had a field day, the late CoS was literally mauled by the social media mob. A few features that both those who sought to beatify him and the gang that saw him as the locus of the perceived stagnation of the Buhari presidency, and as such Nigeria, identified these as his strongest points: his wit, brilliance, controversial disdain for overtness, even when he was a journalist/writer, the illness that was his life, (before the COVID-19) an alleged stubborn stickling for what he believed in, no matter whose ox was gored and, to one or two people who wrote about him, his lacerating tongue.
As Kyari was buried in this expansive apparel of elegies, I wondered how those elegies he was decorated with bore striking similarity with that of French Enlightenment writer, philosopher and historian famous for his wit called François-Marie Arouet, otherwise known as Voltaire. Stubborn, brilliant and iconoclastic like Kyari whose brilliance reportedly shone while carrying the pall of ill-health before he contracted the coronavirus that eventually took him to the graveyard, Voltaire also lived a life of illness. While Kyari’s was diabetic, this French philosopher battled chronic dyspepsia, even from infancy and was a constant figure at the infirmary for catarrhal bronchitis, deafness, aphonia and febrile attacks. On the illness-strewn life he lived, Voltaire once said of life, “that long disease, my life” and throwing his usual wit on his death bed when priests sought to get him to “renounce Satan,” having been engaged in a long-drawn battle with the Roman Catholic Church, he had said, “Now is not the time for making new enemies.”
Unfortunately for the beatify-Kyari gang, their torrents of elegies, to many Nigerians, got easily classified as the usual African white-washing of the dead. When Bola Ahmed Tinubu – who many knew was embroiled in unspoken power fisticuffs with the late Kyari for the control of the heart of the Villa – engaged in the ramp-up of the narrative by white-washing the corpse of the late Chief of Staff, he completed the beatification circus as the usual African lip-service to the dead. Personally, I have always differed from traditional African concept of “not speaking ill of the dead.” Yes, Africa’s defence is that the dead cannot defend themselves but I submit that this is chief reason why despots, evil-doers and Africa’s colony of evil doers didn’t think twice as their malfeasances festered. Once they escaped planet earth, their evil deeds would be interred with their bones, they reason. Perhaps, if we begin to turn the narrative by speaking ill of the dead, it will be wake-up call on the living to leave imprints of good deeds at their departure?
Even when Beatify-Kyari gang tried to drape his effigy in the satin of “a modest man”, they slid into equivocation. What then was the real extent of his power in office? Kyari had no hand in the rife MTN graft story; he was a detribalized Nigerian who valued the brain ahead of clan; his brilliance was such that no minister or aide to Buhari possessed his mental acuity, were the Kyari refrain. None of them saw the counterfactuals in a modest presidential aide who held tightly to the levers of power as they claimed he did and on whose table the buck did a personal advertisement as the place where it stops, rather than his master’s. Without dressing him in any robe of satin, Nigerians know that Kyari was hyper powerful. A Kyari who had a spat in the full glare of the klieg with erstwhile Head of Service, Winifred Oyo-Ita, which marked her eventual departure from office and a suborning by the Almighty EFCC, cannot but be powerful. And the source of his awesome powers is so evident that even the blind could see it.
Try as the presidential media apparatchik have done in the last five years to make Buhari wear similar, even if not higher, mental cap with erstwhile holders of Nigeria’s presidential office, Nigerians know that Buhari stands on his own as the most vacant leader in Nigeria’s history. Not because his school certificate is yet contentious or that he waffles in mental deliveries that require him to speak extempore, there doesn’t seem to be anything mentally exhilarating, sparkling or challenging about the president. And it is not strictly about academic certificate. The only formal certificate known with Olusegun Obasanjo (before his theological certificates), aside the military qualifications, was a school certificate. He developed himself and could spar mentally with a professor. From the oratorical Tafawa Balewa, Yakubu Gowon, eclectic Murtala Muhammed, down to Sani Abacha, Abdulsalami Abubakar, Umar Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan, no Nigerian leader has exhibited this crass crossroads with mental matters as President Buhari.
The history of such dilemma of the mind dates back to his time as military Head of State. I have searched the archives for off-the-cuff nuggets that Buhari could be remembered by in his 20-month reign and couldn’t find any. Those who knew have also attributed the only glow in the less-than- sparkling governance of that era to his Chief of Staff, Tunde Idiagbon. It will seem that the kind of Buhari would always attract a powerful Man Friday assistant. That was why Idiagbon and Kyari were awfully powerful and why anyone who takes over from the late Chief of Staff cannot but be powerful. Nature abhors a vacuum.
From 1999, except during Jonathan’s second term, I am not aware of any Chief of Staff to the President with reputedly awesome powers attributed to Kyari. General Abdullahi Mohammed, Obasanjo’s and Yar’Adua’s Chief of Staff, was almost unknown. Jonathan’s Mike Oghiadomhe was same and it was only during the illness of Yar’Adua that a cabal came to the fore. Why a cabal and a powerful Chief of Staff narrative became the singsong during Buhari’s era is unambiguously because the man called the C-in-C ostensibly lacks grips and grits.
Nigerians are beginning to violate the unwritten African code of beatification of the dead which dictates that even when they wore clothes stained with crimson, departed persons considered evil doers should be shrouded in wrappers as white as snow and made not to receive cudgels on account of their bequeathals. For this set of people, their bile wasn’t strictly directed at the person of Kyari. And their logic for excoriating the departed Chief of Staff is unassailable. If Kyari was as powerful as reputed to be and which was manifestly so, with a President adjudged to be a titular and who openly literally announced you as his alter ego and his Mr. Be-it-all, you deserved expletives for the stagnation of Nigeria. Under Kyari’s watch, the Nigerian government ran one of the most insensitive and insensate governments ever, with a Northernization policy that was never heard of since the days of Murtala Mohammed. The only passport that entitled you to top security, intelligence positions was your ethnicity. If Kyari was the power alter ego that he was said to be, it would be wrong to divorce him from all the legion of ills and mis-governance of the Buhari government in the last five years.
Yes, on a personal level, Kyari could have been the avuncular neighbor next door they said he was. The day someone told me how friendly and sympathetic Sani Abacha was, especially as a squash player in Ibadan during his days as the GOC, I marveled. On the public level, however, Kyari could not have been the good administrator they claimed he was. The ills of the government he literally ran were too legion for that level of unwarranted beatification. Granted, Nigeria is too complex for anyone to make a clean job of its governance, the Buhari government has comparatively misbehaved in the annals of governance, so much that it would be criminal to allow those who control or controlled its critical levers to be conferred with unmerited sainthood.
Whether the widespread flaunt of bile by those who crucify Kyari at his departure was appropriate only in his lifetime and not at his death is a different ball game entirely. That conversation should continue as a form of a postmortem on the Abba Kyari years, so as to deepen the narrative of the public space. Again, as the cliché goes, may Kyari’s soul rest in peace. Same cliché we may be lucky to be greeted with at our individual departure from this mortal world. That is however the prerogative of the Creator.
