Former President Olusegun Obasanjo just declared he had no specific candidate but he does have a “national agenda” — quite noble and patriotic.
The problem though is that from Obasanjo’s public persona, personal and national agenda are but two sides of the same coin. True, the Owu fox eternally grandstands both are two discrete things. But his public records bark and growl otherwise.
If you doubt, just x-ray the famous OFN, which Gen. Obasanjo coined during his first coming as Nigeria’s military head of state (13 February 1976-30 September 1979).
Then, it meant Operation Feed the Nation (OFN), a patriotic, if atomistic precursor to Muhammadu Buhari’s holistic rally of “grow what you eat and eat what you grow”.
That policy, though scoffed at by not a few on the emotive, bigoted lane, has given Nigerian agriculture a healthy jab, in a season of great angst; but a critical juncture of national crunch and possible re-launch, too many are just too emotive to grasp.
By the National Bureau of Statistics’ 2022 second quarter report, at 23.24%, agriculture was the highest driver of GDP, posting an overall GDP growth of 3.54%, up from the first quarter figures of 3.11%. Indeed, crops drove the agricultural growth by 91.99%, between 2022 Q1 and Q2. Within PMB’s two elected tenures of eight years, Nigeria became No. 1 cultivator of rice in Africa; and No. 1 cultivator of yam on the globe.
But back to OFN.
Post-power, OFN assumed a more private juice: Obasanjo Farms Nigeria, Ota, Ogun State, transmuting from its former name, Temperance Farms Ltd, Ota.
The Land Use Decree (now Act) was the sweet sprinkler of public juice into private mouths. It made easier the large acquisition, of hitherto ancestral land, by the elite and the connected; since state governors now held land in purported public trust.
That Obasanjo’s OFN became a direct beneficiary of his regime’s OFN is clearly the sweet incest of national sweat turning private sweets.
The same could be said of the former president’s presidential library: the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL).
Though an amazing trove of public contemporary history, from the prism of Obasanjo’s engagement with his country — that’s no crime and surely should be lauded? — yet you feel that incestuous drift in this sweet public-private coitus.
Neither nice nor nasty but following cold facts: it is fair and legitimate to push that while OFN was Obasanjo’s treasured trophy as a former military head of state, the OOPL is his priceless pearl as a former two-term elected president. Talk of national agenda segueing into personal lollies!
That the same Land Use Act was central to the manifestation of OFN as it was to the OOPL, shows how the Nigerian elite’s public agenda-private business cohabitation has changed little, between 1979 and now.
That, of course, shows that the former president isn’t the only guilty party. But his own case roils because his bare-faced cunning postures such behaviour as some decent — indeed, recommended and beneficial — public conduct. It is not.
Compare and contrast Obasanjo with Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, at whose virtual Minna doorstep the former president released his latest “no-particular-candidate-but-a-national-agenda” election-season whoop.
Whatever were Gen. Abubakar’s shortcomings as junta head of state, his post-power engagements have been refined, measured, guarded and dignified, cultivating the appropriate temper for every occasion. Obasanjo’s has been the diametric opposite.
But still on national agenda and historical contexts. By 16 May 2006, onward to the 2007 general elections, the Senate had just shot down the former president’s “third term” bid. Still, by September 2006 — this time back then — the air was still foul and dank with “third term”, with folks, though joyous at its defeat, still looking past their shoulders in apprehension regarding the looming elections.
Though nobody ever quoted Obasanjo as publicly saying he craved a “third term”, he picked no bones about declaring the coming elections a “do-or-die” for PDP, his then ruling party. Perhaps Baba was angry because “third term” had just been crushed?
As a media consultant to the Rauf Aregbesola Osun gubernatorial run in April 2007, Ripples saw, realtime, the angst of “do-or-die” elections. Our campaign headquarters, Oranmiyan House, was not only attacked by felons ready to kill and to maim, the Osun election 2007 was a brutal killing field, by a desperate PDP sworn to willy-nilly holding on to power.
No thanks to a sitting president’s do-or-die philosophy, 2007 elections were the very worst so far in this 4th Republic — if not ever.
Still, here is the brutal contrast: in August 2022, staring down a tough election in 2023, President Buhari, unlike Obasanjo in 2007, clearly told his party to go work hard to earn their win. What might Nigerian democracy have been today, had Obasanjo embraced a similar democratic ethos back in 2007?
Again, unlike 2007, no one is talking of “third term”. True, some ossified human rights activists, with their “one-shoe-fits-all” brand of mis-advocacy, whispered aloud about some PMB “hidden agenda”. But they soon “shut the hell up”, to mimic that rather inelegant American phrase, because they realized the joke was on them.
Perhaps for the very first time in Nigeria’s electoral history, even since independence, you see a sitting president rooting for the tenets of democracy, neither tainted by cant nor crippled by opportunistic mammon.
That is the true national agenda without wiles; without the insulting cunning even the most grovelling of Obasanjo’s friends have had to endure, with his brash and intrusive public persona. Yet, PMB remains among the most demonized and vilified in Nigerian history, by unfazed children of hate and their colluding media megaphones.
By outing with his latest “national agenda”, Obasanjo, as is his wont, was perhaps plugging into those skewed emotions, where many hate-filled Nigerians are fatally anchored.
The thing though is that it’s a rich recipe for messing with people’s heads, flashing an el dorado that never comes except in delusional dreams; and fating the naive to free bungling of their electoral choices, which earns nothing but bitter gnashing and grinding of teeth, four years after — when the eternal “saviours” would out with new “redemptive” rackets!
That’s the sickly cycle in which Obasanjo’s peculiar “national agenda” thrive. Nigerian voters ought to have realized that by now.
In fairness, the Ebora Owu has been far less intrusive than he was in 2019, or in 2015 for that matter, when he declared a no-holds-barred war against President Goodluck Jonathan, simply because the then sitting president would not be led by the nose.
But his Minna “national agenda” should warn the wary and the sensible. Beyond Hobson and his choice, such “national agenda” have hardly any use for anyone.