Of recent, President Goodluck Jonathan has been under siege like no other president in recent history. In quick succession, he has come under indirect attack from the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, and then directly from the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Waziri Tambuwal, and even more directly, from his erstwhile benefactor and estranged godfather, former president, General Olusegun Obasanjo.
Not least of all, the man has come under renewed attack from the new opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) which has called for the president’s impeachment subsequent upon Obasanjo’s open letter to his erstwhile godson, a letter in which the godfather has accused his godson of sundry offences, including venality, incompetence and bad faith as leader of his party, as president of the country, as commander-in-chief of its armed forces, as its chief security officer and as its political leader.
Last week, the press published a letter the CBN governor had written to the president months before accusing the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation of failing to remit $49.8 billion (about N8 trillion) from the sales of crude oil for 19 months ending last July. That letter can be interpreted as Malam Sanusi’s indirect way of saying the president was either clueless about the alleged mishandling of the oil business by NNPC or he was negligent or, worse still, complicit.
The CBN governor would not be the first to raise doubts about the transparency of the NNPC and, by extension, that of the Federal Government on whose behalf NNPC handles the oily business. As far back as at least 2003, Engineer Hamman Tukur, former chairman of the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), had a running battle with both the NNPC and President Olusegun Obasanjo about money the corporation was supposed to have remitted to the Federation Account. At one time he even wrote the Senate Committees on Appropriations and Finance, accusing the NNPC of short-changing the country of over N300 billion, a charge that then managing director of the corporation, Mr Jackson Gaius-Obaseki, promptly denied.
More recently, the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) warned in its 2011 report on the oil industry that there were revenue short falls of N3.2 trillion from NNPC. Similarly in its controversial report on fuel subsidy, a panel under Malam Nuhu Ribadu appointed by the Minister of Petroleum, Mrs Dizeani Allison-Madueke, to look into the subject said about $30 billion of oil money could not be accounted for.
In all three cases, the public never got any satisfactory answers before the hullabaloos they generated fizzled out.
The difference with the CBN letter is the scale of the alleged venality, which is the biggest so far. Another difference is that the NNPC seems to have a satisfactory answer this time to the charges of playing hanky-panky with oil revenue. Yes, it seems to say, the CBN governor may have got his sums correct but he was wrong not to have disaggregated the total oil revenue among the parastatals collectively responsible for remittances into the Federation Account, the others being the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) and the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR).
However, even if the CBN governor has goofed – and in spite of NNPC’s seemingly satisfactory explanation, the jury is still out over the issue – no one can deny the fact that long before President Jonathan the presidency has never been in the frontline of the war against corruption in Nigeria’s oily business which has made it one of the most opaque in the world. The problem with the president is that, instead of the breath of fresh air he promised in the way the affairs of state have been conducted in his 2011 presidential campaigns, things have only grown worse exponentially.
Thus, it is difficult, if not impossible, to deny Tambuwal’s charge that the president’s “body language” in the crusade against corruption does not suggest someone who is committed, willing and able to fight the scourge.
However, of all the attacks the president has come under lately, none has apparently rattled him like that of his estranged godfather and benefactor. This should not surprise anyone if only because no true godson can ever be happy at being repudiated by his godfather, no matter the extent of disagreement between them.
Add to this the mystique that this godfather’s repudiation has almost always led to the downfall of the object of his attack – the presidency of Alhaji Shehu Shagari whom he had handed over power to in1979 fell in 1983, the regime of Major-General Muhammadu Buhari which took over from Shagari fell in 1985 and General Ibrahim Babangida who ousted Buhari in a palace coup “steeped aside” in August 1993, not long after Obasanjo publicly chastised each of them – then it’s easy to see why President Jonathan should be worried by the tone and substance of General Obasanjo’s letter.
General Sani Abacha, who threw out General Babangida’s interim civilian administration in November 1993, seemed to have punctured this mystique when, first, he sentenced Obasanjo to death but later commuted the sentence to life for his alleged complicity in a coup attempt against Abacha in 1995, due to pressure from the international community to which Obasanjo was well-connected. But then Abacha died mysteriously in office in 1998 and Obasanjo emerged straight from prison to the presidency in 1999, as if to reinforce his mystique of a man whose curse, for want of a better word, is never in vain.
It is highly unlikely that President Jonathan would fall because of Obasanjo’s “curse”. Military coups have generally since become discredited as a means of regime change, never mind the recent cases of Mali, Egypt and the Central African Republic. Impeachment for “gross misconduct”, as the opposition APC called for over the weekend, is also not a viable option even though the president, like his godfather, has committed almost every impeachable offence you can imagine, not least of which is his highly selective and poor implementation of the country’s annual budgets; the opposition in the National Assembly does not have numbers but even if they do, our ethnic, religious and geo-political divisions and the power of cash coupled with the greed of the ruling elite generally, make it virtually impossible to depose anyone through impeachment.
However, even though President Jonathan is unlikely to fall on account of Obasanjo’s curse, it has damaged the viability of his candidacy in the 2015 presidential election almost beyond repairs.
As president, Obasanjo is, no doubt, one of Nigeria’s, indeed Africa’s, most competent and knowledgeable. Also he is, in spite of the presidency’s most recent retort to his letter that the man is a “spineless coward”, one of Nigeria’s most courageous; for example, only a man of courage will disregard warnings while he is abroad of his imminent arrest once he returns to his country and still go ahead not only to fly back but continue with his criticisms of the authorities, as Obasanjo did under Abacha in 1995.
However, as almost everyone will agree, the man is the last who should preach the virtues of good governance, transparency and good faith to anyone, given the proverbial venality, insecurity, institutional instability and acts of bad faith that characterised his eight-year rule as civilian president.
Even then, his propensity to preach what he does not practise should not detract from his courage to speak truth to power when he is virtually alone among our past leaders that are unhappy with President Jonathan’s dismal record of performance, who can speak out without the matter being turned into an ethnic, sectional or sectarian conflict. It’s hardly difficult to imagine how, for example, Mujahid Asari Dokubo, the outspoken Ijaw militant, would have since turned Obasanjo’s letter into an ethnic or sectional thing or how Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, the Christian Association of Nigeria’s president, would have since turned the letter into a religious war if it had been written by, say, Generals Buhari or Babangida.
The only other past leader I can think of who could tick off the president without the matter being given an ethnic or religious colouration is General T. Y. Danjuma. Two Fridays ago, he reportedly lambasted the president in words and tone even more acerbic than Obasanjo’s letter over his incompetence and weak leadership at a private dinner of a very select few initiated by Chief Tony Anenih to solve the seemingly intractable PDP crisis. However, as a private takedown, Danjuma’s reported criticism of the president cannot obviously have the same effect as Obasanjo’s letter.
If nothing else that letter has given the president plenty food to rethink his 2015 presidential ambition. It has also made it difficult, if not impossible for the president’s supporters, his war commanders and foot soldiers alike, to use ethnicity and religion as effective propaganda weapons like they did in the 2011 elections.
