by Akin Osuntokun

The return of Gusau to the government of President Goodluck Jonathan as minister (of defence?) is pregnant with meanings. In the ensuing months of a testy political season fraught with unrelieved Northern animosity against his candidacy, President Jonathan is going to require all the bridges he can rig to connect and may be attenuate this palpable hostility.

My generation was weaned on the literary staple diet of James Hadley Chase novels. I could not imagine a better pacifier than to be left alone, riveted and abandoned to the latest copy from the stable of the master story teller. From Al Barney, the gluttonous bard, of ‘an ear to the ground’ fame to Poke Toholo, the one-man extortionist-executioner gang, he of ‘the want to stay alive?-formula for fear’ legend, every copy was worth its weight in gold.

In the Hadley Chase universe, no character was more idolised and romanticised than superman Mark Girland, the glamorous, inordinately adventurous Casanova whose exploits and escapades was the stuff of living the charmed life, always a step ahead of death and at the nick of time. He was American espionage personified. At the climax stage of his espionage missions was the inevitable encounter with his Russian alter ego, big blonde Malik.

What Girland was to the imagination of Hadley Chase; James Bond was to the vision of Albert Broccoli, the producer of the James Bond thriller movie series. And it was from one of the series ‘the spy who loved me’ that we adapted the title of today’s column. Growing up and completely mesmerised by this fantasy world, I could think of no better career choice than to be recruited as a CIA field agent; to be at the centre of the combustible mix of high wire political intrigues and the wild life of masculine valour, choice wine and choicest of women. And have my invincibility extra terrestrially assured; that the sun shall not smite me by day nor the moon by night…

Mercifully I was jolted to a rude awakening, in good enough time, to the tasking and endurance-race conditions for success in the real world; to the basic challenge of studying hard to become upwardly mobile from secondary school through advanced level certificate to the university and the graduate school. The bad news is that some of our peers never really emerged from this illusory world in which they metaphorically got stuck as overgrown babies.

At the dawn of brooding adulthood and first encounter with what passes for espionage in this corner of the universe, whatever fantasies remained of aping Girland completely evaporated. The Nigerian equivalent of the (Pax-Americana) CIA, was a study in a life of drudgery, social emasculation and incipient sadism; on how not to ever contemplate and wish such a dreary existence for oneself. More luridly illustrated, in its proclivity for sheer savagery and homicidal-mania, were the exemplars of Uganda under Idi Amin and Haiti under Papa and baby Doc Duvaliers. Nigeria was tragically set on this course under the late General Sani Abacha dictatorship and only got rescued by the comely intervention of providence.

General Aliyu Gusau has come to personify the latter day perception of the security and intelligence community in Nigeria as a cosmopolitan-oriented institution. No assertion can be categorically made about this unique community other than the observation that it thrives on contrived anonymity and mystery. They have an inverted relationship with the rest of society. It is their duty to know you more than you know yourself while the same job description entitles them to limit other people’s knowledge of their individuality and collectivity to the irreducible minimum. That being the case, we can assume that Gusau is a compendium and repository of knowledge on Nigeria and Nigerians while revealing little of his person.

The culture of successive military coups and interventions has given the community a higher public profile than should ordinarily be the case. Military coups thrive on secrecy and conspiracy and the sustenance and stability of any military government is anchored on the loyalty, efficiency and competence of the intelligence corps. If I were to hazard a guess on the arrival of Gusau as a strategic player in military politics I would set a parallel date to that of General Ibrahim Babangida’s incursion into public consciousness-1975 or thereabouts. Both have been central to the success of any coup thereafter. There aren’t many shared experiences and endeavours that bond people together as a coup conspiracy does and so it has been with these two officers and gentlemen.

The August 1985 coup that toppled General Mohammadu Buhari and enthroned Babangida was said to have ultimately devolved on the conflict between the former and the latter over the job security off Gusau. Not long after, the grapevine had it that the twinset of Babangida and Gusau was upwardly reviewed to a set of triplets to include Abacha. The triumvirate was tested twice during the eight-year tenure of Babangida by the Mamman Vatsa and Gideon Okar-led abortive coups. It stood firm. By design or default, Babangida was succeeded by Abacha, and in an early indication of his ruthless power grab and total self-absorption, Gusau became one of the first casualties of the one man dictatorship of Abacha.

With perhaps the possible exception of Major Al Mustapha, nobody fully knows what transpired between November 1993 and June 1998 (the reign of Abacha) what was known was that Gusau and Babangida went into self-preservative hibernation in the interlude. Again, other than the incriminating presence of two Indian joy girls and edible apples, little is known of the chain of events that terminated in the death of Abacha, the night of 7th of June 1998. The trademark opacity of Abacha’s interregnum eventually yielded to better visibility in the successor regime of General Abdusalami Abubakar.

Babangida and Gusau were roused from their sleeper mode and picked the political destiny of Nigeria from where their dead defiant triplet left it. From the Minna control tower, the first order of business was deployed in the release of Abacha’s number one prisoner — Olusegun Obasanjo. One of the peculiarities of Abacha was the degree to which he was beholden to marabouts and soothsayers. It is in this hindsight that we now understand his implacable determination to do away with Obasanjo for good. I have it on the good authority of my spirit guide that the marabouts warned him that the destinies of the two of them are tied together in a manner that he would end the ultimate loser! After the incarcerated president-elect, Moshood Abiola, was wasted by forces beyond our control and comprehension, it was revealed on the tray of divination that the salvation of what was left of Nigeria lies in the hands of Obasanjo. The bearer of this tiding was Gusau who thereafter bore emissary to the imperial president in waiting at Abeokuta.

At some point, General Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma bought into this plot and weighed in with his characteristic bravado. Given his present disposition I wonder whether he remembers his threat to desert and abandon Nigeria should we fail to immediately adopt Obasanjo as president by popular acclamation. Among these three super Nigerians we can adequately account for the return of their former boss to the saddle and paddle of the Nigeria canoe. And the subsequent appointment of Gusau as National Security Adviser (NSA) to Obasanjo followed suit.

Again nobody knows for sure how the Sharia controversy originated and spiralled out of control but the rumour was that it was invented as a political lifesaver for the callow newly inaugurated Governor of Zamfara State, Ahmed Yerima Sani. He had to contend with the distressing fact that in his Zamfara enclave looms the intimidating shadow of Gusau-in who resides the capacity to make and unmake in the political power calculus of Nigeria at the inception of the Fourth Republic.

Under pressure for political survival, Ahmed Yerima figured that nobody, not even Gusau, can withstand the political utility of Sharia and before you could say ‘that girl is too young to know man’ he summoned religious fervour to the service of political mammon. In the twinkle of an eye, the whimpering political dwarf of Zamfara hit the Sharia political jackpot and transmogrified to an untouchable canonical icon across the Muslim North. On cue, disaffected political leaders of the North reinvented the Zamfara-customised Sharia spark as a regional casus belli and served notice on the Obasanjo presidency. As a top Northern establishment Muslim figure whose mandate (as NSA) it is to contain the crisis, Gusau found himself trapped between the rock and the hard place.

Since 1999, the increasingly indefinable Northern political establishment has had a rocky experience and exhibited symptoms of political power withdrawal syndrome. The task had often fallen on personalities like Gusau to manage the regional sense of alienation and deprivation attendant on this diagnosis and provide, in tandem, the valuable allied service of helping to stabilise the political system.

His attempt on two previous occasions to parlay the kingmaker role and compete for the presidential throne had ended in fiasco. Against the wish of his displeased principal, he contested for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential ticket in the 2007 election cycle and performed quite poorly. In 2011, he found himself in the embarrassing situation of competing against Babangida and Vice-President Atiku Abubakar to become the Northern regional candidate in the PDP presidential primaries and lost. In consequence he has suffered considerable demystification. I was taken aback when I first learnt of his presidential aspiration. How is he going to campaign? I wondered aloud. To call him taciturn was an understatement. Until recent years, I could count the number of words I ever heard him spoken on my fingers! What he lacks in the gift of the garb, he certainly makes up in a genial, accommodating and authoritative personality.

The return of Gusau to the government of President Goodluck Jonathan as minister (of defence?) is pregnant with meanings. In the ensuing months of a testy political season fraught with unrelieved Northern animosity against his candidacy, President Jonathan is going to require all the bridges he can rig to connect and may be attenuate this palpable hostility. And should the need arise, in the interim, to escalate the military containment of the Boko Haram insurgency, such a necessity will be less prone to politicisation with a defence minister who answers to Aliyu Gusau

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 Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.