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Who Is Persecuting Atiku: Another View By Sina Ogundipesaladin1410@yahoo.com
When issues are raised and argued on the pages of credible and widely read national publications, Nigerians are naturally bound to react either in sympathy or against the issues so discussed by particular writers. In particular, the article written by one Mr. Samuel Agboola in the Vanguard newspaper of Wednesday 15/2/2006 cannot go unchallenged, because of the falsehoods, half-truth, inaccuracies and outright mischief that dominated the tenor of his arguments.
Any analyst worthy of the name should bring intellectual integrity to bear on his arguments by respecting the truth and the facts. In this age and time, no writer can afford to take his readers’ intelligence for granted by deliberately suppressing relevant facts and information capable of influencing the judgment of his readers. And this burden of respecting intellectual integrity of factual argumentation is even greater when you are writing to credible national papers that command automatic loyalty because of their favourable reputation in the estimation of readers.
However, a two-part article by Mr. Agboola, entitled, “Who is Persecuting Atiku?” did not meet the basic test of intellectual integrity. In his attempt to dismiss the significance of the People’s Democratic Movement (PDM) and its active contributions to the successful nomination of General Obasanjo and his subsequent election in 1999 as President, Mr. Agboola argues that “Atiku and his so-called powerful PDM played no role in OBJ’s second coming..” In 1999, the writer maintains, “it was a dying PDM, disorganized and disorientated following the incarceration and subsequent death of its founder, General Shehu Yar’adua, that needed OBJ desperately…”
He describes PDM members as hypocrites and parasites who had to “latch up onto the old man (Obasanjo) because they read and saw the direction the political pendulum was swinging (paraphrases added).” For those who might not know”, he further argues, “it was the remnants of the old NPC/NPN bloc, represented by Adamu Ciroma, that first approached OBJ, offering him its platform before other splinter groups followed.”
Any informed observer with a sharp and intelligent memory cannot help dying with laughter at the sheer lies that underpinned Mr. Agboola’s arguments. Contrary to his misleading arguments, the dominant forces that influenced the nomination of Generals Obasanjo for President in 1999 were the coalition of Generals, led by Babangida, Aliyu Gusau and T.Y Danjuma and, of course, the ready platform of the PDM, because individually, these Generals did not have a political platform of their own.
The alliance of old NPN and NRC, of which Alhaji Adamu Ciroma was a leading member, had actually rooted for Dr. Alex Ekwueme at the Jos convention of the PDP. But the coalition of Generals and the PDM machinery was so overwhelming that the NPN/NRC alliance to which Dr. Ekwueme belonged was upstaged eventually and General Obasanjo emerged as the Presidential candidate of the PDP. Let us not forget also that the official backing given to Gen. Obasanjo by the Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar regime was also a major factor in the emergence of OBJ as President in 1999.
It seems that either Mr. Agboola didn’t do his homework properly or was only interested in distorting facts to achieve his tendentious objectives. A further and closer examination of many aspects of his arguments may reveal basic ignorance about the issues and facts that eventually determined the emergence of Gen. Obasanjo as the Presidential candidate of the PDP in 1999 and his re-election in 2003.
Contrary to the spurious arguments of the writer, it was Gen. Obasanjo who was desperate for support in 1999 from the PDM and not the other way round, having being resoundingly rejected by his political home base of the Southwest that supported Chief Olu Falae of AD. General Obasanjo was thus rendered a political cripple by his own people until other Nigerians from the North, South-East and South-South came to his rescue.
In fact, Gen. Obasanjo became a PDP Presidential candidate not so much as a result of his personal political following, popularity or charisma, but mainly because of the labour of others, including the PDM, which threw its political capital and good will behind his candidature in 1999. If, indeed, the PDM was of no consequence to Obasanjo’s political success, as Mr. Agboola unconvincingly argues, why did the President have to turn to Atiku when he was faced with imminent rejection during the 2003 national convention of the PDP? You cannot detach the influence of the Vice President in the PDP without linking it with the enormous leverage of the PDM.
The reality is that the President needed others more than they needed him in 1999 and 2003, which explains why, despite his abrasive and stubborn nature, he had to go on bended knees, supplicating Atiku Abubakar to save his political career. And having thus been saved by his own enormously influential Vice President, the President should have shown gratitude to those who had stood by him but, instead, he has embarked on a vicious mission of vengeance, seizing control of the PDP by crude undemocratic methods and using the machinery of state power to persecute his perceived opponents. Taking over a party by a coup does not determine the popularity or influence of a President within his own party. Coercion was his main instrument of achieving such tyrannical power within his party and should not, therefore, be used as a yardstick to argue that Gen. Obasanjo would have attained his ambition without the support of others.
In the Southwest, especially during the 2003 Presidential election, Gen. Obasanjo was desperate to establish a political foothold of his own. He therefore, desperately needed the support of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) and, like an orphan, he was adopted by the AD leaders. He hoodwinked the AD leaders into an alliance in which they would support his Presidential re-election in 2003 while the AD would be allowed to retain Governorship, House of Assembly and National Assembly seats. The understanding was that PDP would not present candidates for these offices in return for AD’s support for Obasanjo’s second term bid.
Faithfully, the AD leaders had kept to the bargain by not presenting a rival Presidential candidate of their own against Obasanjo. But in the end, Gen. Obasanjo betrayed them by using Federal might and massive rigging to drive AD out of power, except in Lagos where his PDP fixers realized they were dealing with a dangerous political minefield.
Let us not forget also that, if the late Chief Bola Ige had resigned as Minister in the PDP administration and went back to become AD’s Presidential candidate in 2003 as he had planned before his unfortunate death at the hands of the assassins, it would have been very unlikely if Gen. Obasanjo would have succeeded in establishing a political foothold in the South West. The point here is that, contrary to the warped logic of Mr. Agboola, Gen. Obasanjo was more desperately in need of others’ support for survival than they needed him in both 1999 and 2003.
It is utterly fallacious suggest that in 1999 and 2003, it was the PDM that needed Gen. Obasanjo than the other way round. If the PDM is such a cipher, why was it necessary for the President to destroy its influence by force rather than through democratic means? Indeed, if true and fair contest were held, the President would not have succeeded in breaking the backbone of the PDM. Despite the deliberate de-registration of PDM loyalists, it was still impossible to dismiss their influence in the politics of Nigeria from the SDP days to this time. Even with the recent fresh registration of three new parties, the influence of the PDM is still visible. The Advanced Congress of Democrats (ACD), which is one of the newly registered parties, is a visible parade of PDM influence.
Though the President has despotically hijacked the PDP in a manner that forced basic democratic process take a quick flight through the window, it may be a Herculean task to drive the PDM into extinction. The President rode on the back of the PDM to secure his position but he eventually betrayed them. Gen. Obasanjo had no hand in the widespread influence the PDM has achieved politically in the country. It smacks of dishonesty and deliberate distortion of facts to suggest that the PDM had rushed in droves to Gen. Obasanjo in search of survival after Gen. Yar’adua’s death. With the demise of Gen. Yar Adua, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar took up the gauntlet and made the PDM a force to reckon with. Without a political platform of his own in 1999 and 2003, President Obasanjo had to turn to PDM for survival and relevance. Could Gen. Obasanjo have won election in his own right in 1999 and 2003 without his PDM allies and others?
Discourteously calling Mal. Garba Shehu “garrulous”, or vilifying Abdulkarim Al-Bashir and describing Chief Audu Ogbeh, Professor Ango Abdullahi, Alhaji Lawal Kaita and Chief Sunday Awoniyi as “jesters” only confirmed the porosity of Mr. Agboola’s arguments. You cannot convince anyone of your arguments by name calling, which in logic is called ad-hominem fallacy. Between a man with a political following and another without, who would need the other to achieve a particular political ambition? Instead of addressing the facts of how Gen. Obasanjo rode the back of others to come to power, Mr. Agboola was just insulting our intelligence to suggest that the President didn’t need the good will of the PDM to realize his political ambition. If the President is popular in his own right, in which case the PDM would have turned to him for survival, why is his third term agenda being widely resisted? Isn’t that a clear signal to sycophants like Mr. Agboola that the President is far removed from the hearts of the citizens he tyrannically governs?
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