In Nigeria, it’s no longer as usual to have in place a puppet or dummy government that’s constitutionally independent but, in practice, being controlled by an outside powerful individuals. But the nation’s former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, has always craved to have the policies and actions of the government controlled by him even when he’s no longer in government. He has a longing for intrigues, plots and rackets to manipulate government, and he does that at full throttle, unmindful of accuracy, lucidity and logic. His brand of outbursts that more often triggers thundering rumble of ear-blo
Obasanjo wanting to control the government is not a passing fancy. It is not a minimalist plan to activate his audacious hold on power that abruptly ended years back with the fall of his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)’s mentee – ex-president Goodluck Jonathan. To manipulate the government in power and make it dimwit underlines Obasanjo’s open endorsement of Peter Obi, the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate. Obasanjo is only routing for a puppet in Obi in order to play the piper and dictate the tunes. That’s, speaking to Obasanjo’s today’s intent in the February presidential poll to have the sights and sounds of the presidency come from sources and distances located in him tomorrow.
In the familiar animal analogy, Obasanjo’s preference for the president he can control has the characterization of a baboon, desiring the monkey in the figurehead president to bring him what he must ‘chop’. That is what Obasanjo meant in his letter to Nigerian youths, the nation’s largest demography, that Obi “is a needle with thread attached to it.” The thread is the string Obasanjo prospects to trail and lure the mock up president in Obi, with a promise of the second term presidency.
Great Nigerian youths; ponder intently on this. The Jonathan presidency, mentally slow, had force exerted on his threads or strings, fast one at that and more than half of the time, to the swings of the Obasanjos until the rug under Jonathan’s feet got hauled out.
The Obasanjo false epistle cannot be for the fun of it. It is out of malice. The letter is the sword of partisan wrangling from the scabbard appropriated to derail Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s steady presidential campaigns; mobilize Nigerians, particularly the young generations against his election as president; and to foist a puppet president in Obi on Nigeria.
Obasanjo whose military and civilian governments failed to coalesce the yearnings of Nigerians for growth and development is grossly bankrupt to dictate who our next president should be. The man who pressured the National Assembly to manipulate the constitution in favour of his third term agenda has lost purity to recommend the presidential candidate Nigerians should vote for. The man whose public conducts slammed a huge question mark on his eligibility for the world leadership laurel, the highly coveted Nobel Prize for World Peace for which he travelled global in rowdy manner and never had it, has forfeited aptitude to commend Nigerians to vote in a particular direction.
Obasanjo is an epic fail where success ought to have been reasonably earned. The ‘letterman’ apriori has only fired attention to his horrible trademarks, a throwback to a scrap of history that hallmarked unmatched facts of human right abuses in a democracy. The nation consistently felt a surge of public tension, with the soldiers drafted merely to quench internal insurrections but levelled Odi and Zaki-Ibiam towns in Benue and Bayelsa.
Obasanjo is a tragic example of moral crisis that stubbornly reflects in his politics and robs him of any influence on Nigerians to fall in line on vote matter. Every ounce of his eruptions is neither finesse nor distinction, but crudity and gracelessness, burning so much effort. He’s always the first to welcome each new government and also the first, ex-cathedra, to want deliberately to truncate the same government to make it look like only his own military and civilian governments were urbane and unsurpassable. The Halliburton case allegedly fingered him and his vice president Atiku Abubakar to have shared about $180 million bribe that was given to Nigerian government officials for the various contracts won between 1995 and 2004.
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Obasanjo, indeed, is not important to how the February presidential poll will go. He’s not blessed with a good sense of judgement. His six-point Economic Development Agenda (1999-2007) was abysmally a total failure, with classic symptoms of arrested development all over the place as aftermath. So, the man whose presidency was also found to be too distant from the poor masses, the greater number of who died of starvation from the conquest of economic rationalization measures under his government cannot be an advocate for who’s the best of the presidential candidates.
Obasanjo who as military head of state (1976-1979), bullied the 1979 electoral process against Obafemi Awolowo’s bid to be president of Nigeria; mischievously devastated the MKO Abiola June 12 1993 presidential election mandate; refused to honour June 12 as Democracy Day; deadened by the announcement of Ernest Sonekan as Head of Interim National Government (ING), the ING position Obasanjo ravenously bargained for and never had; and the man who was eventually quickened out of circulation, away in the Yola mega gulag by Sani Abacha, the nation’s worst military dictator, has lost all public probity and decency to put forward any choice presidential candidate.
Today, the Nigerian electorate have overriding sense of responsibility with capacity for focused voting to know who to vote for despite the foul atmosphere by Obasanjo’s infamous letter to the youths. The false statement, meant to slam apathy on the electorate and elections ahead by mudslinging at Tinubu would not make the ground swim around his election next February.
Obasanjo is certainly not a new face out of the old body. He has always oiled the wheel of hypocrisy to habitual status by his shifty character, full of double intrigues, double dealings, double standards, double crossings, double ambushes and double grandstanding with arrogance and obtuse logic. He’s never to be taken seriously on any splendid scale.
“Oh, yes, I do know there is a vacancy at the top, I’m not looking for job,” Obasanjo reportedly said in an interview soon after he left office as military head of state in 1979, but that same year, he paddled himself into politics when he accepted a PDP membership form. And a decade or so after, he publicly trashed his PDP membership card and cursed himself if he ever had anything again to do with party politics. Reflect further on his theatrically weak peddling! He re-joined politics and conducted himself in a series of zigzags into the 2019 general elections to have the PDP’s Atiku inaugurated as the president of Nigeria against the re-election of President Buhari. The Supreme Court dismissed Atiku, impliedly his godfather-mentor, Obasanjo. And the re-election of Buhari, re-affirmed.
For now, Obasanjo’s current insight into Nigerian politics and governance is profoundly marked by corresponding blindness.
•Olusesi writes via isaacolusesi@gmail.com*