IF Dr Jerry Gana or his friends are reading this piece, they should rest easy. It is not about him.

Since his most recent presidential bid failed, the genial former academic who has logged probably a great deal more mileage across political territory and political appointments than most Nigerians living or dead has barely registered in the news.

He always kept a low profile anyway in his many manifestations as a professor of geography, senator, director of the agency for food and rural development DFRRI, chief of the agency for social mobilization MAMSER, minister of agriculture and national resources, minister of information and culture, minister of information and national orientation, minister for cooperation and integration in Africa, and in his several runs for president.

These appointments encompassed the era of military president Ibrahim Babangida, the interim administration of the deluded Ernest Shonekan, the brutal regime of Sani Abacha and Olusegun Obasanjo’s two terms. But Gana never lost his equanimity, his even temperament. More importantly, he was never tainted by scandal.

This piece is about Jeremiah Useni, or Jerry as he likes to be called, another perennial presence in the political firmament who has been around for so long and held so many political appointments on so many fronts that even members of the attentive audience might be forgiven if they have forgotten that he was a military officer for practically all those years, more so, since along the way, he took the evocative title of Sardauna of Langtang and became chair of the National Council of Traditional Rulers.

Few Nigerians have been given as many opportunities as Useni to serve the public and make a difference in the lives of his compatriots and the fortunes of his country – minister of transport and aviation, military governor of the old Bendel State, minister for Abuja Federal Capital Territory, and member of the Senate, the only position he won through an election rather than preferment.

Somebody once said that they just kept moving him from one gold mine to another

When Useni was appointed Minister of Transport Aviation, he was assigned the house formerly occupied by Umaru Dikko, who was well know known for his aristocratic taste. A former student of mine, a senior official in that ministry, was assigned to get the house ready for the incoming occupant.

Virtually everything had to be upgraded. Appliances had to be the latest. Furnishings, crockery, flatware and stemware had to be the finest. Taking a cue from mai gida, the mai guard said the black-and-white television in his post was outmoded. Pronto, the mai gida ordered that it be replaced with the latest, in living colour. And so on and so forth.

One day the supervising official, my former student, came to my office at the University of Lagos, utterly dejected. He said he was scandalised by the cost of getting the house ready for Useni and was going to ask to be transferred to another department or ministry. He said he feared that if it became public, the whole thing was going to stir up public outrage and that there was no way he could defend or explain it away.

Today’s civil service, it is necessary to interject, is governed by a different ethos.

From Useni’s profligacy regarding the furnishing of his official residence, it was but a natural progression to the acquisition spree he embarked upon when he was named minister for the Abuja Federal Capital Territory.

That portfolio made him sole administrator and dispenser of prime real estate worth at least as much as Nigeria’s oil fields. And you needed no oil rigs, no pipelines, foreign technical partners, no syndicated loans, and no long wait to cash in. All you needed was access to Useni, and you emerged clutching a piece of paper allocating a piece of the choice land to you.

It was a fail-safe transaction, translating into instant wealth, in cash.

Useni cornered a vast swath of the estate for himself, not forgetting his friends and cronies. With funds of dubious provenance, he acquired and acquired more, on a scale beyond belief: shopping malls, warehouses, residential homes, office blocs, undeveloped parcels of land all over the country. When a man celebrates his 17th wedding anniversary on a lavish scale as Useni did, you know that money is no longer his problem but how to spend it.

To be specific, his acquisitions confiscated by the Federal Government, apart from the N4 billion reportedly recovered from one of his homes, N2 billion of it in foreign currency, included a terminal in Jos, from where he operated a transport service with a fleet of 20 buses; controlling shares in a bank, two shopping malls in Abuja, 40 lock-up stalls in Garki and Wuse districts of Abuja, more than 70 undeveloped plots in Abuja, more than 30 houses in Langtang and Abuja, and 43 personal cars.

Not even the “special oil allocations” he said he had enjoyed “along with others” for three years as a member of the Armed Forces Ruling Council can begin to account for his sprawling portfolio, of which the foregoing is but an abbreviation.

It is as if Useni had, well before his first public appointment, taken a vow to compensate himself over and over again for, and insulate himself from, the material deprivations of his childhood years in his native Langtang.

Before then, he had been unmasked as the official who procured the women and manned the gates while his friend and principal Sani Abacha indulged himself in orgies of debauchery that eventually claimed his life.

For a time, Useni vanished from headlines and the footnotes. Not even his comprehensive notoriety, it seemed, was enough to earn him the attention of the junk press. So they left him severely alone, thinking that he was finished.

But Useni is nothing if not durable.

He would bob up among the unrepentant enablers of Sani Abacha’s brutal dictatorship parading themselves as apostles of democracy, and even emerge as a chieftain of the ANPP, and later chair of its breakaway faction, the Democratic Party.

Losing his bid for election to the Senate on the platform of that party in 2011, Useni defected to the PDP and was four years later elected to the Senate on that platform. Not one to settle for mere “distinguished senator” when he can return to being “His Excellency,” and “Executive Governor” as a civilian, he entered the race for Plateau State governor, against Simon Lalong, the incumbent and his daughter’s former classmate.

On every lip, the question was: What does Jerry still want? He lost.

Useni’s latest quest ended last week when the Supreme Court affirmed the verdicts of the lower tribunals and held that his appeal lacked merit. And now, Useni finds himself in the unusual position of wielding no authority from an appointive office and no influence from a political perch.

In the decades of his immersion in Nigeria’s public life, it is doubtful whether he has ever had a chance or an inclination to reflect seriously on his career and what it all means.

This is perhaps Useni’s best chance to do so, forthrightly.

What are his signal achievements in the ministries and agencies over which he presided? Where are the monuments he built? What marks did he make on public policy, and on the lives of his compatriots? How is he going to be remembered? In short, what is his legacy?

He should not leave the answers entirely to history.

By Prof. Olatunji Dare