General Olusegun Obasanjo never does anything by half. For him, it is the full Monty or nothing.
Consider, first, the sartorial transformation he has undergone. Time was when he went about his business in clothes that seemed to have been made by a journeyman carpenter. Back then, he would not have won a competition for fine grooming even if he was the only contestant.
Today, the finest fabrics and the most exquisite tailoring combine to make his wardrobe probably the most elegant among members of his generation and indeed any generation.
If President Goodluck Jonathan is minded to look into how his estranged patron’s wardrobe has evolved quietly and almost imperceptibly over the past three years, he will find it a rewarding study in real transformation.
Consider, next, the three volume blockbuster Obasanjo released two weeks ago by way of his autobiography. Even without the controversy that has dogged My Watch since its release, and the rebuttals that have been issued by those chafing at its content, it is a landmark publication.
Another memoirist would have released the first volume and spent some two years or longer working on the second, finally proceeding to work on the third and final volume, which would not go to the press for at least another two years.
Not Obasanjo, and not for him that kind of leisurely pace. He could not, to do a riff on the author’s style, tarry to stamp the era sharply and indelibly with his wit, wisdom, peeves, prejudices, insights, revelations, revisions, disclosures, afterthoughts, rationalisations and evasions, all spiced with rumour, gossip, putdowns and plain abuse.
That, after all, is the quintessence of the political memoir.
I have not read the memoir. I have not even set my eyes upon it. Everything I know about it has been gleaned from the newspapers and online publications. And what I have gleaned from those sources suggests powerfully that, like its author, it is as blunt as a punch to the nose, and as subtle as a sledgehammer.
I would not have said many of the things Obasanjo is reported to have said, or I would have said them differently. But then, I am not Obasanjo. In matters of this kind, he operates by his own rules, untroubled by consequences. If anything, he actually revels in the consequences, seeing them as conclusive evidence that he was dead on target
And see how reactions to the memoir have poured forth.
Even before it rolled off the press, President Jonathan, who must have been informed that Obasanjo gave him a thorough scalping in the book, reportedly appealed to the author to delay publication until after the presidential election scheduled for February 2015.
Obasanjo refused. As everyone who has worked with or for him knows, and as Dr Jonathan ought to know, Obasanjo is not the most obliging of persons. To his credit, Jonathan took Obasanjo’s refusal for an answer and moved on.
Police Inspector General, Suleiman Abba, must have been attending to more important issues while all this was going on. Otherwise, drawing on his acclaimed expertise in constitutional law, he would have deployed his men to block publication by all means necessary, even without instructions “from above.”
In the end, it took a fugitive from the American criminal justice system with the improbable name of Kashamu Buruji to do what Jonathan could not do Buruji, a dual citizen of Nigeria and Benin Republic, had sought an injunction to block publication of My Watch, claiming that it contained libellous material that was the subject of ongoing litigation.
Buruji had not read the book. Neither had the presiding judge, Mr Justice Valentine Ashi, of the Abuja High Court. Yet, amazingly, Justice Ashi granted the petition.
This is a classic instance of prior restraint, or pre-publication censorship, and it is inimical to the freedom of speech and press consecrated in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Its application had been derogated back in 18th Century by the great English jurist, Sir William Blackstone, in his monumental Commentaries on the Laws of England – the laws from which our judicial system derives.
“The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state but this,” Blackstone wrote, “consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published. Every freeman has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public: to forbid this, is to destroy the freedom of the press: but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous, or illegal, he must take the consequence of his temerity.”
More than three centuries later, in the famous 1972 case of the Pentagon Papers centring on publication of classified documents detailing the origins of America’s involvement in the Vietnam, the Supreme Court of the United States held that recourse to prior restraint carries a “heavy presumption” of unconstitutionality.
It is in truth shocking, therefore, that in 2014, a High Court in Nigeria would grant a petition to block publication of a book that the petitioner – and the judge – had not read, on the speculation that it might contain material prejudicial to a defamation lawsuit the petitioner had filed in respect of the same matter.
But Justice Ashi was not yet done.
The book had been published before the injunction, and arrangements for its public presentation completed. Obasanjo, being Obasanjo, went ahead with the presentation anyway, quipping that public presentation and distribution were not enjoined, only publication, which had been completed.
Whereupon Justice Ashi, citing Obasanjo for contempt, ordered law enforcement officials to impound unsold copies in circulation and block further distribution until Obasanjo will have purged himself of contempt.
In a narrow, technical sense, the contempt citation may well be warranted. But the seizure ordered by the court is clearly an overreach.
The material at the heart of Buruji’s petition has been discussed widely in national newspapers and newsmagazines and on the Internet for months. Just Google “Buruji,” and everything Obasanjo has been saying about him and everything he has said about Obasanjo in return literally leaps at you from the computer screen, as well as the narrative of Buruji’s entanglement with the American criminal justice system.
Mr Justice Ashi therefore acted in vain, and arguably in error, when he granted Buruji’s petition to block publication of My Watch. If the memoir did further harm to the reputation Buruji is claiming than the publication that is the subject of his ongoing defamation lawsuit against Obasanjo, he was free to demand aggravated or punitive damages.
Justice Ashi also overreached when he ordered confiscation of unsold copies of the controversial memoir. The book raised no national security issues, and the matter before the court involved only civil law.
On both counts, his ruling was an assault on the freedom of the press as expounded by Blackstone.
Re: Mainstreamers at Work
Chief Ebenezer (Ebino Topsy) Babatope was grieved that I characterised him as a “mainstreamer “and as an authority on “mainstreaming” in my December 2, 2014, column, “Mainstreamers at work, again.” He says he has never belonged in that group and does not subscribe to its ideology.
I sincerely apologise for attributing to him views he does not hold and opinions he has never expressed.
Babatope has paid a fearsome price for his political activism spanning five decades. There was no imputation in my article that his current political affiliation stemmed from pecuniary calculations.
