Tag: former President Olusegun Obasanjo

For those who truly love former President Olusegun Obasanjo, this is the best time to pray that the old wily fox would not, in his reverie of self-importance, shoot himself on the foot. Truth is, if care is not taken, Obasanjo’s seeming invincibility may come to an ignoble end with his latest decision to exchange deadly political punches with President Muhammadu Buhari in his bid to impose a new leader on the nation in the 2019 election. While it was not shocking that his romance and preference for a Buhari Presidency was short-lived due to what he described as the former’s bumbling economic policies, incompetence and abominable clannishness, Obasanjo’s persistently rabid and ferocious attack against Buhari say much about how badly he would want a man he once dabbed in flowery words out of the presidential seat. You ask: what could have gone so terribly awry that the same Buhari whom Obasanjo supported to put an end to a continuation of the Jonathan Goodluck ruinous regime would suddenly make a 360 degree turnaround? Nothing other than the usual power game among Nigeria’s privileged elite! It didn’t start today and I doubt if it is going to end soon until this set of leaders with military background take their final bow from mother earth.

Some years back, this same issue came to the front burner of national discourse when Obasanjo took his estranged former deputy, Atiku Abubakar to the cleaners. It was the same case with the late President Umaru Yar’Adua. And so, it wouldn’t be out of place to conclude that Obasanjo is the proverbial leopard that has not changed its skin. He is merely treading a familiar path by picking on Buhari who happens to be the latest project that must be taken down. In a piece titled “Now, OBJ spits on own grave” and published on this page five years back, I had written that: “There are a thousand and one reasons to dislike former President Olusegun Obasanjo. What one can’t help but admire is his infantile garrulousness. After close to 12 years in office at the highest level of governance, many had expected that Baba would gloriously retire to his Ota farms, tending his chickens and enjoying fresh palm wine away from Abuja’s intriguing politics. No one had thought he would still be that active to disturb a nation’s peace with scathing parodies. It turned out that we had placed too much value on a man who worships nothing but his own ego.

“We may not have a sense of history but we are not that dumb not to understand why an Obasanjo would forever find it convenient to run his mouth riot on his former deputy, AtikuAbubakar or anyone for that matter. This man sees himself as some kind of superhuman. And he may deny it till the end of life; Obasanjo knows that there is more to his sour relationship with Atiku than the allegations of corruption. Central to this pathological heckling of Atiku at any given opportunity is the ‘disloyal’ role Atiku played in frustrating the self-perpetuation agenda otherwise known as tenure elongation in the days of the long knives. Second was the humiliation that Obasanjo went through in the hands of Atiku before he was eventually given the green light to contest for a second term in office. Aside these two, all other things seem to exist in Obasanjo’s fantasies.”

That was when Obasanjo’s was in his late 70s. Today, at over 80 according to official records, the narrative has not changed. As it was then, so it is now. After running his mouth over the late President Umaru Yar’Adua and plucking Jonathan off the presidential seat, it is inexplicable that Buhari would be his latest poster boy for bad governance knowing that he sees himself as the best thing that ever happened to Nigeria. With Buhari’s veiled reference to his administration’s mismanagement of a whopping $16bn allocated to the power sector in his eight-year reign, you can be sure Obasanjo would unleash the vilest part of his tongue and commit all his energy in seeing that he rubbishes the Buhari government. It is one role that he relishes playing going by how he brought down other regimes after him, including the one in which Buhari is major beneficiary.

Having said this, the journey might not be as smooth as Obasanjo would have wanted. While he practically had most of the other leaders by their balls tagging them corrupt and unfit to rule, Buhari, in spite of his many failings, may be an exception to the rule. Demystifying Buhari is definitely not going to be a tea party. Unlike the others, Obasanjo’s binge of delirium in tagging every of his targeted victims as criminally corrupt might not stick with Buhari. And, regardless of what he says, it would be delusional for him to think that he remains the only living Nigerian leader without the tar of corruption. In case he has forgotten, a former Chairperson of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Mrs. Farida Waziri, had cautioned him to watch his tongue or risk being exposed. That was when Obasanjo described her as unqualified for the job of an anti-corruption czar, utterly mollified that the former governor of Delta State, James Ibori, played a crucial in Farida’s emergence.

Of course, Farida didn’t take the allegation lying low, cautioning the impertinent ex-president to be mindful of the saying that “those who live in glass house don’t throw stones, and, as such, Obasanjo should not allow me open up on him. Respectable elder statesmen act and speak with decorum.” Well, Obasanjo is not one to speak with the decent gait of a grey-haired statesman. He relishes swimming in his pond of hollow triumphalism as an incorruptible living legend. That seems to be the reality that nudges to talk down on other Nigerian leaders either dead or alive. Yet, it is a reality that has not been put to the test for some queer reasons. Fair enough, he didn’t take Farida on and the sleeping dog was allowed to rest. Now that he has decided to enter into a ‘roforofo’ fight with a brutally frank Buhari, one can only hope he has his facts right as Buhari does not look like someone that would clasp his hands in submission while Obasanjo runs his acerbic tongue on him recklessly.

Whilst jumping from pillar to post in a bid to install yet another president in power, Obasanjo should also be wary that the dynamics of the power game has changed. Farida spoke like someone who has classified information on him. If that was the case, there is nothing to suggest that someone in the Presidency is equally not in possession of that file. Buhari, in making his allegations, did not speak like someone who was making empty threat.

The President’s question was simple yet pregnant with meanings: why the megawatts of darkness after investing billions of dollars power generation? It is one question Obasanjo, in spite of his pontifications in his book, My Watch, has failed to answer convincingly. Should Buhari decide to push the conversation further by backing his innuendoes with classified documents, would he be able to dribble himself of the scandal?

By the way, I couldn’t recall the National Assembly, precisely the House of Representatives which probed the activities of the power sector under Obasanjo, exonerating from the scandalous perfidy of that time. Instead, he was excoriated for superintending over the benumbing malfeasance going under his nose. Specifically, the report indicted him and some of his top aides for playing one role or the other in the “high level corruption and unspeakable inefficiency and waste in the execution of projects and disbursements of funds’ that were exposed during the investigations. While Obasanjo reserves the right to gloat over his clearance of any involvement in the power fraud by the Ibrahim Lamurde-led EFCC, he should also note that there was the possibility, as being suggested in some quarters, that Lamurde could just be doing a clean-up on a report that was submitted to Farida after taking over from the woman Obasanjo never wanted on that seat in the first place. Knowing how things are done here, it is not an impossibility that someone just provided him with a soft landing, knowing how close he was to Jonathan then before their romance went bad. And so, until the real truth behind the mess that happened in that sector was laid bare and the truth about how the billions spent on the third term project were sourced, it would do Obasanjo well to step down on his old time fantasy of playing god in the affairs of this nation. Will he listen? I doubt if he would, anyway.