With Typhoon Taiwo ripping his roof and the Yoruba Council Worldwide (YCW) aiming a blitzkrieg from outside, it’s testy times for former President Olusegun Obasanjo.
Quite the merciless storm: Ms Taiwo Martins (ex-Mrs. Obasanjo) virtually setting her former husband ablaze in justifiable public anger; and YCW going for broke!
Why, Prof. Wole Soyinka, supreme master of the cultured repartee, on September 24, added his own spice!
“My royal highnesses, I wish to assure you that I’m not about to bark at you to ‘stand up’ and ‘sit down’,” he told a select company. “This is a cultured gathering.” Ouch!
That elicited a hilarious guffaw. But the Ebora Owu wouldn’t find it a tad funny!
At last, the man that has lived a long and grumpy life of talking down to others — no matter whose ox is gored, as he often brags — just talked himself into a ditch at Iseyin!
When a self-famed Ebora spews gutsy insults at royal fathers, revered peers of the gods in the Yoruba cosmos, self-caused catastrophe is never far away!
Indeed, Obasanjo’s impish relish at insulting others has been a life-long hobby — most of them documented to boot, thus making himself a preening pariah to not a few.
Still, Iseyin was a new, new low!
The foundation of that talk-into-a-storm though, was firmly laid in 1990. That year, Obasanjo had released the second of his ego-tripping autobiographies: Not My will.
In that book, he cast great slurs on two personages: the great Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who the Yoruba revere as the second Oduduwa; and Gen. Yakubu Gowon, Obasanjo’s old commander-in-chief, suave and genteel as Obasanjo is raw and coarse.
First, he bragged that all Awolowo craved in his entire life, he — Obasanjo, a mere rustic boy from Ibogun-Olaogun, near Abeokuta! — got on the proverbial gold platter.
Were he a futurologist, the triumphalist in him would have pranced over his future eight years as elected president (1999-2007), added that tally to his three years as junta head (1976-1979) and screeched he not only triumphed over Awo, he was indeed the best that ever happened to Nigeria!
In truth, that grand delusion — the best that ever happened to Nigeria — feeds the Owu chief’s constant megalomania.
Still, everyone knows Awo, in rigorous thinking, clear vision and developmental ideas, theory and praxis, was head and shoulders above Obasanjo and his band of military ruffians — political soldier-usurpers that misruled this country for much too long.
Which explains why Awo (1909-1987) would in death command deep reverence, which a living Obasanjo craves, but will never get. Indeed, that craving for willy-nilly honour, unworthy of his trademark petulance, must have led him to his Iseyin cultural Waterloo.
Obasanjo also savaged Gen. Gowon, arbitrarily stripped him of his military rank, churlishly demoted him to “Mr. Gowon” and passed on him a military fatwa, should he ever set foot in Nigeria — all for unproved allegations over the 1976 Buka Suka Dimka coup attempt that took Gen. Murtala Muhammed’s life!
Still in 1995, karma would pay Obasanjo back in grim coins. Gen. Sani Abacha nearly tied Obasanjo to the stakes — Obasanjo, Abacha’s old commander-in-chief — for coup plotting, just as Obasanjo himself had tied Gowon to the stakes in Not My Will!
Only divine grace sprang the old soldier from that hook, though not before a hefty jail term. But grace hardly oozes from the public conduct of the man, old or young!
Still, the Awo/Gowon symbolism is telling: if you rubbish the prime icon of the modern Yoruba (Awo) — to which you claim nativity — and scorn your own army commander-in-chief (Gowon), which other shrine will you not profane?
Earlier in My Command, his Civil War memoirs (released in 1980), he had traduced Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle, his predecessor at the Third Marine Commando Division. The dreaded “Black Scorpion” had won the most bruising battles before Obasanjo harvested the Biafra surrender.
Still, after Awo and Gowon, he felt emboldened to gore about anyone — and did he do so with satanic relish!
Second Republic (1979-1983) President Shehu Shagari was a let-down — which he was, in truth — for wasting the 1979 military-to-civilian power transfer.
Gen. Ibrahim Babangida (self-named military “president” for eight years) was the worst to ever blight Nigeria — which he was.
Still, that frothy public sanctimony didn’t prevent Obasanjo from allegedly striking a one-term deal, with the same Babangida as successor, as part of the Army Arrangement that propelled Obasanjo to the 4th Republic presidency in 1999 — if a video clip, making the rounds is true, in which Senator Orji Uzor Kalu bared it all!
The stark Abacha wouldn’t stomach the cheap Pharisee that was his old commander-in-chief. That probably was why he roped Obasanjo into the so-called phantom coup, before he started running his mouth, as always, against the Abacha regime!
Earlier, as Ernest Shonekan’s iniquitous Interim National Government (ING) was being cooked at home, Obasanjo bobbed up abroad, claiming MKO Abiola, winner of the annulled June 12, 1993 presidential election, was not the “messiah”.
After leaving power in 2007, Obasanjo would descend on his successors — the tragic Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, on his dying hours; the sorry Goodluck Jonathan, mere fall guy for a corrupt PDP-era structure Obasanjo nurtured; and the Spartan Muhammadu Buhari, the opposition candidate that kicked PDP from the Abuja power gravy.
Most flailed under Obasanjo’s vicious verbal strafing but only PMB gave a quiet but devastating riposte.
Behind Obasanjo’s second coming power trophy — the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library, Abeokuta — PMB erected the Wole Soyinka train station, to serve millions of long-suffering Nigerians, as OOPL eternally sates Obasanjo’s sole gravy.
Posterity will judge: who, between the two, was the leader or the dealer!
It was this terrible complex, of annoying arrogance firing verbal diarrhoea, that spurred him to his Iseyin sacrilege, risking becoming a formal Yoruba pariah at old age.
Now, YCW demands Obasanjo must beg on 10 TV stations and 20 national dailies. It also told the Olowu of Owu-Egba to strip his Balogun of that title.
Karma! He that stripped Gowon of his military rank risks losing own traditional military title! Karma!
The Ebora — ever rough and gruff — will probably ride out the storm. Still, his march into wilful ostracism echoes the great Pericles’s of ancient Athens.
Gen. Pericles was voted into political exile for being too “popular”. Gen. Obasanjo risks cultural exile for ringing notoriety: unabashed insolence to revered natural rulers!
Even if he rides this harsh scrutiny, who survives the undiluted scorn his former wife, Ms Taiwo Martins, publicly poured on him, in that long, no-holds-barred put down?
And to think the crux of her message was that her children, and children’s children, be shielded from the dire comeuppance of her former husband’s grand misconduct!
On this one, the Ebora Owu is well and truly on his own!
