Neither Umaru the president nor his nemesis and namesake Umar the terrorist can salvage Nigeria's reputation, sighs Gamal Nkrumah Nigeria is in the news. Alas, it's as usual unfavourable news. This time round, the news is about PENT, or pentaerythritol, a high explosive substance used by an innocent looking, strikingly handsome young Nigerian, the very personification of his people's quandary. Umar Farouk Abdel-Muttaleb was charged with planning to detonate the explosive substance in a classic suicide bombing during a Detroit- bound flight from Amsterdam's Schipol Airport, the Netherlands. The privileged callow youth was a jetsetter of sorts, but like the politicians running his country -- into the ground, we might add -- he never achieved what he set out to do. He studied in England, but visited Egypt, Dubai and more ominously Yemen -- where apparently he acquired PENT and where he presumably touched base with Al-Qaeda. PENT, by the way, was used by a would-be assassin who attempted to do away with Saudi Arabia's anti-terrorism chief Prince Mohamed bin Nayef. Nigerian President Umaru Musa Yar'Ardua, who has been hospitalised in Saudi Arabia for the past six weeks suffering from pericarditis, was unable to do anything worthwhile concerning the notorious Nigerian 23-year-old banker's son who attempted to blow up the Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day. Yar'Ardua was a compromise candidate at the April 2007 presidential election. The previous president Olusegun Obasanjo, a staunch Christian, from the southwestern part of the country, and an ethnic Yoruba deliberately favoured a Muslim northerner as presidential candidate to placate the Muslim majority of the country. Abdel-Muttaleb's dubious deed could not have come at a worse time for Nigeria. It, nevertheless, diverts attention from the political pickle that Nigeria finds itself in. Not only have militant Islamists gained a foothold in this monolithic, multi-religious and deeply troubled African nation, but also Nigeria's Civil Aviation Authority is now in the dock. But that is the least of the country's myriad problems. Another preeminent Nigerian on trial, so to speak, is none other than Nigerian President Yar'Ardua himself. The Nigerian National Assembly resumes this week and pressure is building for the president to step down on grounds of poor health. Three different influential civil society groups have filed cases against President Yar'Ardua. The Nigerian Bar Association demanded that the Federal High Court force the president to hand over power to his deputy, effectively asking him to resign. The Human Rights Writers' Association urged the judiciary to pronounce decisions taken by the cabinet in the president's absence annulled. And to top it all off, the opposition Action Congress Party demanded that the government provide "concrete evidence" of Yar'Ardua's competence. He was absent at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in September last year, a faux pas for Africa's most populous country. No country as politically weighty and influential as Nigeria, Africa's sleeping giant, could conceivably be governed by an president, suffering from a critical heart condition, from his deathbed, God forbid, in a Jeddah clinical. To ward off the evil eye, in a recent interview elaborating on his seven-point agenda to pull the country out of its quagmire, Yar'Ardua told his admiring interview that he was "looking trim. No Nigerian president could look chubby in the face of the enormous challenges before the nation." True, the president has always operated mainly in the shadows, Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan was in the spotlight. He stands a good chance of becoming the next Nigerian president if Yar'Ardua steps down. The ruling People's Democratic Party can hardly have been surprised by the onslaught on the ailing president. It remains unclear how much control Jonathan is exerting over the ruling party. So is Jonathan the next big sensation to hit Nigeria? The gigantic problem is that no matter how much one does gussy it up, Nigeria continues to swag as West Africa's messy muddle. Jonathan is not expected to bring Nigerian diplomacy back from the dead. The ruling People's Democratic Party won the 1999, 2003 and 2007 presidential elections. It is a centrist party that is in a particularly powerful political position. The central drama is not between southerners and northerners, not between Christians and Muslims. It is the battle between the haves and the have-nots. Economic mismanagement, especially during the era of the military strongmen and juntas who held sway in the sprawling country, engendered an ever-widening gap between expectations and any real likelihood of economic wellbeing for the teeming masses. It is hard to gauge Jonathan's popularity in a country as vast as Nigeria. Yet this uncertainty about Jonathan's chances of success is more because the challenges that confront Nigeria are extremely difficult. In much the same vein, it is not exactly clear how many northern Nigerian Muslims are sympathetic to the indisposed president's predicament. The president's demise will be interpreted as an additional postscript to an era of political skullduggery in Africa's most complex political entity. The practical effect is to give Jonathan a free hand for almost as long as he wants. Yar'Ardua is paying the price of his poor health. Mayhem, death and destruction are turning Jonathan's birthplace into a political booby trap. The southeastern corner of Nigeria, the Niger Delta, is the country's economic powerhouse, the goose that lays the country's golden eggs. Yet, the people of the region are among the poorest in the country and have not benefited from the oil wealth of their conflict-torn corner of the country. Yar'Ardua's predominantly Muslim north fares no better. It is poor and its poverty is on a much larger scale, partly because the northern expanses of Nigeria are relatively resource-poor. It is precisely because of the demographic realities of the country -- the fact that a majority of Nigeria's 160 million people reside in the northern two-thirds of the country -- that political power has traditionally been held, or usurped by northern Muslim political bigwigs. The reluctance to lead, coupled with the inability to engage with his constituency, has been the real disappointment of Yar'Ardua's troubled presidency. There were many missed opportunities in Yar'Ardua's two years in power. He chose not to exercise the kind of strong leadership the military rulers of the country once exercised with impunity. To run a country so polarised to its roots as Nigeria is a Herculean task. Still, Yar'Ardua not only may well survive this imminent disaster, he may well demonstrate that he had found his voice as the indisputable leader of Nigeria -- pending of course, his full and speedy recovery. His information minister, Dora Akanyili, announced that the bed-ridden president is capable of "discharging his functions". And Jonathan disclosed that he would return soon with "renewed vigour and vitality". Most Nigerian politicians favour Vice- President Jonathan, who hails from the oil producing southern Bayelsa State, to be the first Nigerian president to originate from the oil- producing Niger Delta. Indeed, Jonathan was a governor of the oil-rich state before he assumed the office of Nigerian vice-president. Bayelsa lies in the heart of an area long embroiled in civil war and whose disgruntled citizens are fed up with being disfranchised and politically marginalised even though they produce most of the country's wealth. Indigenous activists are facing years in jail as human rights campaigners and environmentalists take the issue not only to the Nigerian capital Abuja, but around the globe. Many, however, have taken justice into their own hands, taking up arms against oil multinationals. The ferocity with which the indigenous people of states such as Bayelsa have made their case has astonished the Nigerian authorities and outsiders alike. No West African whistleblower has come close to ascertaining Nigeria's imprint on history. Nigeria is a country at the crossroads. It also straddles both Muslim Africa, traditional religious and Christian Africa. The formidable capacity of Nigerian leaders for ignoring international opinion is nothing new. But in the mysterious case of Umar Farouk Abdel-Mutallab, they face only limited external criticism. Nigeria, like the Netherlands, has pledged to tighten security checks at the country's main international airports -- Lagos, Kano, Abuja and Port Harcourt. It is still uncertain how these security checks would be applied, or how long such draconian measures would last. Few, however, seriously expect a noticeably different travel experience for passengers departing Nigerian airports. In any case, no one breezes through departure formalities when flying out of Lagos, with the notable exception of VIPs, including influential bankers' sons.
