Struggle for power in Nigeria is a study in paradox. Awolowo who burnt the midnight candles to discover ‘the path to Nigeria’s freedom’, a path never taken, to our eternal damnation, an ill-equipped Obasanjo boasted he got on a platter of gold what Awo started struggling for while he, Obasanjo was a mere bare-footed school boy. Zik, a foremost Nigerian nationalist who ‘eleczikfy’ the Nigerian press preaching liberation from colonial rule was sidelined when freedom came. The crown went to Tafawa Balewa of a fiercely anti-Fulani minority tribe from southern Bauchi, courtesy of Ahmadu Bello, who preferred the Northern Region premiership to Nigerian Prime Minister. MKO Abiola won a pan-Nigerian mandate; Babangida with Obasanjo’s support substituted his mandate with an illegal Interim National Government. Following his death in prison, Obasanjo was brought out of Abacha’s gulag to be crowned president. And while Obasanjo for eight years failed to acknowledge the immense contribution of Abiola to democracy, President Buhari, whose regime was toppled back in 1985 by Babangida coup bankrolled by Abiola, made justice denied him by Obasanjo, his kinsman possible.
We must also add that Shehu Shagari wanted to be just a senator; Obasanjo admitted influencing his emergence as president after publicly stating the best candidate in the 1979 election didn’t have to win to spite Obafemi Awolowo, Shagari’s opponent. Obasanjo equally admitted aiding ailing Umaru Yar’Adua and an ill-prepared Goodluck Jonathan to power.
As part of the paradox, the north had wanted a confederacy in 1953 but reluctantly accepted a federal arrangement they were allowed to control. The north sponsored the July 1966 coup to resist a unitary system instituted by Ironsi through decree 34 of 1966. Today as the greatest beneficiary of the current unitary system we fraudulently call federalism, they are opposed to a restructured workable federal arrangement in line with what we inherited from our founding fathers.
And what can today be more paradoxical than Obasanjo and PDP who for 16 years destroyed the country through massive corruption, through ill-implemented self-serving privatization and monetization policies, now forming an alliance to stop Buhari’s second term for allegedly condoning corruption, among other reasons?
Of course Buhari and his APC, many believe have not met the aspirations of Nigerians. Many feel betrayed that Buhari needed six months and over two years to constitute a cabinet and the boards of over 500 small governments that he needs to execute his party programme. They agonise over the president’s decision to surround himself with those who appear not to share his pan-Nigeria vision. It is equally no relief that due to the president’s error of omission, APC, the platform with which he secured his mandate for the greater part of the last three and half years, displayed instincts of factions with divergent tendencies interested only in power. The division in the party and the attendant crisis have overshadowed whatever efforts the president is making in tackling the party’s eight-point cardinal programme viz electricity generation, war against corruption, food security, integrated transport network and free education, devolution of power, accelerated economic growth and affordable health care.
There are also concerned Nigerians who also believe the president has not risen to the challenges of modern government. By his opposition to restructuring, devolution of power, state policing etc., they say, is evidence of his lack of understanding of our national diversity and the reason why his approach to national divisive issues continues to fail to inspire confidence.
But Obasanjo and PDP with his sabre-rattling Kola Ologbondiyan, its spokesman, are not prepared to allow Buhari to be haunted in the 2019 election by his personal inadequacies and his party’s failure to fulfill its electoral promises. Obasanjo, a master of political subterfuge, is fuelling intra party feuds within the APC while PDP spokesman deploys language of fear when not fabricating lies.
Obasanjo who had on February 11, 2015, at the launch of his autobiography titled, My Watch, in Nairobi, Kenya said of Buhari “He is smart enough, he is educated enough. He’s experienced enough. Why shouldn’t I support him?” in January 23, wrote an open letter to Buhari, claiming his administration is “characterised by poverty, insecurity, poor economic management, nepotism, gross dereliction of duty and condonation of misdeed”. He followed up with the formation of a ‘Coalition for Nigeria Movement’ (CNM). The CBM has since been collapsed into the African Democratic Congress (ADC) for the purpose of the 2019 election.
But as part of the paradox, Obasanjo is not only not taking responsibility for his role as the father of PDP that has brought the nation to its knees in the last 16 years, he wants Nigerians to forget that he and Murtala Mohammed planted the seeds of today’s social dislocations back in 1975 with their destruction of the bureaucracy and the academia, two critical institutions without which a nation decays.
It is also as if PDP wants to wish away its baleful legacies which include wrecking of the aviation, pharmaceutical, textile industries through the importation of labour of other societies, mad rush to build private universities with unexplained sources of fund after destroying the world class institutions they inherited, trading our refineries for fuel importation through which about 140 oil importers appointed by Ahmadu Alli, according to a house probe Stole N1.7 trillion; ill-implemented privatization programme through which they sold NITEL, a successful outfit that posted a profit of N53bn in 2002 to proxy company; Daily Times with onshore and offshore assets including NSE House on Customs Street, for N1.2b; the entire Trade Fair Complex for as low as N10bn; ALSCON, built with $3.2b dollars for $250m out of which only $130m was paid and, sharing 60 licensed Independent Power Producers (IPPs), among its members and sympathizers.
The same PDP now says of Buhari: “Instead of fighting corruption, Buhari’s administration is practically a felonious empire of corrupt individuals, certificate forgers, contract inflators, looters of treasuries and well-known liars, making it, ‘head to toe’, the biggest assemblage of plunderers in the history of our nation. Largely, due to the incompetence and corruption of the Buhari Presidency, our once robust economy has been wrecked, resulting in unbearable hardship, unemployment, hunger and starvation, strange sicknesses and untold depression with compatriots resorting to suicide missions and slavery as options”. PDP is “urging Nigerians not to despair especially as the 2019 general elections offer them the firm opportunity to vote out this inept administration and return a development-oriented and competent government on the platform of the repositioned and rebranded PDP.”
Calling attention to the paradox of those who are now proclaiming themselves as our new redeemers is not a call for their rejection in 2019. If frank and honest Buhari loses to slyness and deviousness, he should take solace in the fact that democracy, as Richard Geibis once observed shortly before the hand-over of Hong Kong by Great Britain to Mainland Chinese, is “the rule of the easily manipulated mob”. A white supremacist mob recently elected a sly multi billionaire tax evader and women abuser, whose close aides claim does not know his left from his right, in America, the home of democracy. And finally as Alexis-Charles-de Tocqueville (1805-1859) a French political thinker put it in his ‘Democracy in America’, “in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve”.
