End Game for the Odd Father

End Game for the Odd Father?

Abdulrazaque Bello-Barkindo

If Obasanjo was not the president of the federal republic of Nigeria, his business would have remained his business. His foreign trips would remain his business and his issue with the Abacha family would remain his business.

I mean if Obasanjo was not our president, his desperate attempt to dig himself out of trouble with the "boys" at the national assembly, his struggle to keep his ambition to continue in office burning and his constitutional breaches would all be his look out. We would not have had to care whether "mad man get family" or not! Were he just another soldier, Obasanjo would simply have vanished into oblivion. But it is hardly likely that this will ever happen. However, there is worrying evidence that the day he would rather forget is very much at hand.

Sequel to his hand over in 1979 his behaviour as a head of state and elder statesman had been full of scandals. Unlike all decent men his age, Aremu could not manage his home. Without a live-in wife, his children gallivanted all over the place. He did not pay his workers. One of the few occasions we heard of him was when he personally assaulted a police constable who dared to stop his car for routine checks. It was the day the poor constable will never forget! But this did not constitute a scandal at the time since the spotlight was on people in government.

With such reputation in his baggage to the Villa as a civilian president, it is not surprising that Obasanjo's democratic behaviour is as it is. I am still at a loss as to why, or who ever created the notion that Obasanjo would be different after gaol. Before his mouth ran him in, he stood on the log in his own eyes to remove the mole in Babangida's and Abacha's eyes. Not that they were any better, in my view, but his criticism of the duo was all a façade. He merely scandalised them to make room for himself. Note that the word "scandal" is hardly resonant in the private sector rather the term is reserved for politics, politicians, their aides and those in charge of our commonwealth, which is why he got away with his misdemeanours as a farmer.

Obasanjo is now a politician. But he had come with a huge psychology of compensation that belies the promise he made to us and his "belief in the great need for moral and spiritual regeneration within our country." For a man who denied his children fatherhood, to prefer to be called "Baba" even by the speaker of the House of Representatives and some of his aides is absurd. If you ask me, it is more plausible that someone who had been locked up in a cubicle in Yola will decide to recover lost time by junketing all over the world, leaving others to steer the home-front. That is exactly what our father, "Baba" did. And that action alone, ignoring the problems he was expected to solve for his 120 million tearful children makes him an Odd father! In fact, it will be difficult to say now if we are better off with him at home or abroad because in spite of all his international connections and foreign travels, Obasanjo ran his government like someone who could miss his way in an empty room. When he came in 1999 he suspended all contracts signed by Abdulsalam, sacked all heads of "inefficient" parastatals and dismissed all military officers who had held political appointments from 1985. His promise to cut the standing army from 80,000 to 50,000 to make it more efficient came as joyful news, but little did we know that a witch-hunt was just about to commence. The sacking of Tiv generals and the eventual deployment of the remaining army to shell them out of existence has since plucked the wool from our eyes.

It is barely months to end of "Odd father's" tenure and everywhere is on fire. So far a government which was to be admired for its anti-corruption gimmicks has turned out to have the most elastic accounting practices ever know in Nigerian affairs. Impeachment motion apart, he has set up machinery to remove his man-friday Anyim Pius Anyim from the leadership of the senate and is using the ICPC against his arch enemy Ghali Umar Na'abba. Obviously, the man has no idea how to heal a family feud which, more often than not, does not just involve the transgressions of one party, but in which everyone must share the blame.

With the way things are going, he has shown clearly that he is not interested in reconciliation but an all out battle. The moral is that while American politicians fall to their sexual escapades, our president will fall to inefficiency, intolerance, corruption, foolish pride and insensitivity to the feelings of others. It is a curious way to end the return of the "Odd father" indeed.