By Adekunle Ade-Adeleye

When a newspaper reported in early July that ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo would be forming a new political party and had scheduled a meeting for mid-July, it created a stir among Nigerians. The report also stated definitively that three ex-governors had already been appointed as coordinators. Last month, Chief Obasanjo was also reported to have written another letter to President Muhammadu Buhari excoriating him for poor governance. It turned out that some smart alec on social media had simply taken one of the ex-president’s previous letters and regurgitated it for a predetermined purpose. In the same vein, the party formation fantasy is a staple of the reportage on Chief Obasanjo. Clearly, despite the criticisms leveled against him, the former president still makes good news, helps newspapers to sell copy, and online media platforms to chalk up traffic.

But Chief Obasanjo was irate. He was not forming any party, he fumed; and though his doors remained open to all, he had no intention of returning to murky politics in the partisan sense. Said he: “In my part of the world, when you say goodnight in a place, you do not go back there and say good evening. The one who reported that (story) may need to visit Yaba Left. And those who believe it can believe that their mothers are men. I’m done with partisan politics, but by my position in Nigeria and in Africa and, without being immodest, indeed in the world, my door must be opened and it is open to any individual or group of individuals who want to seek my opinion, view or advice on any issue or matter and I will respond to the best of my ability, without being part of that individual or group.” It is not clear whether Chief Obasanjo dictated that part of his rebuttal that alluded to “Yaba Left”, a reference to the Psychiatric Hospital located in Yaba, Lagos. But his rural jocosity, even when he tackles serious political issues, cannot be doubted. Chief Obasanjo was saying in other words that the man who wrote the report published fiction and needed his head examined.

The former president insists he has taken a transcendental position on politics in Nigeria. His party, he says jocularly, is one that takes care of the welfare of Nigerians and responds to their yearning and challenges. In the rebuttal signed by his spokesman, Kehinde Akinyemi, he denounces any attempt to smuggle him back into partisan politics, seeing that he has now become a statesman. Chief Obasanjo has a reputation for hard work and passion for Nigeria. That he was, however, unable to bring those virtues to the service of lifting Nigeria to glorious heights neither invalidates his claim to loving the country nor indicates he was lying about his decision to stay off partisan politics. He may sound exhausted today, having had to address the same malignant issues over and over again, and age may also not be on his side, for he cannot summon as much energy at 84 as he did some 14 years ago when he left office after two terms as president. He must, however, be believed when he said partisan politics was no longer for him.

There is, however, one thing Chief Obadanjo has not come to terms with, and seems increasingly unlikely that he would grapple with now or in the years ahead as his night years flicker out. He was fortunate to be called upon, whether deservedly or not, to anchor the Fourth Republic, despite neither really being a politician nor a former leader whose exemplary legacy had called for an encore. Instead, he laid a wobbly foundation for the new democratic experience, not being a convinced democrat himself, and set such horrifying examples of leadership that all his successors, save perhaps the late Umaru Yar’Adua, aped him in far more inimical ways than he ever probably contemplated. His economic record was mixed, and his social engineering policies were contradictory and even injurious to the polity. It was his record on democracy that would have stood him out and set the country on an even keel, he as the fulcrum, and his successors as the balancing weights. But that was not to be.

Few ex-military men manage the transition to civil life with aplomb. Chief Obasanjo was not among the few. He did not of course go to the deplorable depth of subverting the judiciary on the scale the current administration has managed to do with so much panache, but he subverted the legislature, ruined his party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), in such a manner that has made recovery virtually impossible, and gradually etched into the executive branch psyche that the president should operate more like a monarch than an elected chief servant. The country is still grappling with the consequences of his imprudence today. And in the hands of an inept president, the combination of monarchical bearing plus subversion of key institutions and arms of government would become a lethal brew. This is why Nigerians keep looking in his direction, sometimes even faking the news, because his successors performed so woefully that he has begun to look and sound like the messiah of his fond, narcissistic bearing and imagination.

Chief Obasanjo will expire gradually. No writer or analyst can hurry the decay. Soon, the country will look beyond him, and his voice, not to say his admonitions, will no longer sound sonorous to their ears. President Buhari’s poor performance may have canonized Chief Obasanjo, but in reality he is only a tad better than his brother presidents. He has precious little else to give; and because governance has under the current administration been reduced to a sectional instrument for heinous attack on the idea of Nigeria, not many Nigerians will notice the jadedness of the Obasanjo phenomenon.

Fire service and firearms

Early July, the Ministry of Interior disclosed that the federal government would be initiating a legislative process to enable a unit of the Fire Service to carry arms. To be known as the Fire Police, this unit is expected to provide armed outer cordon during firefighting operations in order to curb the incessant attacks on operatives of the service in the line of duty. It is true there have been myriads of recorded attacks against firefighters, especially at a time of deteriorating security all over the country. During the EndSARS protests for instance, the fire service was disallowed in many instances from carrying out firefighting operations by armed hoodlums.

However, arming the Fire Service through the Fire Police is one more indication that the country is losing the battle to secure the nation. It will of course be out of place to expect the Service to study the reasons for such attacks and proffer solutions. The country as a whole has been unable to critically analyse the factors disposing the country to increasing insecurity, not to talk of finding the appropriate panaceas. If the country is remiss in constructing security architecture to police the nation, it would be a tall order to expect the Fire Service to do the job.

But if the instinctive response of the nation is to arm every public unit in order to secure its operational environment, there would be no end to the arming business. The country is still contending with constitutionally sanctioned law enforcement bodies which misuse firearms; to add one more would indeed be complicating. After all, the Road Safety Corps, which operates more widely and almost ubiquitously around the country, had unsuccessfully lobbied for decades to be allowed to carry firearms. If that request was declined, it is incomprehensible that the same government could be preparing to sponsor an executive bill to repeal the obsolete 1963 Fire Service Act to allow for the new realities.