Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has a mind seething with many contrivances. One of these contrivances is his customary habit of inveighing, through his bothersome letters, against what he perceives as other people’s failings. He never sees his own failings, nor thinks much of them. Middle of January, in the same mood as he is wont and with the same fierce and unrelenting temper he had embraced since his youth, he wrote a letter addressed to the National Assembly leadership in which he decried their budgetary profligacy and callousness. He didn’t have much to anchor his rage on, but he singled out the plan of the legislators to buy N4.7bn cars for themselves, notwithstanding the parlous economy. The former president knew his letter and the views expressed therein would resonate with the emotive and impulsive public, for the issue of buying cars, which he described as insensitive and unnecessary, and which President Muhammadu Buhari briefly, emotionally and superficially addressed during his last media chat, remains on the front burner, triggering angst and snickers.
Chief Obasanjo’s letters troll public mood in a sinister manner. His biographers will probably remember exactly when he acquired the habit of exploiting moods. But the public will remember some of his contentious letters, not to talk of the acidity of the words he deployed with pleasurable and malevolent frenzy. He wrote twice or thrice in recent times to, but chiefly against, Wole Soyinka, professor of literature and Nobel laureate, on wide-ranging issues spanning politics, religion and morality, all designed vaingloriously to enhance his own image, steal the professor’s thunder — and steal a march on him too — and depict the former president in far more superior ethical light than he merits. He was not always successful, considering how unsparing Professor Soyinka is of bunkum, but he was satisfied achieving a stalemate and reveling in the noxious publicity that often accompanied both the letters and the stalemates. The former president also wrote many times to other less fortunate victims, including his former party chairman, Audu Ogbeh, and former president Goodluck Jonathan. What is clear is that though the letters lacked soul and oomph, Chief Obasanjo always carefully selected his targets to derive maximum publicity advantage and dividend.
The former president contrived last week’s letter in the same mould as the others he had written over the years. It was bitter, vengeful, rambling and sanctimonious. Apart from the core of the letter– his so-called concern about the legislators’ insensitivity to the country’s parlous economy — the former president undergirded the letter with a number of other self-serving complaints. They had allocated to themselves salaries and allowances in excess of what the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) approved for the legislature, he whined; and collecting constituency funds without applying them to the purposes for which they were meant was irresponsible. Chief Obasanjo doubtless has legitimate concerns about some of the issues he raised in his latest letter, and unfortunately the national legislature itself has never really proved to be a responsible body mindful of the weighty role and responsibility entrusted to it. But to embalm such concerns in a provocatively mocking letter when other media would have sufficed is nothing but caviar to the general.
In their deeply cynical responses to Chief Obasanjo’s gratuitous attack on their bona fides, both the Senate and House of Representatives dismissed the former president as misdirected and ill-motivated. Not only did they question his timing, wondering whether he did not have the 4th and 5th NASS in mind, they also questioned his integrity and read into his diatribe a vendetta propelled by the traumatic rejection he faced when he pushed his third term agenda. The legislators are wasting their time responding to Chief Obasanjo. Surely they can’t have forgotten that the old soldier gradually mummifying in their presence is inured to insult. He shrugs off the worst invectives as if they are nothing more than a feather duster on his skin. After giving a brief and elegant reply to the old general, the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, has indicated that at a later date, he would send a formal response to the ex-president. It is hard to imagine why he needs to do that. Yes, Chief Obasanjo is a former president who appears to be concerned about the well-being of the country. But beyond that, the legislature does not owe him any explanation. He has attacked them and, like the current federal government is attempting to do, is instigating the country against them. To that extent, the lawmakers owe the country explanations on how they intend to spend their budgetary allocations. For, after all, the people are suspicious of their representatives and distrustful of their intentions.
While the NASS needs a better appreciation of the harshness of the times the people they represent live in, and must necessarily be more realistic and frugal in their spending habits, they must by their display of patience and commonsensical approach to the economic and social exigencies of the moment resist the attempt by the executive arm, of which Chief Obasanjo is a vestige, to undermine or weaken them in the esteem of the electorate. That is why they need to discipline their spending culture and bring it in subjection to the dictates of the moment. But it is also important that the country should not be carried away by the criticisms of the former president. His observations are not entirely altruistic. The former president was fortunate to preside over Nigeria when oil price rose and peaked at a dizzying height. While he liquidated Nigeria’s external debts using questionable economic parameters and paradigms, he virtually laid the foundation for the country’s ruination in the years that followed his presidency.
The country remembers that he dedicated almost his entire time in office to propounding and nurturing appalling economic policies. His years as a military head of state between 1976 and 1979 saw him as an impressionable, gullible and fanatical proponent of nationalisation; but his years as an elected president contradistinctively saw him exercise a dangerous volte-face, dedicating his entire presidency to selling off everything the country owned under an equally poorly reasoned pot-pourri of privatisation programmes. The country has not recovered from his brusque and unwise economic measures. But rather than reflect on his policies that miscarried very badly in his years in office, the former president has carried himself extravagantly and without substantiation as the best thing that has ever happened to Nigeria.
Chief Obasanjo’s economic policies were in many parts obnoxious and unworkable, but they were the least of the troubles that accompanied his presidency. Throughout his two terms in office, he undermined virtually every democratic institution, including the legislature and the judiciary, in favour of the executive. He was a dictator at heart, and he nurtured that habit extraordinarily at the expense of the country. Where he could not browbeat his opponents, he induced them; and where he could not induce, he harassed and oppressed. And if the oppression and harassment failed, he attempted to instigate the country against the evidently underperforming lawmakers. It was, therefore, in one final act of desperation that in 2007 the legislature, which had heedlessly and enthusiastically connived at his many anti-democratic measures, rose up as one man to put an end to the many buffooneries of his presidency.
As this column has maintained over the months, had Chief Obasanjo laid the right foundation for Nigerian democracy in 1999 when God and man gifted him the role of a pathfinder; had he ruled like a philosopher-king, thoughtful, reflective and innovative; and had he abjured all forms of depredatory habits and established a honest and altruistic culture of leadership, he would not today need to question the integrity of federal lawmakers nor denounce their profligacy. Indeed, had he been the man for the moment in 1999, Nigeria would not have voted into office the late Umaru Yar’Adua, nor embraced Goodluck Jonathan, nor yet engaged in the jinxed pirouette of returning to the democratic starting block every time there is a change of office. The consequence of Chief Obasanjo’s dereliction of responsibility is that both democracy and the rule of law are still either alien to the country or embraced only when it is expedient. Nigeria has Chief Obasanjo to thank for this galling abnormality. He casts aspersion on the legislature and at other times views the judiciary contemptuously, but comparatively, despite their weaknesses, profligacy and incompetence, the legislature and the judiciary have kept democracy alive.
It is important that the public put Chief Obasanjo’s objurgatory letters in perspective. He often does not mean well, even when his criticisms and observations are a true reflection of reality. He does not know as much as he pretends to know, though he carries himself with statesmanlike airs. His appreciation of issues are often coloured by selfish motives, but no man ever preaches altruism with as much fervour as he does. And no man ever sought publicity and advantage over others, whether friend or foe, as much as he does. Let the country engage their lawmakers, but let it not be on Chief Obasanjo’s self-seeking terms. And let the presidency not imagine that in Chief Obasanjo, they have an ally and defender. For when the spirit takes hold of him, he is quite capable of launching scathing attacks on President Muhammadu Buhari as he has brutally savaged the legislature. He did it to former military ruler Ibrahim Babangida, who civilly ignored the attack; he did it to late military ruler Sani Abacha, who felt so incensed he sought his life; he did it to Dr. Jonathan, who watched helplessly as his reputation ebbed under the old soldier’s withering blows; and he did it to many others: laureate, politicians and sundry personalities, not minding whether he was right or wrong. His constant and exuberant malfeasances, not to say his personal follies and foibles, nevertheless make him unqualified to be the country’s conscience.
