Nigeria’s Unsung Heroes - Part 4

Politics without opposition is like the human body without the nerve of the brains, the power provides the ammunition and the opposition make the assortments rationality.

Both the power and opposition, though, normally representative shades of rational politics are the working parts in machinery of representative and legitimate potentiality, one – an interlocutor and the other – a political imperative.

It is based on this universal understanding that a suppressing inputs of power without the damning prescriptions of the opposition in a political system makes a system trapped in carnage of iniquities and arbitrariness as an apolitical human fiasco reminiscent of dictatorship and dictatorial suffocations through the real power of kleptocracy. The history of Nigerian politics is a narration of continuity tragedy through opportunistic bereavement and engineering misrule of the power. The fourth republic is the engine room of a reshaping complex of the old concept of democracy with a new anguish of medieval brutality in power dissemination and the administration by kleptocratic barbarity.

Power has no limits and barriers, while public funds have limitless routes of disappearance – one voice is providing the vogue answers even without questions and no voice is asking why. But at this stage of show of infamy, few Nigerians amongst which is Alhaji Wada Nas had held a credential of glorious contributions. Alhaji Wada Nas’s political life started emerging on the National scene during the First Republic, like the average northerner who is a politician; Nas launched a successful lifespan of charisma and charm in a record of political derivable capabilities that kept the increasingly infractuous elite especially from South Pole guessing and hissing at the magic of his inclusiveness in political capacity building. His disarming mediation was a frantic search rooted in fashioning specific values as it relates justice and fairness. When he was later to support the ambition of the Igbo generation of politicians angling for a slot in the 2007 presidential elections, there was some a kind of tidal obstruction that left my people – the North in the same spot of the earlier posture of the South of late Alhaji Wada Nas.  A good friend of mine had quipped at the eventual holding of Nas that “Mamza, since you a close confidant of Alhaji Wada Nas, what is the explanation for this volte face?”  In the tripod stand of the political equation of Nigeria, Nas felt that the Igbo had been sidelined and hence must be a logical contender.  His beliefs was purely anchored on fairness and justice in an abnormal organ of fair-play, for participatory democracy is suppose to diffuse contentions based on regional or tribal confinements for a nationalistic symbol. Though harmful the school of thought believes that it would heal past wounds and present reconciliatory panacea.  I was to secure this position from the source and sources are customized explorers of troubling history.  Alhaji Wada Nas had the firepower of a damning strategic without a show of irredentism, once he is skillfully guided by his conscience he pursues his line of action without the fear of a political court – martial – transparently decisive and honestly confrontational – he had at least before his death nurtured the multiplying viciousness of the patriarch of persistent political correctness in building reputations of saying it when it is due.  Before then, Alhaji Wada Nas’s journey triumphs in politics range from a member of the House of Representative under the platform of the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU), former secretary of National Party of Nigeria (NPN), Kaduna State to Chairman, National Republican Convention (NRC), Kastina State during General Babangida’s transition programme and until his death was the President General of the People’s Salvation Party (PSP) – one of the parties registered before the 2003 elections.  By a natural cause he became the fearless political gladiator in the opposition against the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) – controlled central government under President Olusegun Obasanjo.  When the opposition under the banner of the Conference of Nigerian Political Parties (CNPP) is to organize a peaceful protest against the 2003 election fraud through mass action, Alhaji Wada Nas were amongst the few leaders of other parties apart from P.D.P. that went out to show his anger for the outlawing motives.  Contrary to false beliefs in some quarters the point has been made for the entire world to see the facing impossibilities as it relates to populist mandate.  Under the military regime of General Sani Abacha, Alhaji Wada Nas served the government as Minister of state for Education, Special Adviser on political matters to the Head of State and Special Duties Minister.  When other figures that appeared even in more prominent positions and told the entire world that the best thing that ever happen to Nigeria was Abacha even at the point his death (Abacha’s) made a u-turn with the changing dynamics of change inorder to win new favors, Alhaji Wada Nas lamed the vanities of the body and soul for the inspiring prestige of the mind and the spirit.  Great minds is product of a tenacious brief and precise emergency – this is the mind and spirit Alhaji Wada Nas upheld as General Abacha’s last man standing.  It is not that Alhaji Wada Nas was the oasis in the gaping cracks; Professor Sam Aluko and Alhaji Mohammed Kaloma Ali are also symbolic initiatives.

His first son, Aminu captured his father’s public glare correctly. Granting an interview with the Daily Independent of July, 29, 2005 when asked about what to remember of late Alhaji Wada Nas, said “we have indeed lost a man of people, very cooperative, honest, detribalized and progressive”. while written a tribute to mark his death entitled “Wada Nas: A man with a bold streak” LEADERSHIP, January, 23, 2005, I summarized the political life of this great Nigerian, as “Wada Nas was an embodiment of honesty and truth. He left behind the attributes of honesty, dedication, determination, loyalty and trust. He was a consummate politician with a magical charm, a writer with incisive torrents and an elder of insurmountable wisdom.

He was a journalist delight, a man of the people and the succor to the underprivileged”. Nothing is a summary of this great mind than this. If one is to follow Alhaji Wada Nas’s predictions and the alerting radical impetus the circumstances on ground had vindicated all that had revealed impromptu. Though out of the power contentions, Alhaji Wada Nas was a replacement to the ailing opposition power, thereby driving home a ray of hope for the already beleaguered citizenry incubating under collective inabilities of the political class. Among the continuum of the failed political elite, Alhaji Wada Nas had voluntarily volunteered to challenge the federal government’s earlier position of not appointing the Minister for Petroleum Resources, a contention the President had to live with one year after Nas’s death by soft landing on an appointment of a Minister of State with the President still the de facto Minister. Alhaji Wada Nas had during the Fourth Republic logically structured the concept of opposition as emergent transformations and purposeful importations without employ of hatred and greed. His continual revolutionary feel was a search quest for social justice and fairness. He mustered courage to determine a fate for the ‘national question’ within the armpits of national survival and progress while his convictions was an exemplar of uniqueness in trust, honesty and dedication. Alhaji Wada Nas died at the age of 66. Let us give this well-deserve politician his due, as one Nigerian, too many.

- Mamza a political columnist with the leadership Newspapers writes from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.
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