Those who plan to write former president Olusegun Obasanjo’s biography will labour to make sense of his person, his philosophy and many jarring contradictions, and his times in office, both as a military dictator and democratically elected president. If the biographers want to be true to their art, they will find themselves skewering him on every page, and perhaps in every paragraph. Even the redemptive part of his leadership will, under their pens, turn out as a vice or caricature. After he relinquished office as dictator in 1979, no elected or unelected successor was ever good enough for him or the country, even though he masterminded the elections that cobbled the Second Republic’s constitution, produced his successor, and erected the 1979 political dispensation on quicksand. And after he left office as a two-term president in 2007, again, no one could hold the candle to him. Since then he has given everyone, his successors and public alike, the full length of his waspish tongue.
Last week, he was again at his dogmatic worst in the presence of proselytising lawmakers who sought his endorsement for the constitutional amendment they hoped to sponsor. They are probably shamefaced by now. Led by Hon. Ikenga Ugochinyere (Ideato North and South constituency of Imo State), the lawmakers sought the former president’s buy-in, believing, strangely, that his support would go a long way in helping them push the agenda of one-term rotational presidency. Never one to shun the limelight, Chief Obasanjo welcomed them but poured cold water on their enthusiasm. Their goal, he said firmly, was both tangential and inconsequential to the real issues bedeviling Nigeria. He said: “The issue is not whether Nigeria should adopt a single six-year term or maintain the status quo. If the mentality of the people in governance does not change, then Nigeria will remain where it is. For me, the issue is for us to get it right. Whether we have one term of six years or two terms of four years, where it’ll work is our mentality. Our main problem is ourselves, and until we are taking care of ourselves it doesn’t matter. We may have one term of four years, one term of six years, one term of seven years, if it’s the same people and the same mentality and the way we do things then it won’t change. Yes, the system; yes, democracy. We have to rethink democracy. We have to rethink the form of government. But what about the character of the people in government? With all due respect, most of them should be behind bars, some should even be on the gallows and that is the truth.”
In one long exhalation, Chief Obasanjo threw out the reform agenda of his guests and redirected them to the more salient issue of leadership character. Given the controversy swirling around Hon Ugochinyere and the NNPC probe panel he chaired, it is not clear whether the former president meant to fry any small fish other than the successor presidents he has loathed since he left office. On the surface, Chief Obasanjo was right about the inconsequentiality of term limits, and he may have even begun to rethink his specious argument about the need to rethink the liberal democracy bequeathed to Africans by Western powers. But it is remarkable that in his lengthy and didactic pontifications before his chafing guests, during which he boxed the air and thumped the table, he was not struck by a sense of irony that his eight unbroken and largely uneventful years as president did not afford Nigeria the benefit of his quaint moralising.
Thereafter, Chief Obasanjo launched into what he considered the indispensable core of leadership, the issue of character. But no matter how hard anyone tries, they could never get the former president to define the term beyond his sophomoric platitudes with which he has inundated his longsuffering guests. He has written books, some of them panegyrics on his time in office, led Nigeria for about 11 years, and addressed the world, the continent, and Nigeria too many times to count on diverse subjects. But in none of these, whether in books or public fora, had he ever addressed the subject of character in its most intellectual, transcendental and nuanced sense. Undoubtedly, he frequently talks about character, belabouring friends and enemies in equal measure, as indeed he did to the besotted Hon. Ugochinyere and his co-travellers, but he suffuses his speeches and references with the romantic and rudimentary notion of what character means rather than offer the deeper, classical definition. Nor could he resist the sanctimonious urge to ask for the jailing of leaders who lacked the character he talked about, insisting laughably that “most of them should be behind bars”. Surely, he does not think he would be excluded from that hypothetical list, especially given his massive investments in lands, agriculture and education while still in office. He is like Nigerians who romanticise revolutions and coups d’etat, imagining that revolutions can be confined to test tubes, and coups could never lead to war, and they and their families are immune to the sanguinary and cataclysmic consequences of coups and revolutions.
Chief Obasanjo’s sweeping dismissal of other political leaders gives the impression he really thinks he is above suspicion. Such delusions are a consequence of his lack of introspection. Throughout the 10 days of protest in some states of Nigeria, a probably disillusioned Chief Obasanjo drew the attention of the administration to the dangers of not heeding the cries of the youths. He said: “As I have warned earlier, we should know that we are all sitting on a powder keg if we fail to begin to do the right thing. For instance, what the youths are demanding is very legitimate and should be listened to. Or why should they be denied what rightfully belongs to them? They make demands, and we are not listening to them. Many of them are frustrated, desperate, angry, and unemployed. What do we expect? They deserve to be given listening ears.” As a former president who unconvincingly claims to respect democracy and has spoken about reforming the country’s democratic system away from its Western straitjacket, he did not seize the opportunity of the visiting legislative reformers to denounce the idiocy of protesters calling for a coup, nor did he think it fit to denounce the obviously partisan call for the overthrow of the constitution. Most of the 15 or 20 demands of the protesters were unrealistic in the extreme; but Chief Obasanjo glossed over any jarring contradiction to instead sound the alarm while banging the table before his guests, engaging in outright mendacity, and feigning passion, patriotism and impatience.
In the past few months, and in fact since last year when he hoped a revolution would sweep away the result of the 2023 presidential election, he has spoken pessimistically about Nigeria, democracy and the administration. There were no encouraging words from him, no attempt whatsoever to inspire the country into believing in itself, no attempt to rally the country behind great ideals to sustain and improve constitutional rule, and no indication at all that he expects the country sometime in the future to surmount the difficulties it faces. Everything from him has been about depression, discouragement, alarm, and catastrophe. If the country does not revolve around him, he always hoped his prophecies about its impending collapse would be self-fulfilling. But perhaps he is not even conscious of his pessimistic and dismissive characterisation of modern Nigeria, and he has drawn no lessons at all from the anomie in Somalia, the confusion in Kenya, the great example set by Britain in dealing with violent protesters and those who incite them on social media, and the global economic crisis from which Nigeria is certainly not immune.
