Like an old colonial bailiff confronted by a tricky case of repossession, our own four-star general, former military and civilian head of state and revered man of letters, Olusegun Obasanjo, has fired a salvo at the Old Bailey central criminal court right there in the heart of the colonial metropolis of London. This time around, the old general is not acting the part of a gruff, taciturn man of arms. It is rather an impassioned, polite and well-reasoned plea for compassion and mercy for Ike Ekweremadu and family.
There is Dickensian irony in the air. Those who have read Charles Dickens will appreciate. There is also a touch of cruel paradox. In his nationalist military heydays, Obasanjo treated the British establishment with bucolic aplomb and a wary distrust. But that was a long time ago. Beggars can no longer be choosers, as they say in England. Now, he is forced to eat the humble pie at the behest of a wayward compatriot and closet collaborator.
No one can be sure where General Obasanjo’s letter-writing capacity will take him next. Perhaps he is going to pen an epistle to Kings Charles on the delicate matter of the Adubi War of 1918 which summarily abolished Egba city-state status , or the still more infamous spat over General Yakubu Gowon after the assassination of Murtala Mohammed. All that was at the high noon of Nigeria’s greatness and global relevance.
But you must give it to the old boy, even where you vehemently disagree with his motives and what many will dub diabolical motivations. More often than not as a literary marksman, Obasanjo knows how to pick his spot and then pull the trigger with chilling resolve, like an executive executioner. Many have been wondering whether the former president is just a letter writer among generals, but they soon discover that he is also a general among letter writers.
Like most of his letters, this one is also filled with mixed motives, multiple intentions and objectives; coolly rational and calm on the surface but a seething cauldron of contradictions just below the surface. It is like killing four birds with one single strike. Whatever the motives and motivation, only deadly maestros do that. A born master of psychological destabilization, no one can take dissembling and dissimulation away from the Owu-born general.
The Ekweremadu affair comes with acute moral complications for everybody, particularly for families that care for their children and want the best for them. But if we grant that as an adoring and doting father, the senator from Enugu has all the right to seek the best medical care for his beloved daughter, what about the other poor chap who has been treated like a cipher or simply as an unperson in all this?
This is where the search for personal justice is ensnared by the eternal quest for social justice. Every human, no matter where, when and how, is born with certain inalienable rights which guarantee them some measure of respect and decency of treatment. Members of a ruling class who treat their people like cyborgs and dehumanized commodities are likely to run into an ethical tornado when they transfer the mindset to more civilized climes which have learnt to abhor political cannibalism.
The facts of the case are so well known that they need not detain us here. Ike Ekweremadu, a ranking Nigerian senator, together with his wife and a medical doctor, Obinna Obeta, were arrested, tried and convicted for organ-harvesting. They were accused of deceiving David Nwamani, a 21 year old Lagos street trader, into donating a kidney for their daughter Sonia who is threatened with renal failure.
After a year of trial, the prosecutor, Hugh Davies, in a damning summation, told the court that the Ekweremadus and Obeta treated Nwamini and other potential donors as “disposable assets—spare parts for reward” which is nothing but an “emotionally cold commercial transaction” reeking of “entitlement, dishonesty and hypocrisy”.
Anyone familiar with this kind of arrogant impunity which is common place in Nigeria must appreciate why it is particularly affronting to the British general populace. Civilized societies set certain premium standards on decency and humane conduct towards others, deviation from which attracts severe reprimand. You can call it hypocrisy of the highest order, but this is how humanity is nudged to higher telos away from the savagery and criminality which is our default setting.
Enter at this point our own General Obasanjo who insisted that the punishment must take into consideration Ekweremadu’s “good character”. At this point, a lot might be tempted to ask, what good character? Here is a man who has been tried and adjudged guilty for criminal laundering and misappropriation by the highest anti-graft agency in the land, ironically set up by Obasanjo himself. At this point, we must leave Obasanjo to his prerogative of what constitutes good character.
But this is where his letter begins to reveal its own conditions of production and possibilities willy-nilly the author. First, Obasanjo’s letter is a product of the collapse of elite consensus in Nigeria. By writing the way he did, and obviously without any approval or endorsement from the federal authorities, he is seeking to draw insidious attention to the cold indifference to the plight of a ranking senator by the Buhari administration.
Obasanjo’s intervention would have gained more traction if he had been working in tandem with the federal government rather than in covert animosity. This was precisely what happened when he penned a letter to all African heads of state about the need to secure a second term for Akin Adesina at the African Development Bank. Buhari’s government backed the move to the hilt and Adesina sailed through despite formidable opposition. Obasanjo’s letter would have had more gravitas with federal backing.
But these days, the falcon can no longer hear the falconer. There is open hostility and uncontrollable animus between the authorities and the Owu-born general. The case against the senator from Enugu State is clear and incontrovertible, and the lack of synergy between Obasanjo and the Buhari administration would have vitiated any chance of Ekweremadu being let off the hook lightly by his metropolitan interlocutors.
It is a well-known fact that the government has rebuffed attempts to get it to intervene on Ekweremadu’s behalf from many quarters. Once again, Obasanjo may consciously be stoking the embers of elite discord by presenting himself as a friend and defender of the Igbo elite. What he hopes to gain by this strategic gambit remains to be seen, given the fact that on all the occasions he rose to power in the country whether as a civilian major domo or military supremo the north has been instrumental.
The general from Daura is a person with a well-documented and legendary aptitude for long-distance feuding. Given Ekweremadu’s sinister role in the historic heist which saw Bukola Saraki emerge as senate president against the stated will and preference of his party, the former infantry general would have marked him down as the poster-boy of the corrupt and undesirable brood of politicians from a particular elite formation in the country who should not be granted any latitude.
General Buhari’s animus towards Ekweremadu wouldn’t have mattered greatly if the elite formation that threw him up stood resolutely and valiantly behind him in pursuing its struggle for supremacy against the other countervailing hegemonic formations. But it remains about the most fractious and fractured going forward. The pursuit and achievement of individual ambition seem to matter more than collective bargaining. There is no society, only individuals, as Margaret Thatcher famously submitted.
This has been their bane since the advent of the Fourth Republic and appears to have played out once again in the Ekweremadu affair. An irate and despondent Igbo contributor to the AIT newspaper review programme last Wednesday morning was heard calling out an influential former global diplomat of Igbo extraction for keeping quiet on the fate of Ekweremadu while Obasanjo took on the awkward role of the defender of the Igbo people in their hour of tribulation.
Obasanjo himself had publicly stated on the occasion to mark Chukwuma Soludo’s first anniversary as governor of Anambra state that he found the Igbo elite amenable and appointable to high office because of their unflinching loyalty and competence. This is in sharp but unstated contrast to his Yoruba compatriots who he would have found to be of brittle loyalty and ever querulous insolence as far as his selfish and antediluvian vision of the nation is concerned.
Yet among the Igbo elite, and beyond individual bargaining for plum office, a bitter infighting and mutual hostility prevail which engender a paralysis of the collective will going forward. In his memoir, Standing Strong, Ken Nnamani has some unpalatable things to say about Ike Ekweremadu. Not only did Ekweremadu strive strenuously to block his attempt to get to the senate, he was also very much at hand to prevent his emergence as Senate president.
No wonder they deserted the book launch in droves. As the reviewer, one should know. Yet here was an Igbo leader very much respected and admired by the Buhari presidency for his solidity of character and unimpeachable integrity. One man’s meat is another man’s poison. Obasanjo’s hero is Buhari’s antihero.
It will be left to future historians to determine whether Obasanjo’s embroilment in partisan politics really messed up his sterling character and reputation for transcendental patriotism, just as it seems to have done with General Mohammadu Buhari. In his glowing tribute to Murtala Mohammed, Chief Obafemi Awolowo described his successor as “shy, deep and equally patriotic”.
In his nationalist incarnation as a military ruler, Obasanjo did not suffer amoral fools very gladly and neither could he be found in bed with depraved scoundrels. In a towering rage against military miscreants, he was known to have cast the deciding vote that sent Colonel Wya to the stakes.
Unable to bear the shame and trauma, the white widow of the poor fellow launched herself against a trailer a few months after on the Kaduna-Kano highway. Not only that, Obasanjo made sure that Yoruba notables such as Dr Shodipo, Major Ola Ogunmekan, aka Bros Ola, and Eji Gbadero face the music for their economic, military and criminal infractions respectively. Until the very end, the gregarious, music-loving socialite never believed that he was about to meet his maker.
It can now be seen that what commends and recommends Ike Ekweremandu to Obasanjo is not his sterling character but a fascination with moral squalor. The problem with criminal impunity is that it never knows where and when to stop. When it behaves as if it has immunity in a foreign clime, it always comes with dire consequences. Let the old bailiff now depart for the Old Bailey court to do its job. This is what happens to a country without elite consensus on nation-building or core values about public morality.
