Tag: Obasanjo

IN a devastating putdown last week and with his usual cruel frankness, ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo gave what amounted to a mimic state of the nation address at a lecture in Lagos that pummelled four principal groups or persons in Nigeria, including President Muhammadu Buhari, the judiciary and the National Assembly. The former president was unsparing and unrepentantly direct. His motives, as usual, are controversial and probably impure; but whenever he can fathom his way through the stalactites and stalagmites of his cluttered thoughts, he manages to address issues that trouble the nation. Even then, though his diagnoses may sometimes be right, his prognoses are often either misplaced or self-serving. This contradiction is customary of self-righteous leaders.

On the economy, Chief Obasanjo had this to say in the paper he gave at the First Akintola Williams Annual Lecture in Lagos: “No administration can or should be comfortable with the excruciating pain of debilitating and crushing economy. Businesses are closing, jobs are being lost and people are suffering. I know that President Buhari has always expressed concern for the plight of the common people but that concern must be translated to workable and result-oriented socio-economic policy and programme that will turn the economy round at the shortest time possible…I believe that going for a huge loan under any guise is inadvisable and it will amount to going the line of soft option, which will come to haunt us in future.  We immediately need loans to stabilise our foreign reserve and embark on some infrastructure development, but surely not $30 billion over a period of less than three years.”

Whether he was merely trying to curry national relevance or sustain it, Chief Obasanjo nonetheless spoke the truth to President Buhari on the economy. The president probably realises and feels the pains the people are going through, but he seems to have reposed all hope in securing a $30bn external loan to jump-start the faltering and gasping economy. But if Nigeria went through excruciating pains to exit a crippling $33bn loan secured by many governments over three decades, and had to pay a painful $12bn to get a relief of about $18bn, which many economists felt was insensitive and unwise given the size of the Nigerian economy, it is indeed hard to defend the reckless attempt to secure another $30bn loan, this time, in three years, in addition to the about $10bn already owed. There is no way to defend a $40bn debt.

The former president was even more vitriolic on the controversy surrounding the arrest of judges and the raids on their residences. Said he: “Three weeks before the first three judges were arrested for corruption, I was talking to a fairly senior retired public officer who put things this way, ‘The Judiciary is gone, the National Assembly is gone, the military is sunk and the civil service was gone before them; God save Nigeria’.  I said a loud Amen.  Three weeks later, the process of saving the Judiciary began. And if what I have gathered is anything to go by, there may be not less than two score of judicial officers that may have questions to answer. That will be salutary for the Judiciary and for the Nation. While one would not feel unconcerned for the method used, one should also ask if there was an alternative. A drastic action was needed to save the situation, albeit one would have preferred an alternative that would serve the same purpose, if there was one.  In the absence of that alternative, we must all thank God for giving the President the wisdom, courage and audacity for giving the security agencies the leeway to act.”

Nothing showed the appalling depths leadership has sunk to in Africa than Chief Obasanjo’s superficial reasoning on the judges’ controversy. He supported the treatment the justices were subjected to, he said grimly, but he felt bothered, only as an afterthought, that there could be an alternative to a measure he thought was drastic but needful. Here, as elsewhere during his presidency, his military instinct trumped his democratic instinct. His preference for a better alternative, which he seemed to think existed somewhere in his imagination, was nothing but a product of his boyish admiration for rhetoric. Almost as soon as he asked himself whether an alternative existed, he also answered that none existed, and that on the judges affair, God obviously imparted wisdom, courage and audacity to President Buhari for which Nigerians must be thankful. There was nothing about the “intellectualism, strategy and philosophy” he talks so glibly about when he later, in the same lecture, indulged in self-praise over his tenure. It was clear he lacked the intellectual depth for introspection, and the expansive knowledge, logic and discipline for reflection. He thought nothing of the cost to the judiciary of the president’s action, nor, as he was to argue later when he called for a purge of the legislature, of the dire impact of a grandstanding but morally defective executive imposing heavily on the other arms of government. The fact is that both Chief Obasanjo and President Buhari are not convinced democrats. There were indeed alternatives to the manner the president moved against the judges, but these do not fit into their constricted worldviews.

Chief Obasanjo was in his elements when he denounced the National Assembly. He had had a running battle with that arm of government when he was president, and they had scuttled his dream for tenure elongation or, as former vice president Atiku Abubakar said, life presidency. He never forgave them, and there was no foot they could place right after that. Hear him: “The National Assembly stinks and stinks to high heavens. It needs to be purged. With appropriate measures, the budget of the National Assembly can be brought down to less than 50% of what it is today…The National Assembly cabal of today is worse than any cabal that anybody may find anywhere in our national governance system at any time…The National Assembly is a den of corruption by a gang of unarmed robbers.”

The former president was deeply embroiled in the scandal the legislature became under his presidency. They were instinctively corrupt; but so was he. They were amoral; so was he. They placed themselves before country; so, too, did Chief Obasanjo in an even more demeaning and offensive manner, for he was incapable of placing anything, including his family and friends, before himself. He had no capacity for sacrifice of any kind, and it is baffling he demands it of others. Had Chief Obasanjo been altruistic and intellectual as he has tried to convey, he would have coaxed or cajoled the legislature into the path of rectitude and helped the country lay a solid foundation for democracy. Instead, he was locked in deathly struggle with them and engaged in needless and wasteful supremacy battle with an arm of government simple foresight would have led him to nurture. Quite apart from the unpresidential scurrility with which he dismisses the legislature, it is tragic he is lending his atrocious examples to President Buhari who himself always acts as if democracy and its restraints are inimical to common sense, peace and stability.

Finally, it is perhaps fitting that of the four notable things Chief Obasanjo drew attention to in his controversial lecture, he should end with a fulsome and exasperating acclamation of his presidency. He had noted, he said dryly, that President Buhari lumped all his predecessors together in one grand notorious heap. That should not be, he cautioned, for the period between 1999 and 2007 was the golden era. “The blanket adverse comments or castigation of all democratic administrations from 1999 by the present administration is uncharitable, fussy and (futile),” fumed Chief Obasanjo. “Politics apart, I strongly believe that there is a distinction between the three previous administrations that it would be unfair to lump them all together… Now that we have had change because the actors and the situation needed to be changed, let us move forward to have progress through a comprehensive economic policy and programme that is intellectually, strategically and philosophically based.”

He is right to counsel President Buhari to quit fussing over the past and get a move on. But for a man who, while he was president, launched a presidential appeal fund for his own private university and library, and raised billions, it is not certain what kind of examples and ethics he was recommending. The economy under him ran on the adrenalin of high oil prices, the kind President Buhari wistfully talked about some months ago as the economy began to plummet. As long as he has breath, ex-president Obasanjo will continue to buffet the country with his sanctimonious examples of a great yesteryear which he presided over. He will have to be tolerated, even if he is nearly always wrong or self-centred. He had done some good as president. Like his good fortune when heaven paved the way for him with the death of Gen Murtala Mohammed in 1976, and rising oil prices when he was elected president in 1999, his modest achievements and his extraordinary good luck will qualify him to continue ridiculing his betters with malignant glee and his inferiors with unsparing animosity.