Ebora purgatory

Hardball

FORMER President Olusegun Obasanjo, the famed Ebora Owu, appears in some Ebora purgatory.

First, he just declared himself a convert of “restructuring” — restructuring that he, throughout his two-term elected presidency, regarded as the ultimate political heresy, to be crushed by the ruthless weight of the state!

Then, he’s fresh factory-minted crusader for “Constituent Assembly”, Sege-speak for the good old Sovereign National Conference, the Obasanjo Presidency’s high crime against the state!

If that aspiration could not be crushed by the might of Obasanjo’s all-conquering state, then it must be scuppered by a useless National Constitutional Conference (which gulped billions from the common purse); and even a more devious parliamentary constitutional review, which ultimate — if not sole — aim was to gift Baba Iyabo an unlawful third term!  Thank God, that gambit collapsed!

But it is the depth of the Obasanjo purgatory, and the debt of apologies he owes Nigerians, while still alive, for wrong and wilful policies, that he now confesses his lack of faith in constitutional reviews by the National Assembly!  What really has changed in the Ebora, beyond the opportunistic getting wise after the fact?

Then, the ultimate collapse: beatifying the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) founder, Dr. Fredrick Fasehun in death, after the all-powerful President Obasanjo had thoroughly demonized him in life!

Remember how Obasanjo, as the tragic Nebuchadnezzer impressed by his power and glory, flexed his rippling presidential muscles, and pronounced a shoot-at-sight diktat on any OPC scum (not excluding the now canonized Fasehun, and his then deputy, Gani Adams) that the Police set their eyes on?

Perhaps what saved Fasehun and Adams then was they were both herded in detention?  Even then, didn’t the Afenifere, another fallen regional lobby then at the zenith of its powers, scream and screech the duo’s lives might be at stake, because Obasanjo was trying to please his northern patrons, who installed him as president, against the ethnic will of his Yoruba people?

Ethnic will!  That sure echoes Obasanjo’s Not my Will, the callow memoirs of a shallow youth, flush from accidental military power, who nevertheless beatified himself as some eternal wit!

In that book — you must remember — he mocked Awolowo as lusting for power that he, Obasanjo, got easily by the barrel of the gun!  He also ridiculed the great Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria’s first and last ceremonial president and famed nationalist, as plumbing from the Zik of Africa to Owelle of Onitsha!

Well, what new height is Obasanjo, hitherto the hot and breathless lover of Nigeria and self-named founder of modern Nigeria, scaling — serenading Amotekun, which Obasanjo would have crushed, with white nationalistic rage, in his presidential years?

Where is the epiphany of rejecting being a second class citizen, in a Nigeria he loves more than his own life, coming from?  When did that epiphany flash?

Before the so-called first-class citizens — to dread being second class, there must be first class now! — corralled him, against his “will and personal desire”, to military power after Murtala Muhammed’s assassination in 1976?

Or after the same lobby in 1999, dragged him from gaol to president, in lieu of MKO Abiola’s martyrdom after his foiled presidency, against the Yoruba will, for which the Ebora never showed a second of respect or regret?

Obasanjo talks the restructuring talk — hardly a crime!  But he does so with his customary galloping hypocrisy and graceless cant.  He probably flushes with his cleverness, knowing the country boasts little institutional memory.

But in his heart of heart, he knows he is in purgatory, publicly swallowing the full emptiness he pushed, during his high noon of power.

What ultimate karma and ironic justice — to live long enough to publicly swallow your public and arrogant vomit!

It’s the making of Ebora purgatory!