FORMER President Olusegun Obasanjo, in his latest blistering public
criticism of the Federal Government, said President Goodluck Jonathan’s
response to the Boko Haram insurgency was slow. This is, no doubt,
arguable.
He spoke in Warri as the moderator of a public lecture by former
External Affairs Minister, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, in honour of the
Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, President, Pastor Ayo
Oritsejafor, who was marking his 40th anniversary as a pastor.
He seemed to have chosen the right forum to express his concern over a
scourge that has become a national security problem, but his position
was defective.
The former president reportedly accused his successors of allowing
the Boko Haram insurgency to fester and was quoted to have said: “My
fear is that when you have a sore and you don’t attend to it early
enough, it festers and becomes very bad. Don’t leave a problem that can
be bad unattended.”
When I read the news report which was accorded prominence on the
front pages of some influential national
dailies of Wednesday, November
14, 2012, I told a friend who was with me that the old fox was at it
again.
I reminded my friend of how Obasanjo slammed the late Yar’Adua early 2010 at a
Trust Newspaper forum when the former president was hospitalised in a Saudi Arabia.
Many people must have felt or reacted the same way and this is
understandable. Since 1979, after his lack-lustre administration as
military Head of State, Obasanjo has characteristically and uncharitably
become a critic of successive governments in Nigeria.
He retains the unenviable record as being the only former Nigerian
leader (apart from General Muhammadu Buhari who is understandably an
oppositional presidential candidate) who relishes open castigation of
the seeming actions or inactions of the government of the day. The
only administration that did not get his (Obasanjo) open bashing was
his.
Unlike some members of the clan of former Nigerian rulers such as
Alhaji Shehu Shagari, General Ibrahim Babangida and General Abdulsalami
Abubakar, for instance, who have taken advantage of their access to the
Presidential Villa to offer advice on governance, Obasanjo has incurably
violated that norm.
Whereas he is not denied access to the President, yet he has chosen
to pitiably mount the bully pulpit on a voyage of open criticism. The
impression Obasanjo creates about himself is that he is not happy to see
the other man in the leadership saddle. This tends to confirm the
views in certain quarters that he has the penchant to destroy people
than to build them.
There is even a proposition in some circles that Obasanjo believes he
is the only man who, perhaps, has been created by God to offer the
right kind of leadership to Nigeria; and which is why he always
gleefully refers to his administration as a trail-blazer of sort.
He is wont to allude to some of the things he did while in the saddle
as president from 1999 to 2007 in his effort to persuade his listeners
that his successors have either lowered the standard or have not been
pro-active. But, in a bid to present as Nigeria’s patron saint,
Obasanjo’s attitude has become increasingly confusing.
At a point, he donned the garb of a conciliator by going to Maiduguri
amid the escalating Boko Haram insurgency to seek to broker a truce.
He claimed to have obtained the permission of President Goodluck
Jonathan before embarking on the enterprise.
AT the end of the day, the move
turned awry when his host in Maiduguri with whom he sought to kick-start
the process of reconciliation, was killed about three days after he
(Obasanjo) left the town.
But today, it is convenient for Obasanjo to wrongly accuse Jonathan
of slowness in responding to the Boko Haram insurgency simply because he
wants to portray the current administration as weak and incompetent. It
is also game for Obasanjo to stomp on the Jonathan presidency just
because he was instrumental to the political arrangement that threw up
the Umaru Yar’Adua-Jonathan presidential ticket in 2007.
The truth, however, is that Obasanjo cannot approbate and reprobate
at the same time on the same issue as he has tended to do in the Boko
Haram case. Here is a man who went to Maiduguri purportedly on a
reconciliation mission now turning round to recommend the Odi treatment
for the town of Maiduguri and perhaps other towns in the North just to
nip the Bokom Haram insurgency in the bud.
He would have loved to see Jonathan deploy soldiers to the
flashpoints to level the places-annihilate the innocent and the
‘criminals’ in a military action. To Obasanjo, this is pro-activeness.
This is how to show that the Federal Government or the President is not
weak. This approach does not accommodate rationality that is grounded
on humanity: how can you commit genocide because you want to take out
some criminals?
While reflecting on the crisis at Odi, Obasanjo had said at the Warri
forum: “I attended to a problem that I saw; I sent soldiers. They were
killed, 19 of them (were) decapitated. If I had allowed that to
continue, I would not have the authority to send security anywhere
again. I attended to it…. If you say you do not want a strong leader,
who can have all the characteristics of a leader, including the fear of
God, then, you have a weak leader and the rest of the problem is yours.”
As I wrote above, Obasanjo’s attitude is increasingly confusing. He
claims Jonathan’s response is slow. He also claims that his successor,
the late Yar’Adua, was soft on corruption. But I ask: When he (Obasanjo)
became president and inherited the problem of militancy in the Niger
Delta region, what did he do very quickly to end the scourge? Was it
not the late Yar’Adua who ended it with his famous Amnesty deal?
Is his claim about the late Yar’Adua being soft on corruption not
tenuous against the backdrop of the fact that despite his much-trumpeted
anti-corruption crusade, his administration witnessed, perhaps, the
most bizarre forms of corruption? Did Obasanjo not couple a so-called
Transcorp conglomerate and sold Nigeria’s prime assets to this group
where he kept a N200 million worth of shares in the blind?
Did he not, with the vantage position of his authoritarian
presidency, permit the launching of a N7billion Presidential Library
Project in Abeokuta? Has it not now become a notorious fact that
Obasanjo was only paying lip-service to the war against corruption as
nearly every action of his was a violation of the principle and creed
behind the scheme?
Nigerians know that Nuhu Ribadu, former Economic and Financial Crimes
Commission, EFCC, Chairman, used in fighting his personal battles, was
promoted Assistant Inspector General of Police without any
recommendation from the Police Service Commission, thereby violating due
process.
Yet there are other samplers which border on corrupt enrichment of
certain individuals who were not prosecuted or allowed to go scotfree,
including those linked to the Halliburton scandal and the ill-fated
Obasanjo third term agenda.
I remember that a Senate Joint Committee, headed by
Senator Abubakar Sodangi revealed that the plot of land originally
belonging to the defunct National Primary Education Commission
(allocated in December 2005 to Inter-Projects Association Limited which
immediately commenced development) was illegally allocated to Obasanjo
Farms Limited, curiously, on May 28, 2007, a day before Obasanjo handed
over power to Yar’Adua.
I also remember that two Abuja lawyers had sued Obasanjo at the Code
of Conduct Tribunal over N1.2 billion belonging to the Petroleum
Technology Development Fund, PTDF. Specifically, the offence for which
the lawyers wanted him punished were the 2006 presidential approval in
respect of the payment of N250 million to a law firm for the
incorporation of Galaxy Backbone and $10 million for the purchase of
computers for civil servants, outside the scope of PTDF.
Besides, he was alleged to have illegally withdrawn as much as N231.4
billion from the Federation Account without due process or
authorisation from the National Assembly (
Daily Sun of
Thursday, February 5, 2009) while the Ad-Hoc Committee set up by the
House of Representatives to probe the activities of the NNPC between
1999 and 2008, indicted him and former Group Managing Director of the
Corporation, Mr. Funso Kupolokun, for violating the guidelines for the
respective bid rounds, thereby finding them guilty of “preferential
treatment of winners at the conclusion of the bid rounds.”
Where then is the moral high ground that Obasanjo is standing on to
pontificate on his administration’s fight against corruption and dismiss
his successors as soft on the anti-corruption crusade?
Indeed, on both scores-Boko Haram and corruption-Obasanjo has been
unfair to his successors. It is in his character to be so disposed;
only that I am surprised that he is behaving as if he has fallen out of
favour with the government he helped to enthrone. But then by
recommending the Odi recipe for the Boko Haram insurgents, Obasanjo has
succeeded in showing to the world the inhumanity and irrationality of
his presidency.
He cannot in a self-ignited frenzy railroad a cruel recipe on Jonathan.
As far as I am concerned the President’s systematic and multi-faceted
approach at tackling the Boko Haram insurgency, which factors in the
innocent civilian population, is the best in the circumstance and should
therefore be sustained.
Mr. CALLISTUS OMOREGIE, a public affairs analyst, wrote from Benin, Edo State.
0 Comments