For
sometime now, a 24-page document prepared by a group that is working very
closely with President Olusegun Obasanjo is now in the public domain. The
document contains very well documented plans by a cabal to manipulate the
2007 elections and install staunch believers in the government’s economic
reform agenda, as president, vice president and governors of most states
of the country. The document is labeled confidential, the presidential
advisory team (T6), this document suggests strategies that would
systematically coordinate the use of police, SSS, EFCC, ICPC and other
state organs as per their respective roles before and during elections
based on new approaches. Among others, the document entitled Nigeria
20-2020: From 2006 to 2020: Sustainability and Succession Plan (Draft for
Discussion) contains strategies for selecting those that would rule
Nigeria for the next 25years on the platforms of the PDP, mounting a
national and global propaganda, restructuring and strengthening the PDP,
as well as neutralizing the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF). According to
the document Nigeria’s continuous rise among countries with seeming
manifest destiny of greatness owes much to President Olusegun Obasanjo’s
implementation of this Administration’s Economic Reform Agenda (ERA). This
agenda could be undermined unless the elections taking place in 2007
provide for the emergence of a leadership that believes in the compelling
necessity to preserve and expand the ERA. There are disturbing signs in
the polity that some of the leading political gladiators who feel
threatened by the reform see the elections as their final chance to
actually reverse the economic reform instead of carrying it far into the
future. If indeed the economic reform programmes are so good, why can’t it
sell itself? Why must it be foisted on the people at all cost? In any
place in the world, there can never be one economic model as solution to
economic problems.
Therefore,
the document claims that to maintain the present scheme of things, the
following steps must be taken, namely the preservation and entrenchment of
President Olusegun Obasanjo’s Reform legacy; sustenance of the Nigerian
project and its corollary dream of world class greatness; maintaining the
PDP as the ruling power at the federal level and majority of the 36 states
and FCT amongst others. On the funding of PDP the document suggested
encouraging and accepting corporate donations, mobilizing offshore funding
and internal re-organization, it detested a situation in which PDP failed
to rally its majority in the National Assembly to support Mr. President’s
legislative proposals, annual budgets and desirable constitutional
amendments, PDP failed to get its principal officers in the Senate and the
House of Representatives to abandon the opposition agenda which fact made
the latter’s key members to play larger than life roles in the two
chambers, PDP failed to get its elected majority members in Plateau and
Anambra States House of Assembly to deal with governors whose conduct in
office left much to be desired, PDP’s subservience to those perceived as
immoral power brokers particularly in Oyo and Anambra States, the
inability of PDP governments at all levels to win the propaganda war(media)
war or the hearts and minds of Nigerians as to rely on the party’s
performance to return them to power, hence everything must be done to
reposition the PDP to eliminate these encumbrances and also be able to
remain in power for the next 25 years at all cost.
To be able
to achieve this feat therefore, the document suggested that, the president
should maintain the size of Team 6, but create a president’s core group (PGC)
that will not exceed 10 in number. The PCG should have a chairman at
large, namely. Mr. President. However, a vice chairman who would be its
formal leader must be somebody with unhindered access to the chairman at
large. The vice chairman assists the president in overseeing the zonal
coordinators. But it bears logic that when PDP’s presidential candidate
emerges, he or she would automatically become the vice-chairman to be
assisted throughout the campaigns by his predecessor. The function of the
core-group is to systematically coordinate the use of police, SSS, EFCC,
ICPC and other state organs as per their respective roles before and
during elections based on new approaches which subject matter will be
detailed out subsequently. The PCG shall liaise with state governors,
party chairmen at state and LG levels, and key political leaders in the
state to ensure unity, collaboration and PDP’s success in the 2007
elections. The zonal facilitators will oversee the effective
implementation of targets and operations in the states taking cognizance
of need for varying these in line with peculiarities of their respective
states. Where the police, SSS et al have zonal structures, zonal
coordinate will relate to them, they would also be responsible for
assisting weaker states under their domain reinforcement from within the
zone, or undermining the opposition’s ability to secure outside support
for its weaker states. The zonal coordinators must enjoy the confidence of
the president and have preexisting relationships of trust with members of
the Core Group. The Zonal coordinators shall be based in Abuja, regularly
commuting to their operational areas in a discrete but effective way.
To this end
the presidential core group according to the document has resolved to
engage with rather than withdraw support from hostile media houses, as
well as intensively patronize friendly ones. There is need to urgently
convert a not so hostile paper like The Punch into a friendly one
and revive The New Nigerian, and The Reporter newspaper if
the late Yar’Adua family would be agreeable. The use of the unprecedented
federal electronic media in the propaganda war is unavoidable, being a
weapon that is readily available in the arsenals of the ruling party and
therefore all obstacles to its deployment must be anticipated and removed
immediately. A strategy should also be evolved to snatch away the
international wire services from the opposition. Equally important is the
need to cultivate FM radio stations for effective deployment against the
enemy whose dirty deals and shameful conducts the print media has been
largely paid to conceal. All stringers of the international wire services
resident in Nigeria and their editors abroad should be identified for
engagement, neutralization or deployment against the enemy that has used
these effectively.
Without
mincing words the document is a wicked and calculated attempted to
systematic rig elections in Nigeria by the PDP for the next twenty five
years as well as impose people that are opposed to the will of the
electorates into power. It an attempt, to ensure that, the will of the
people and the votes of the electorate amounts to nothing at the end of
the day. If indeed the reason for public service is to serve the people,
if the reason for going into public office is for the greatest happiness
of the greatest number, while not neglecting the interest of the minority,
then there would have been no need whatsoever for this kind of document or
what can be aptly termed PDP elite conspiracy against the Nigerian people.
It is imperative to underscore the fact that, the Obasanjo led government
has started to implement the sinister agenda contained in the document
piece-meal. The EFCC, ICPC, SSS AND Police have all been politicized, they
have all become willing tools in the hands of the present government to
foist a reign of terror on the people, and this too is a very corrupt act,
in fact, the entire impeachments saga are part of the ploy to tenaciously
hold on to power against the wish of the people and the constitution of
the country. The document is said to have been prepared by el-Rufai,
because of his desperate and inordinate ambition of wanting to be
president of Nigeria next year. A close look at the document shows in a
very sly and somewhat covert manner various methods through which el-Rufai
wants to eliminate contending power within the PDP, and strategically
positioning himself to a much higher political office. However, the point
must be made that he his working in sync with the president, as the
president is not ready to relinquish power come May next year, but at the
same time el-Rufai is running rings round the president without the
president knowing, in other words el-Rufai is setting up the president in
a very sinuous manner and there is even a proposal in the pipeline to the
effect that the handover date should be shifted from May to October 2007,
and this is just to buy time in the desperate bid to continue to hang on
to power at all cost.
Okey Ndibe
captured the rottenness of the Obasanjo led government which is the reason
for this document, in a memo to the National Assembly, he said, “under
this presidency, what used to be called the Nigerian Police Force has
degenerated to a farce, a veritable tool in the execution of
illegalities…..Nigeria may not be the most corrupt nation on earth, but it
seriously lays claim to the patent for primitive transfers of public funds
into private pockets. Far from abating, that practice has metastasized
under Obasanjo’s presidency. He has handed out the nation’s oil blocs to
his friends, empowering some truly disgraceful men and women in the
process. There is a real war, an urgent war, to be fought against
corruption, but this president lacks the ethical credentials and moral
wherewithal to declare, much less lead it. In his hands, the effort
against graft has become more theatre than a focused campaign. He has
turned the war into an instrument for savaging his corrupt personal foes
(while coddling his often more corrupt friends), a petty tool for bringing
his critics and political opponents brutally to heel, the lesson? That a
man deeply embedded in vice and highly invested in corrupt enrichment
cannot be entrusted with galvanizing a true crusade against corruption”.
It is for this reason that it is very important that all the civil society
groups, human rights organizations and all well meaning Nigerian should
work hard together to get out these groups of political scavengers and
nonentities from power, they have become a curse to the Nigerian State.
By
Jide
Ayobolu