OBJ, the unlikely revolutionary

I cannot buy a used car from His Excellency, Dr General Chief Olusegun Obasanjo (OBJ). I would even be more circumspect if he offered me a fairly used thesis on democracy. When a naked man offers you a jacket, beware! However, I am not one of those who say that OBJ is an unmitigated disaster. […]

I cannot buy a used car from His Excellency, Dr General Chief Olusegun Obasanjo (OBJ). I would even be more circumspect if he offered me a fairly used thesis on democracy. When a naked man offers you a jacket, beware!

However, I am not one of those who say that OBJ is an unmitigated disaster. Providence has been so gracious to him to the extent that, in a country of almost 200 million people, he has been a General Officer Commanding (GOC) in the Nigerian army, a federal commissioner, a Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters (military vice-president), a head of state, a thriving farmer, a democratically elected president, a serial political godfather and a much-sought-after statesman.

There is no other Nigerian, living or dead, who has attained all the high positions Obasanjo has been privileged to occupy. Benevolent gods have always queued up to crack his kernels at crucial points in his personal life which have coincided with critical points in Nigerian history.

To his credit as president, during his first term (1999-2003) Obasanjo tried to reform the public service. He established the EFCC and ICPC and also strengthened the Code of Conduct Bureau to fight corruption. Some top politicians and a former Inspector-General of Police, were jailed. His government secured an $18 billion debt relief from the Paris and London Clubs and got Nigeria free of debt. He midwifed the gsm revolution. He sought and brought talented ‘outsiders’ into government His government also launched Nigeria’s first satellite in space.

Yes, there are positive things that can be said for OBJ. Last year, when he wrote one of his famous letters indicting President Buhari, I did say that we should separate the message from the messenger, although I hadn’t forgotten Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka’s characterisation of the man as “an overgrown child of circumstance with capacity for infantile mischief”.

Obasanjo’s recent 16-page missive after he had plunged with both feet into the current political contestation on the side of Atiku Abubakar, however, reads more like a partisan construct, a potpourri of facts, half-truths, outright fiction and ill-will. Political analysts, while acknowledging OBJ’s right to free speech, now see that in the present case, the message and the messenger are intertwined. They have therefore been holding up the mirror to the former president and the reflection is not quite flattering.

Obasanjo cannot be accused of being a democrat. Indeed, his tenure was the farthest Nigeria went in having an imperial presidency. While most of his achievements as president were recorded during his first term, he spent the four years of his second term terrorising imagined enemies and plotting an unconstitutional third term. When his third term agenda came to grief, he orchestrated a ‘do-or-die’ rigged election which returned his hand-picked candidate, Umaru Yar’Adua, as elected president with an unbelievable 24,638,063 votes. Yar’Adua was so embarrassed by the wholesale rigging that he apologised to the nation and promised to fix the wonky system.

The flashback mirror also shows the OBJ years as an era when Solomon Lar, Barnabas Gemade and Audu Ogbe were forcefully removed as chairmen of the ruling PDP under OBJ’s instigation, so were Senate Presidents Evans Enwerem and Chuba Okadigbo; troops were ordered to level the towns of Odi and Zaki Biam; election rigging was so endemic that governorship results were nullified in Cross River, Rivers, Bayelsa, Delta, Edo, Ondo, Ekiti, Osun, Adamawa, Kogi and Sokoto States; Federal funds allocation for Lagos State was seized in contravention of constitutional provisions; $16 billion was allegedly spent on power without results; Governors Ngige, Rasheed Ladoja, Joshua Dariye, Ayo Fayose and Diepreye Alamieyeseigha were forcefully removed while a spate of assassinations claimed the lives of  a sitting Attorney General, Bola Ige, Harry Marshal, Chief Dikibo, Chief Ogbonaya Uche, etc.

Obasanjo is the most unlikely revolutionary in circulation. He doesn’t want a revolution. He only wants a government he can control. He only cares about three persons: I, Me and Myself. He has had a hand in the rulership of Nigeria since 1979. Admittedly, he is adept at ventilating popular grudges to service narrow personal goals. He latched on to the Third Force idea when the mood seemed to favour a third alternative to the dominant APC and PDP. The new group inherited his enemies and its profile promptly nosedived. He then ate up his own vomit by endorsing the same man he had spent the better part of a decade demonising – Atiku Abubakar.

OBJ has bullied every Nigerian leader since 1979, with the understandable exception of General Abdulsalam Abubakar who released him from jail and facilitated his 1999 election as president. One commentator declared that OBJ should have written his famous letters to himself when he was an imperial president.

For a man who, within eight years, transformed himself from a chicken farmer to a multibillionaire with investments in several sectors of the economy, a private university and a presidential library built from funds extorted from state governments and government contractors, Obasanjo is one of the problems with Nigeria. Of his hypocritical holier-than-thou stance, Itse Sagay says, “The man is not just immoral, he is worse; he is amoral, i.e., he lacks a sense of right or wrong”.

In Africa, we respect old age. We respect position/attainment. When a man combines these, society expects some level of decorum, discipline, decency, self-respect, discretion and restraint from him. Otherwise they would strip him of his hypocritical halo.

My counsel: Beware when a naked man offers you a jacket!