Former President Olusegun Obasanjo enjoys the limelight for the right or wrong reasons. GBADE OGUNWALE writes on the ex-President’s many missteps in and out of power
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo is one Nigerian nobody can choose to ignore. He has dominated the public space more than any other Nigerian leader dead or alive. The ex-army general has remained in the national consciousness since the Nigerian Civil War (1967 to 1970) to date. General Obasanjo was military Head of State from 1976 to 1979. He staged a comeback twenty years later to emerge as a democratically-elected President from 1999 to 2007. Fate had thrust on his shoulders a golden opportunity to reset Nigeria on the path of renown on the global stage with his second coming. But the ever-presumptuous ex-soldier flunked out for lack of foresight. There was no way he could have offered his fatherland virtues he did not possess in the first place.
One in a string of his perverse sense of values was the irreverent command he dished out to a group of Yoruba Obas in Oyo State at a public function on Friday, September 15, 2023. In a viral video, Chief Obasanjo is seen commanding the royal fathers who were seated in front of him to stand up. They all stood up as he had commanded them. And after savouring the vain glory he derived from humiliating the monarchs, the raffish ex-soldier ordered them to take their seats. Revelling in a euphoria of his “royal conquest,” the ex-President then went ahead to tutor the Obas on why they must subordinate themselves to Presidents and governors as the case may be. Judging by the triumphant ting in his otherwise croaky voice, it was obvious he relished chafing his messy rump against the royal robes of the thoroughly befuddled kings. He treated the royal fathers the way a headmaster would treat primary school pupils in a class. It was an ego trip he undertook to affirm his grotesque sense of self-importance. What many did not know, however, is that the ex-President carefully chose the targets for his latest assault. For, Obasanjo, with all his egregiousness, dared not serve certain Yoruba monarchs the same dish. Certainly, not the likes of HRH, Oba Sikiru Kayode Adetona, the Awujale of Ijebuland without the highly revered monarch reminding him of the difference between a butterfly and a bird! Those who know say that not on one or two occasions had the Awujale reportedly have put him in his rightful place in previous charged encounters. And this was the same Obasanjo who prostrated for the Ooni of Ife, HRH, Oba Adeyeye Ogunwusi and the Olu of Warri, Ogiame Atuwatse III at separate public events not too long ago. His is a life of many contradictions. Chief Obasanjo has continually basked in self-conceited fantasies of being the “Deputy God Almighty,” a phantom he believes should elevate him to the status of “General Overseer of the Federal Republic (GOFR).”
In a recent public statement, the Balogun Owu claimed to know the identities of certain Nigerian pastors and church leaders who will not make heaven when they die. He lives in his own world of phantoms. In and out of power, the former President had consistently exhibited profound irreverence towards the country’s democratic, religious, public and traditional institutions. He had never held anything sacred, not even the Nigerian constitution which upheld his legitimacy and which clearly defined the limits of his powers as President. In 2004, in one of his outlandish public outings in Jos, Plateau State as a sitting President, Obasanjo had, in a similar fashion, denigrated the Christian Association of Nigerian (CAN) and some of its leaders. “CAN my foot,” he had blurted out, and went ahead to call the then chairman of Plateau chapter of CAN, Rev Yakubu Pam “total idiot”.
His innate character flaws trailed his public conducts and policy actions throughout his entire eight-year Presidency. The 2003 general election, the first to be conducted by his administration and in which he sought re-election, was handed down as electoral decree. The Southwest had roundly rejected in 1999. Through grand deception and guile, he snatched five of the six states in the zone for his PDP. Sitting governors of the defunct Alliance for Democracy (AD) seeking re-election in Oyo, Ondo, Ogun, Osun and Ekiti states were pilloried. He attempted had attempted the same electoral heist in Lagos State but discovered in the process that he wasn’t the only one with an ironclad skull. None of the election petition tribunals anywhere in the Southwest had the balls to upturn the outcome of the farcical polls. Obasanjo took the farce a notch higher during the 2007 election that preceded his exit from power. That election is widely adjudged as the worst in the history of elections in Nigeria. A winner in that presidential election was announced while poll results were still being awaited from many states. Governorship mandates in five of the six states in the Southwest previously snatched from the AD, were consolidated. It was after his exit from power that the courts were able to summon the courage to return the stolen mandates to their rightful owners in opposition parties. That accounted for having off season governorship elections in Ekiti, Ondo, Osun, Edo and Anambra states to date. The late Umaru Yar’ Adua, who was declared as the winner of the 2007 presidential election, was honest enough to publicly admit that the poll that brought him in as president was deeply flawed. Dr Goodluck Jonathan who was Yar’ Adua’s deputy and who stepped in as president following the death of his boss, also admitted to the electoral heist seven years after.
Dr Jonathan had, at a public function in 2014, declared that the 2007 election through which he emerged as vice president caused him a lot of embarrassment. While speaking at the Leon Sullivan Dialogue on Nigeria in Washington DC in 2010, Obasanjo had declared that not even Jesus Christ can conduct election in Nigeria that would not be disputed. “With all due respect, if Jesus Christ could come to the world and be the chairman of INEC, any election he would conduct will be disputed,” he declared before his foreign audience. Could that be the reason he failed to envision or initiate electoral reforms in all his eight years as president? Perhaps. During his two terms as president, Obasanjo replaced the rule of law with the rule of claw. He trampled upon virtually every democratic institution and deployed instruments of state to settle personal scores. He instigated the impeachment of sitting governors in Plateau and Ekiti states using a numerical minority of the members in their state assemblies. He followed it up by imposing a state of emergency on the two states and appointed two ex Army Generals as sole administrators to replace the governors he impeached unconstitutionally. The courts however voided the two impeachments after Obasanjo’s exit.
In 2003, a former Anambra Governor, Dr. Chris Ngige, got the rawest deal in the hands of some power syndicates acting in cahoots with then President Obasanjo. As a sitting governor, Ngige was abducted by a group of the ex-President’s minions who subjected him to all forms of dehumanizing treatment for several days. The National Assembly (from 1999 to 2007) was a house of commotion as the ex-President bullied the leadership and instigated the removal of Senate Presidents at will. His eight-year Presidency saw to the emergence of five Senate Presidents, instead of two. There were Evans Enwerem, Chuba Okadigbo, Adolphus Wabara, Pius Anyim and Ken Nnamani. They served an average of 19 months and six days per person.
One of the ex-President’s graceless moments was during the multiple bomb blasts that rocked the Ikeja military cantonment in 2002. In the midst of fear and apprehension the incident evoked in the entire country, Obasanjo arrived at the scene talking down on the sufficiently-horrified survivors and other concerned Nigerians. “I am not supposed to be here,” he bawled, telling his frightened audience that he abandoned a scheduled foreign trip just to visit the site. There and then, without any investigation or assessment of the situation, Obasanjo thanked God that “nobody died” in the blasts. However, the full impact of the blasts started manifesting a few hours after his departure to Abuja. About 1,100 Nigerians lives were lost to the blasts with more than 20,000 sustaining varying degrees of injury.
Gen. Obasanjo listens only to himself. In his own estimation, he is the only best thing to have happened to Nigeria. Trying to make him see the grim realities of his jaundiced world view will be as futile as attempting to force water to flow uphill. Those expecting him to change must first change the colour of blood from red to green. Otherwise, they labour in vain.
