Second Term Politics and the Atiku Factor
By
Michael Ikhariale
George Washington, the first president of the United States of America, was so popular that it was largely expected that he was going go on ad infinitum. But the man was perceptive enough to take cognizance of the fact that power is better relinquished while the proverbial ovation is said to be highest in addition to the fact that he was not getting younger. Like a good general, he knew when to call it a day because not all that is possible is probable.
So it was on the seventeenth day of September, 1796, when
President Washington shocked his admirers as he declared that “[
It is one of the ironies of the African political experience that a man who, when he was a lot younger, once took a personal exception to this African malaise and quit power voluntarily, is now the same person at the hub of a debate that is centered around the indecent theme of “second term”. That is the irony that President Obasanjo represents. His record shows that he has once proved that not every African leader is stupid or power drunk by voluntarily relinquishing power to a democracy in 1979. That civilized act endeared him to the world and immediately, he was catapulted to the privileged pantheon of international state men, a distinguished member of the Eminent Persons Group, EPG, membership of prestigious foundations and institutes and as someone who was urbane enough to have dreamt of the exalted UN secretary-general office, his rather poor academic curriculum vitae irrespective. That was Obasanjo.
Take it or leave it, no Nigerian military leader, dead or alive, has gotten anywhere near a fraction of that achievement. Obasanjo broke the continental barriers of sit-tight-ism, a phenomenon that has seen to it that many of African past leaders are unwanted companies in the gathering of civilized international VIPs. Some of our so-called past leaders are in fact potential guests at some foreign jails and with the real possibility of some getting the Milosevic-type medicine if they ever dare to step out of Nigeria carelessly.
So, if today the President chooses to abandon his own precedents, and stay on in power inspite of serious reservation by many people, while it would not be correct to charge him with sit-tight-ism, because the Nigerian constitution has a maximum possible two terms, and that is exactly what he has only asked for, it could still be said that he has in effect abandoned the very crust of his self-professed principle.
And with that has come so much troubles for the body politick that, if care is not taken, we may all live to regret the ultimate fallout of any miscalculation on either side of the contentious aisle. The bottom line in the frenzy is that whether or not he decides to contest again remains an issue for the political elite to sort out amongst themselves because those opposing him cannot convince us that if they were in his shoes that they would not readily take advantage of a second term. It is quite possible that those who are now crying foul are just doing so to create cheap opportunity for themselves in this unholy game of dogs eat dogs. But speaking for myself, I believe it would have greatly profit our burdensome process of establishing a functional democracy with probity in governance if Obasanjo was ready to re-enact his 1979 feat by saying to Nigerians: “Thank you. I am done!”
My worry with those that want him out so desperately is that they are not basing their demands on any higher moral premise; some even predicate their arguments on the shameful “turn-by-turn” politics of Nigeria. Why these people do not believe that the electorate has any role in this process is what I just cannot get. It is obvious that they do not reckon with the wisdom of the Nigerian People to democratically vote out Obasanjo if they do not accept his second term bid. All that concerns them is that the man should simply get out of their way so that they can pick the presidency thereafter like an item of inheritance. Some of us have serious problems with that line of reasoning. Apart from it being clearly primitive, it also does not make any serious moral or constitutional case against a second term ambition by any means. Shed of all the underlying hypocrisies, whole idea is everything but democratic.
While I do want to dwell much on the president and his liabilities, I think one individual that I somehow feel for in all of these is the VP, Abubakar Atiku. The ongoing permutation seems to have impacted so negatively on him that he may well be one of the most unhappy politicians in the country for now. He stands between the proverbial devil and the deep blue sea. Head or tail, he is in some trouble. If Obasanjo is perceived as successful, his enemies calculate that he will profit by it and forestall their own chance of ever getting into Aso Rock soon, as the presidency would fall on him, as a fait accompli. On the other hand, those who spin for Obasanjo think that Atiku is not doing enough to shield his boss from unwarranted and undeserved darts from the vengeful ‘opposition’ because he hopes to profit by it. Because these are allegations constructed on crude hearsay, innuendoes and brinkmanship, they are both difficult for him to confront without being seen as unduly bellicose on the one hand and, if he ignores them, without drawing undue inferences as to his motive on the other hand, something like a catch 22 scenario.
That has led many people to think that the VP has, more or less, become a political orphan of sort. But sorry, I am unable to agree with that view and for good reason. I believe the man has a functioning game plan that may be very simple, but devastating all the same. Those who compare him with IBB and some other northern politicians and end up underrating him are all mistaken. From all practical perspectives, it is obvious that IBB is circumstantially an expired political force whose only relevance in contemporary Nigerian politics is that of a very huge scarecrow against the Obasanjo incompetent system. Yes, he has plenty of money but who says that Atiku has no such money too? I am sure the Minna man knows his limits because 1985 is certainly not 2003. Who can ignore the additional force of patronage and the aroma of incumbency? What is more, Atiku is yet to acquire the nuisance qualities of either IBB or Buhari and again, he is not a soldier, that tribe of Nigerians that has forfeited their relevance - a fate which has now been finally sealed by Obasanjo’s actual and perceived failings. So I am not persuaded by those theories anchored on events and situations that existed well before May 1999. The factor of time seems to favor Atiku as against IBB or Buhari.
Besides, apart from being ‘Guests of Honor’ at sumptuous wedding ceremonies of the siblings of their former cronies, these generals do not have anything near the mammoth political force currently at Atikus’s disposal. For a man who cut his teeth for several years inside the Customs “Long Room”, where ‘the more you look, the less you see’, is the standard Job Description, no one should never underrate his capacity to do anything magical. Therefore, even if the VP is evidently unpopular right now in some parts of the north, as we have explained elsewhere in this essay, the man continues to hold the aces as he is the only one amongst them with a functioning political machine on the ground that is credited with some surgical efficiency.
It is in the nature of politics that every practitioner wishes that he or she were the president. But we can only have one president at a time. Most deputies are just not satisfied being the number two - the real prize is the number one seat. For example, John Adams, Washington’s vice-president was overtly impatient and absolutely bored with being the vice-president that he was reported to have lamented to his wife, Abigail, that “My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the moot and insignificant office that ever in the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived”.
To put it mildly, John Adams could not contain his frustration of merely watching presidential actions from the ‘boys quarters’. But that is the nature of life and all civilizations have abundance of records of palace coups; sons seizing power from fathers, wives seizing power form husbands and deputies taking over from bosses all by force or treachery. The endless rancor and the cat and mouse game between our governors and their deputies lately are just practical manifestations of this age-long phenomenon. The bitterness in Nigeria is loudly combative in the open simply because of the primitive character of our politicking, otherwise, it is common place thing. Setting a different standard for Atiku in this respect is simply tendentious and malicious, if not wicked.
In the present instance of the president’s impeachment predicament, there have been many theories as to why there is a massive gang up to deny him his right to complete his lawful term of office and further frustrate this second term bid. Some have gone to the ludicrous extent of pointing accusing fingers at the Vice-president, as a possible subterranean hand behind the moves. While such is theoretically not impossible, I am however unable to agree with such calculations for many reasons. Take one example. It is to Atiku’s credit that while all other previously vociferous presidential aids and ministers scampered for cover during the heat of the impeachment attack, it was only him that remembered that he owes a duty to the President by initiating a visit to the ‘enemy territory’ and reached out to leaders of the House of Representatives. Do I hear that the Atiku - Na Abba encounter was not substantially different from the famous IBB coup-day chat with Lt. Col. Dimka? Whatever!
For us to make any sense out of the confusion now engulfing the nation, it is very important that we take into account the nature and style of Obasanjo’s presidency which is very short of humility and a collegiate outlook. After three years on the saddle, he still does not seem to realize that this is not a military government in which it is the norm that the Commander-in-Chief is everything. Rather than ‘let his vice loose’, so to say, on the public to be doing the proverbial “dirty jobs”, the same way President Bush assigns tricky assignments such as demonizing Saddam Hussien to a very skeptical world or whipping up the drums of war to a dumbfounded American public to the old dinosaur, VP Dick Cheney, (apologies to Mandela) who must go to “an undisclosed location” on big event days (Oyinbo people self!), Obasanjo on the other hand, prefers to be the man who would always sit in front of the TV cameras pontificating on nutty political equations over which he had fumbled so many times before the public.
Sure, he is in charge and no one disputes the presidency with him but the way it goes in all contemporary democracies is that, while the president takes all the glory, his aide’s carry the dirty trash can. Not so with Obasanjo. He alone is the driver as well as the conductor of the presidential bus. Otherwise, the VP and those playing in the hurly-burly drama that is the Obasanjo regime certainly do not have any higher moral platform than their boss because it takes two to tango and the president has been quoted several times in the past as saying that nothing comes between him and his deputy. The only inference therefore available to us is to conclude that the alliance between the duo must be holding very well, at least in theory.
Atiku, for all intents and purposes, is a ‘president in training’ and the most logical expectation of his apprenticeship under Obasanjo is that, all things being equal, he would eventually step into the presidency after Obasanjo, especially if he is able to make his boss a winning president as the resultant goodwill would ultimately inure on his own ambition. That is the most natural scenario in the relationship existing between presidents and their deputies unless there are serious problems like we have in Nigeria. A vice-president cannot safely jettison the president, in and out of office, as Al Gore tried to do to President Clinton by prematurely declaring “I am own man” only to find out to his chagrin that his erstwhile boss, in spite of the baggage of problems that trailed his second term, was still a very powerful vote winning personality just as we say in Nigeria: “the young shall grow but under the old”. But for a man who had managed to hold on firmly to the Yar ‘Adua well oiled mafia in the PDM political group for so long, it would be surprising if Atiku fails to factor this into his political calculations. This is more so if one considers the fact that the real challenge awaiting Atiku would come from his fellow northerners and that would mean that he would need the pay-back support of whatever shall remain of Obasanjo’s faithfuls. So it is naive to think that Atiku could hope to profit form Obasanjo’s impeachment, assuming such was even possible.
But from all we can see today, Atiku is only playing the role Obasanjo has deemed it necessary to assign to him. To go beyond that would present him as a man without restraint in a game in which loyalty and treachery tends to intertwine delicately. One example of this scenario is when Obasanjo declared interest in a second term. He did not need to leave his choice of Atiku as his 2003 running mate in any shadow of doubt as he should have announced it simultaneously. Not a few hawks in the PDM faction in the PDP tenuous, if not an unholy alliance, which is Atiku’s political backbone, took the development very lightly. Failure to do so clearly denied the president’s second term intention the full force of his incumbency because if he was sure that he had a winning team in Atiku, that would have been the best time to showcase it. But he did not.
Behaving as if he has a choice in the matter exposed the president to a great deal of negative speculations; some of the results are what we are experiencing right now – rumors, ghost posters, mangled political graffiti, denial and innuendoes everywhere. Another good case in point is the seemly unwillingness of the president to saddle his deputy with jobs with critical media visibility. For example, many people are not aware that it is actually Atiku that is manning the heart of the national economy and the ongoing privatization scheme from where he can build strong political capital because he is in a position to make lot of people rich overnight. This very critical assignment does not attract too much of media attention and that probably explains where he is not always adversely in the news. I do not see why anyone would want to fault a man for avoiding negative publicity, the type Obasanjo seems to relish in. For that reason, he is certainly a better politician than his boss is, and I do not think it is a crime to be smart.
A more perceptive boss, for example, would have made the vice president to be the one doing some of the mundane overseas travels, especially where there are no serious strategic issues at stake. But Obasanjo, like the Sphinx, wants to be everywhere except inside of Nigeria, where his political sagacity and diplomatic acumen, if at all, are mostly needed. I cannot recall that globe trotting was a part of his campaign promise even if pulling the nation from its erstwhile pariah dungeon remains a pressing matter. His funny theory of a “single presidency” does not seem to have a realistic significance as he alone has so far been doing all the yeoman’s jobs that require undue public scrutiny. Apart from the fact that it is obviously too late, I need not teach the President that a little myth is necessary about an office for it to be respected and that is why our traditional leaders do not hawk beans in the open village market.
There is also the real possibility that some of Atiku’s enemies, especially from some portions of the north are making the best use of this opportunity to injure the relationship between him and his boss with a view to benefiting from the fallout. From all indications, the Atiku Factor has become serious obstacle to other northern aspirants who know the extent of the power of incumbency in a politically under-developed society like Nigeria. It is a common knowledge that a politically very powerful Atiku carries the potential for greater political damage for fellow northern contestants than anywhere else in the country and that is why it is only there that he is decidedly “unwanted”, so much so, that he was actually the subject of a recent mob attack.
It has equally been pointed out that many of the president’s aides are not totally loyal to him, judging by the fact that they have always left him to stew in his mess, contrary to the practice in other democracies where the principles of collective responsibility impels political subordinates to always come out to forcefully defend their boss. Again, my take on all of these charges is that everything depends on the boss because when a leader has made it abundantly clear that he is above mistakes or beyond advice, the best thing to do in an environment like Nigeria where principles do not count much in public affairs is to sit back and let the ‘Mr. know-all’ boss carry his own cross. Even if they had truly wanted to help him, there is the nagging fact that they have become political dinosaurs, dead wood, too senile and too old to effectively react to the dynamics of modern Nigerian politics.
As things are now, it would appear that it is too late to make any meaningful overhaul of Obasanjo’s incompetent team, even if some heads are definitely ripe to be momentarily sacrificed to the gods of the National Assembly for some peace to reign. For a man who boasted that he got his men to sign copies of their letters of resignation on their assumption of duties to have kept those useless dead wood in his government for that long is an indication that he lost control a very long time ago.
As much as we can see, most of Obasanjo’s ministers see themselves as potential presidents, able and willing to out-stage their boss and continue wherever he drops off. It does not matter to them that they have outlived their usefulness, if ever. So why would they be undoing themselves by openly identifying with or helping out a drowning president when in fact they are the rocks and bricks that accelerate the descent?
The events of the last few weeks have prompted the question once more: Where are the president’s men? Who speaks for Obasanjo? Nigerian recall with debilitating trauma that ‘Jerry-can’ Gana who is his Information Minister was the unethical town crier that crooned for IBB, the misinformation amebo that parroted for Abacha and the Goebbels for all our previous deviational military dictatorial regimes. He did his propaganda job so ‘professorially’ that no one with some memory would ever take him serious again. It ought to have been obvious to the President that the population is already sick and fed up with the antics and hollowness of the ‘Jerry-can’. The messenger may, at times, be more important than the message: Gana is evidently overused and irritating for a Nigerian audience. By the way, is he the only knowledgeable ‘grammar man’ from his tribe?
Perhaps this is the right time to take a serious look on those others who claim to also speak for the president. From Doyin Okupe to Tunji Oseni, these are very poor exercise in political strategy in a federated and suspicion ridden polity. President Obasanjo made himself unnecessarily vulnerable for critics who hold him to be nepotistic by referring to the way he made some of his image making appointments. As a president of Yoruba origins, he should ensure that those who speak for him officially are individuals from other national groups because his government should of necessity be made of people of different “tribes and tongues”. This is one lesson he should have learnt from IBB, the evil genius himself. Both Okukpe and Oseni are, no doubt, quite competent persons, but being professionally competent is a different ball game from being politically credible and persuasive in our kind of society where stereotype and bias are the main items on our mutual appraisal sheets. Truth must not only be told, it must also be told by a witness who does not suffer the legal stigma of bias - nemo judex in causa sua. That is why a wife is not usually the best compellable legal witness for the husband or vice versa - credibility.
Whatever may be the methodological limitations of the president, it remains my candid opinion that in the present circumstances of Nigeria, an Obasanjo had some usefulness as a veritable factor in the inevitable re-orientation of our military from the present ethnicized political and sectarian regiments they became, to a truly national professional army, ready and able to function under civil authorities. Obasanjo is certainly not a likable personality both in mien and verbosity but that some people seem to passionately hate him to their marrow may in deed be the true test of his suitability. It may indirectly confirm that it is no loner exactly business as usual for some folks. They are sounding like the modern rendition of the famous Animal Farm sloganeering: four leg good, two legs bad. Such a mechanical approach to social discourse does not advance on the quality of debates that is needed to save the nation from the present problems of insecurity, ethnic and sectarian strife, economic hardship and the continuos decadence of everything government.
I do not agree that these problems are there just because Obasanjo is in power. No. They are problems that have been allowed to germinate and fester over the years. Blaming Obasanjo personally for all of them only shows that we have not yet properly diagnosed the sources and the exact nature of our national misfortunes because unless we know “why” and “how” things got to where they are now, anyone coming into the fray later may only be aggravating the problems instead of solving them. It is no secret that we have truncated the concept of leadership so badly in the past that it is now normal for us to think of governance only in terms of who is doing it and not what is being down, thereby giving undeserved alibi to failures in leadership.
We are faced with enormous structural problems. The constitution that we operate does not encourage efficiency and productivity in governance. If anything, it actually promotes indolence, corruption and unmitigated wastes. More importantly, it is not yet a part of our concept of government to think of it as a creator of wealth, an institutional accelerator of the "felicity calculus", or as an engine of positive growth. So, rather than ponder over wealth creation and nation building, we tend to waste too much time on the business of sharing, allocation of existing opportunities, inordinate eating spree and piratical festivities over budgetary matters. Everyone is waiting on the almighty Budget and no one is talking of productivity. Is that not indeed turning illusion into an art? Nigeria will continue to deteriorate until we accept that we have to sit up and build and not just bicker over budgets and the perquisites of office as the so-called 9-points impeachment charges by the legislators against the President tend to confirm. How do we expect the economy to improve when, for example, we have spent the better part of three years debating religion and its applicability as if people feed on religion; ethnicity and political intrigues as we are that well off? Communities that decide to fight themselves to the last man instead of working together must prepare for the starvation of their offsprings down the road. Simple.
Obasanjo’s contribution to our woes are many. But it does not help the issues that we now face if we continue allege that he alone is the cause or that he is failing simply because he is a Yoruba man as some have carelessly hinted. Such refrains have never worked and I cannot see them working now. Any person hedged into the kind of political structure that Obasanjo is in right now would still be confronted with these structural problems that militates against development but how far a leader goes in wading through them would depend on the personal creativity, style and hard work of the individual concerned. But to think that fixing the nations deep-rooted problems would be an easy sail is erroneous. I very much doubt that, as the evidence on the ground points elsewhere. How low things have gone down in Nigeria may indeed be an indication that they started quite a long time ago because until very recently, governance in Nigeria went into a prolonged state of slumber. We have to make up for the arrears of leadership absence before reaping on the present efforts. To ignore that is to court trouble quite unnecessarily.
The debilitating problems of Nigeria can never be resolved through the blurred ethnic prisms that have now taken the center stage. What is more, to accuse a man of failure just because of whom he is or where he comes from is only to strengthen his moral hands against his accusers because they are bias and therefore unworthy of attention. Such a situation does more harms to the society because by unnecessarily demonizing one another, real crooks tend to get off the hook undeservingly for reasons of defective charges. Every good prosecuting attorney knows that. So it is good that when we accuse, we must do so creatively: Nigeria is in a mess because many people are not sincere with the duties of their office. There is no doubt, however, that majority of Obasanjo’s very loud critics do honestly mean well for the nation. It is therefore important that he listens to all complaints attentively and with greater respect too. Failure to realize this may well be his Achilles Heels.
Tactically, it is profitable for the President to learn to appear to be like someone who is in need of help and be forthright about his personal inadequacies by candidly presenting himself as an ordinary humble man, rather than the present image of a rampaging matador or reveling in naked political machismo. After all, Nigerians are aware that they did not elect, or had imposed on them, an angel for a president but a former chicken farmer and an ordinary retired soldier of now serious intellectual standing. They will naturally understand and bear it as the outcome of our ‘choice’. But that will certainly not be so if they perceive that they are dealing with an unrepentant bully or an impostor.
It should have been obvious to any discerning observers of the Nigerian political system that Obasanjo unwittingly opened up his rather soft political underbelly for merciless assault by all and sundry the very moment he made it known that he was not going to follow the honorable path of the great Nelson Mandela who rejected a second term offer inspite of his overwhelming popularity. As I have maintained repeatedly, it is perfectly within his prerogative to seek re-election, but he must ensure that he has made adequate effort to deserve it and work for its success. Those who boasted to the nation that there was “no vacancy in Aso Rock” recently must now work very hard to ensure that there are no other possible routes to Aso Rock excepting that created out of the will of the People, or....
The ongoing debate, rough and robust as it may seem, boils down to one thing: the objective determination of what is it that Obasanjo really wants from history or what history also wants of him. We unduly confuse the issues at stake by looking at the whole drama only from our warped ethnic and sectarian lenses. Or adopt the old overbearing overseer’s evaluation of the laborer’s daily work output as never enough forgetting that the product of any effort is a direct function of the imput: garbage in, garbage out. We also tend to forget that there are many Obasanjos, in fact worse ones, lurking around and on their wings and they are from all over the place, possibly our hometown. What guarantee have we that they will not follow the same wayward tradition of leadership without responsibility already well entrenched as the code of conduct by the national military elite, retired or serving, and their civilian cohorts? As far as I can see, it is only a proper analysis of all the evidence that are before us that may save us from yet other cataclysms as the dynamics of the system remains the same.
Returning to the main theme of our discussion, it is my candid opinion that most of the charges leveled against the VP Atiku are unsustainable. Surely, he must pick his own share of the mess, but I still do not think he is much of the problem. I could be wrong.