Tag: Obasanjo

When I was in the village, to make sure that lice die, you put them between two fingernails and press hard to ensure they die and they always leave blood stains on the fingernails. To ensure you do not have blood on your fingernails, you have to ensure that lice are not harboured anywhere within your vicinity. The lice of poor performance in government – poverty, insecurity, poor economic management, nepotism, gross dereliction of duty, condonation of misdeed – if not outright encouragement of it, lack of progress and hope for the future, lack of national cohesion and poor management of internal political dynamics and widening inequality – are very much with us today. With such lice of general and specific poor performance and crying poverty with us, our fingers will not be dry of ‘blood’. Olusegun Obasanjo, “A Clarion Call”

The quote above comes from the first few paragraphs of Obasanjo’s widely discussed but grossly misnamed “letter” to Buhari. As I tried to show in last week’s column, Obasanjo’s document was not addressed at all to Buhari; it was addressed to the whole nation. Moreover, Obasanjo’s indictment went well beyond Buhari and his administration to embrace and implicate the entire political class and the ruling class political parties. This is why the former president was so scathing on both the PDP and the APC in his “clarion call”. Also, this is why Obasanjo placed great emphasis, great passion, on the need for the creation of a movement of Nigerians from below and across the length and breadth of the whole country. But will politicians decamp en mass from the APC and the PDP and from the other ruling class parties to join the movement of “Concerned Nigerians” (CN) that Obasanjo envisions as the nemesis of our bankrupt political class? More importantly, if this happens, how likely is the Obasanjo-inspired movement of Nigerians to be truly effective against what the former president, in the quote that serves as an epigraph to this essay, the “lice of poor performance in government”? These are the questions that I address in this piece.

It is a grotesque and shocking metaphor, “the lice of poor performance in government”. But it is a poor or unsatisfactory metaphor with which to try to invoke the current dire state and frightening future prospects of our country. This is because on the whole, lice do not kill their human victims, though of course they do cause great physical discomfort and unwanted social embarrassment. But most of the evils that Obasanjo lists under the “lice of poor performance in government” kill and they kill in astronomical numbers: poverty, insecurity, poor economic management, gross dereliction of duty, condonation of misdeed, poor management of internal political dynamics and widening inequality. Insecurity of life, limb and property alone accounts for hundreds of thousands dead while poor economic management, poverty and poor management of internal political dynamics place the lives of millions of Nigerians in great danger and a slow, festering despair that has seen the rise of suicides in our country. No, the crisis, the tragedy of poor performance in government in Nigeria goes well beyond the discomforts and the shame that lice cause their victims.

Literally and physiologically, the problems that lice cause are skin deep; they do not get to the inner recesses of the great internal organs and tissues of the human body. From this, I deduce the following point: Obasanjo’s passion and born-again angst about the terrible crises and tragedies caused by poor performance in government in Nigeria are skin deep, they are not life-changing or even personality-changing. I say this not with or in anger or outright dismissal of Obasanjo’s motives and intentions, but with a desire to warn Nigerians to be wary of whatever may be the former president’s conscious and unconscious motivations. At the very least, I am asking Nigerians to carefully and critically examine present and future developments surrounding the former president’s call for the formation of this movement of Concerned Nigerians. Permit me to give a short elaboration of this observation.

In the slightly more than a week since it was made, perhaps the single most noteworthy development pertaining to Obasanjo’s call for the formation of this movement is the number of reported or hinted defections to the movement of politicians from the PDP and the APC, most of them past and present members of the National Assembly. Of these, many are allegedly defecting to the Obasanjo-inspired “CN” because they are fearful that they may not get their party’s nomination for the 2019 general and state elections. As a result of this development, Obasanjo’s CN has more or less merged with or morphed into a so-called “Third Force” that had been in the news long before Obasanjo issued his recent “clarion call”. This so-called “Third Force” is “third” to the numbers 1 and 2 spots in the Nigerian political landscape occupied by the APC and the PDP respectively. Thus, if Obasanjo’s CN is morphing into or merging with this “Third Force” it means that Obasanjo’s movement is no more or less than a realignment of forces among the political class. Nigerians, please don’t be fooled – the same politicians responsible for the “lice of poor performance in government” in the APC and the PDP administrations are heading to Obasanjo’s CN with a view to capturing it!

In fairness to Obasanjo, he did have something to say in his “clarion call” about the possibility of the CN becoming a political party fielding candidates for elections. This is what he said: “But if at any stage the Movement wishes to metamorphose into a candidate-sponsoring Movement for elections, I will bow out of the Movement because I will continue to maintain my non-partisan position”. This seems to be a noble gesture. But I suggest that Obasanjo is being disingenuous here. This is because the woman or man that inspires a movement is its spiritual godmother or godfather, its symbolic and honorific head, with enormous influence over it. Indeed, without having inspired or created such a movement, in and out of office, in the military or the civilian dispensations, Obasanjo has always aspired to be this sort of figure in the affairs of the Nigerian political class: the Godfather, the Boss of Bosses. And in this role, he has presided over his own quota of the “lice of poor political government”. All the same, from the projected Concerned Nigerians movement, will a new, born-again democrat and populist emerge from the Obasanjo that we all know, the Obasanjo who, perhaps more than any other head of state in our country’s history – with the possible exception of Sani Abacha – hated and feared the actual and potential power ordinary Nigerians?

Many parts of the “clarion call” seek to indicate that this is an altogether new and reformed Obasanjo that is sincere, idealistic and focused on the ability and willingness of ordinary Nigerians from all walks of life and every corner of the country to take their individual and collective destinies into their own hands. Perhaps the most eloquent of such passages in the “clarion call” is the following segment that I am quoting in full: “Democracy is sustained and measured not by leaders doing extra-ordinary things, (invariably, leaders fail to do ordinary things very well), but by citizens rising up to do ordinary things extra-ordinarily well. Our democracy, development and progress at this juncture require ordinary citizens of Nigeria to do the extra-ordinary things of changing the course and direction of our lackluster performance and development. If leadership fails, citizens must not fail and there lies the beauty and importance of democracy. We are challenged by the current situation; we must neither adopt spirit of cowardice nor timidity let alone impotence but must be sustained by courage, determination and commitment to say and do and to persist until we achieve upliftment for Nigeria. Nothing ventured, nothing gained and we believe that our venturing will not be in vain. God of Nigeria has endowed this country adequately and our non-performance cannot be blamed on God but on leadership”.

In power, Obasanjo hated workers’ unions and their leaders with passion, especially the most radical and genuine among them. He hated student activists, especially the most courageous and outspoken among them. He couldn’t stand civil and human rights organizations and their spokespersons. He it was who, as military head of state, sent paramilitary forces into some universities to shoot and kill students. He sacked militant lecturers and those he couldn’t sack he hounded mercilessly. He had absolutely no use for the power of the masses of Nigerians to either elect or vote out of office their leaders and this was why he presided over the worst cases of election rigging in our country’s history since the return to formal civilian rule. The only concentration of ordinary Nigerians that Obasanjo loved and embraced were the crowds of bought and manipulated supporters in PDP rallies; any other assemblage of Nigerians other than for religious purposes terrified him and he had them closely monitored and controlled. Popular democracy, even populism of any kind from the pen of such a political hegemon as Olusegun Obasanjo is like saintly beatitudes from the mouth of a perjurer and a murderer.

I admit it: no man or woman is beyond redemption, in this case the redemption of political and historical redress against injustices and the misdeeds of the past. There is the ghost of a probability that Obasanjo in particular and the whole political class in our country in general, are seeking just such a redemption from their long, long breeding of the lice of poor performance in government. The first step in this direction is for them, Obasanjo and the political class, to admit to, and take personal and collective responsibility for the evils and misdeeds they have perpetrated, again and again. Let Olusegun Obasanjo take the first step in this act of redress and redemption: let him be man enough to confess his “sins”, let him admit that he, too, bred a lot of the lice of poor performance in government. Perhaps then, we may realistically hope that the movement he wants to create might just be reformist enough to make a historical and political difference.