Tag: Jonathan

In his typically sanctimonious manner, ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo early this week passed harsh judgements on his successors while speaking at an international conference organised by the Covenant University, Ota, Ogun State. There was nothing unusual about the judgements, for he had passed similar ones in the distant and recent past. And there is nothing in his behaviour and antecedent to indicate that his abrasive and dismissive characterisation of his friends and enemies will ever end. The purpose of his judgements is not only to offer frank opinion on their qualities, assuming he believes they have any, but to put them in perfect contradistinction to his own qualities as the incomparable palladium of correctness and leadership. In fact, the only new thing about his harsh dismissal of his presidential peers is the inclusion of President Muhammadu Buhari in the equation.

President Buhari, he suggested condescendingly at the conference, knew little about economic policy and foreign affairs, but might be strong on security matters and, to some extent, anti-corruption war. Damning the president with faint praise, and speaking at length, Chief Obasanjo volunteered: “I will tell you what I know and I will tell you what I don’t know. I know General Buhari, he served under me in the military. His characteristics that I know, his behaviour that I know, he hasn’t deviated from it. He was not a perfect man and he would never be a perfect man and no leader would be a perfect human being. But if you really read my book ‘My Watch’, what I said about him is still correct. He is not a hot person when it comes to economy; he is not a very hot person when it comes to foreign affairs. But he will do well in the matters of military and he will do well in fighting Boko Haram.”

He gloated on: “I’ve gone to Maiduguri, I have met the Theatre Commander, I’ve met the General Officer Commanding (GOC), and Buhari has got that right. That, yes, the final nail on the coffin of Boko Haram is not military, it will be socio-economic development, and to be able to do that, the security of the area must be taken care of. So, for me, if we have no hope, we would have no future, we would have no life. I’m an incurable optimist as far as Nigeria is concerned. If somebody doesn’t get it all right, for now, we would get somebody who would come on and get it. Whatever the situation is, the administration before this had no clue on how to deal with Boko Haram. There is no doubt about that. This one is dealing with Boko Haram. The administration before it was deep in corruption. This one says it’s fighting corruption; you may not like the way he is fighting it. I fought corruption. We recovered $1.25 billion, £100 million and about N30 billion from Abacha and his henchmen. We didn’t make noise.”

This was a definitive and skewering impression of an imperfect President Buhari in the eyes of the all-rounder ex-president Obasanjo. Nigeria would struggle in economic policies, he suggested gloomily, and foreign affairs would continue to be shambolic. But even on the two achievements he grudgingly conceded to President Buhari, to wit, counterinsurgency operations and anti-corruption war, Chief Obasanjo clarified with an insinuation that he hoped everyone understood that what would knock Boko Haram into a cocked hat was not military action but ‘socio-economic development’. And on the anti-corruption war which he thought the president was waging somewhat admirably, Chief Obasanjo also insinuated it was accompanied by too much noise and publicity. Under his own presidency, the former president noted dryly, the anti-corruption war was effective, what with all the retrieval, and ‘we didn’t make noise’.

President Buhari should not rejoice at Chief Obasanjo’s qualified endorsement. The former president is notorious for putting down his foes and friends alike, regardless of how well they are performing. With a natural and unabated fondness for his own person, which some see as narcissism, he believes he is a matchless leader. If a friend or opponent betters him, he is scurrilous and unrelenting; and if the same friend or opponent is unable to match him, he is contemptuous. It is indeed impossible for anyone to satisfy him, no matter how hard they try. Had it not been impolitic of him, going by the almost universal manner he condemned his predecessors as military head of state, and his successors as elected president, he would have given Murtala Ramat Mohammed, the late military head of state who took him as deputy, the full length of his acerbic tongue. To continue to receive qualified endorsement in the eyes of so impatient a man, President Buhari would have to struggle valiantly to retain the admiration and goodwill of his countrymen. This will not be easy.

Chief Obasanjo saw nothing good in ex-president Goodluck Jonathan, whom he dismissed hideously as tactically incompetent and a cipher who initiated another ‘spate of corruption’ rather than build on what he (Obasanjo) did. But since he had said more than enough on Dr Jonathan in the past few years, he reserved his most cynical and sarcastic condemnation of any of his successors for the late ex-president Umaru Yar’Adua. Describing the late president as a revisionist, he added that instead of recognising the failures of successive Nigerian leaders, analysts were distracted by what they erroneously suggested were the failings of the constitution. “There is no constitution that is bad,” sneered Chief Obasanjo. “If I am given opportunity to write a new constitution for Nigeria today, there are aspects of our constitution that I would change. But in all seriousness, it’s not a matter of constitution that we are to worry about. If you remember, Yar’Adua (may his soul rest in peace) campaigned on the slogan of continuity. That was the content of his campaign. When he got there, he jettisoned continuity and began discontinuity. After his death, I asked one of his close associates. I said tell me what really happened. He said as soon as we left, some people got hold of him (Yar’Adua) and said ‘look, you will never succeed unless you run down Obasanjo’. He believed that. So, that is what he believed and that is what he did.”

Then, vaingloriously, he added the clincher against Mallam Yar’Adua: “Some of the things that we put in place that would help the country  I’ve talked about agriculture, I talked about debt; in fact, if debt relief was possible to be reversed, Yar’Adua would have reversed it. ” In short, none of his successors could pass muster. In Chief Obasanjo’s conceited opinion, he was nonpareil, and he should be hoisted aloft as the lodestar of leadership. Yet, it never occurred to him he was the architect of the misfortune he so acerbically and eloquently enunciated at the Covenant University conference. Not only was he the sole architect of that misfortune, he bears sole responsibility. He singlehandedly foisted Mallam Yar’Adua on Nigeria, knowing full well he was almost an invalid. And he rested the fulcrum of that government on the outmanoeuvered Dr Jonathan whom he thought could not call his soul his own. Chief Obasanjo in fact believed the pair of an invalid president and a docile vice president would enable him, out of government, to exert as much influence on the presidency as he would like, in addition to cleverly achieving the secondary goal of producing successors who could not hold the candle to him. Failing in both, he has become hysterical, gruff, peevish and inconsolable. The country is consequently still subjected to the periodic eruptions of his searing truculence.

Neither Mallam Yar’Adua nor Dr Jonathan had the physical or mental capacity to manage the affairs of Nigeria wholesomely. Nor was Chief Obasanjo himself able to give anything extraordinary beyond his piddling capacity and accomplishments. What is even worse is that the country is yet to rid itself of the deleterious effects of the chain reaction he triggered in 2007. Much more than the incapacity of his successors, what is indisputably evident about his successors is that Chief Obasanjo is a poor mentor, someone so wholly incapable of following anyone, let alone anyone following him. He belongs to no school of political or economic thought, and he has no expansive vision of anything, including of Nigeria and Africa. It was, therefore, out of the injurious limitations of his constricted worldview that he sought out his enfeebled successors and foisted them on a country enervated by its own ethnic and religious contradictions and structural weaknesses. Chief Obasanjo should not complain, for even if he were to get another chance in government, he would still be incapable of remedying the great moral wrong he committed against the nation. Indeed, there is nothing in his few books to indicate he is capable of the reflection and mortifying hindsight great leaders permit themselves after retirement.