Obasanjo and History

Obasanjo and History

Moses Ochonu

Those familiar with the craft of historical reconstruction are equally familiar with a paradigmatic consensus in the writing of history: the best historical assessments are those written after the subjects and actors are dead. The death of key actors in historical events and dramas bestow on the historian perspective, interpretive and analytical distance, and emotional neutrality.

We Africans know that this is a supposition founded on Western notions of how the dead should be treated and related to. Because it is generally forbidden in Africa to speak ill of, or criticize, the dead, historians must assess the political acts (or lack thereof) of African leaders and icons while they are alive if such assessments are to be objective. But such assessments must avoid the pitfall of projecting the political baggage inherent in incumbency unto their conclusions about individual political figures. They must also be careful not to allow their evaluation to be inflected or corrupted by the fleeting emotions stirred up inevitably by all living political figures and incumbents.

It is in this spirit and with these important caveats that one must assess the terminating tenure of president Obasanjo. No such exercise would be credible without first outlining the peculiar advantages that Obasanjo has had the good fortune of enjoying in the last eight years. The fact that Obasanjo’s presidency was dealt an exceptionally good hand by a perfect confluence of divine benevolence and human goodwill increases the burden of expectations against which his tenure must be assessed. Some of these expectations are valid and understandable precisely because Obasanjo has had so much to work with, and one’s verdict on Obasanjo’s tenure necessarily devolves into a weighing scale of valid, realistic expectations and Obasanjo’s ability or inability to meet them.

Let’s start with the intangibles. Here is a president who came to power in 1999 with perhaps the greatest combination of public sympathy and support in Nigeria ’s post-colonial history. Such intangible moral energies are hard to quantify, but they constitute a non-political, trans-ethnic groundswell of support. They complement and perhaps supersede even the most emphatic of electoral mandates. Starved for too long of the basic freedoms and principles that accompany democratic governance, Nigerians were even willing to excuse and forgive a little violation of democratic etiquette if the endpoint was the attainment of a people-oriented development culture and the institution of transparency in our governing institutions.

What did Obasanjo do with this rare display of political magnanimity by Nigerians? He serially abused it. Obasanjo interpreted it to mean an irreversible transfer of sovereignty from Nigerians to himself, a sheepish, helpless surrender to the supreme wisdom of an omniscient president. He channeled all the goodwill into the building and consolidation of a personal edifice of power and control. Obasanjo slowly depleted the enormous sympathetic understanding that Nigerians continued to show his administration even as it turned disregard for public opinion and aspirations into a political art form. Visible Nigerians who complained about the creeping, stealthy approach of autocracy were called names, abused, harassed, and sometimes jailed on trumped up allegations. Regular Nigerians, ever excluded from the mediums of national political conversation, remained incapable of reaching an erring president to express their disappointment. An incorrigible Obasanjo binged on the liquor of power, and more callous acts of fascist disregard for the yearnings and expectations of Nigerians followed. A dug-in president became even more isolated from the people who banked on him to reverse the multiple damages of the military era.

By 2003 when Obasanjo’s first term ended, it was clear that Nigerians had committed the most naïve blunder in Nigerian political history. It was apparent that Obasanjo’s deceptively delicious rhetoric about transparency and infrastructural transformation where just that. So damaged was Obasanjo and his political platform, the PDP, that he had to rig his way back to power in the April 2003 election.

Obasanjo’s access to, and manipulation of, public goodwill was matched only by a remarkably consistent increase in Nigeria ’s revenue receipts in the last eight years. Buoyed by a fortuitous coalescing of the war in Iraq, China’s industrial renaissance, and the economic anxieties of an increasingly volatile international system, the price of crude oil, Nigeria’s major export, has held steady at a range which Obasanjo’s predecessors could only dream of. The result is that Nigeria has earned in the last eight years more than it earned in the two decades before 1999.

With a purse busting at the seams, Nigerians expected Obasanjo’s government to restore the infrastructural integrity of the country by fixing the electricity, water, and transportation sectors. By the standards of this unprecedented prosperity, these were modest expectations and did not even reflect the biblical axiom of “to whom much is given, much is expected.”

What did Obasanjo do with this overflowing treasury? He funneled billions of dollars, we are told, into the electricity sector, the roads sector, and into the provision of potable water. Today, in the twilight of his administration, these sectors are worse than they were when he came to power. Explanations for the disbursement and use of these billions are today as elusive as the services and benefits they were expected to deliver to Nigerians. Government’s reactions to questions about how so much money could translate to so little visible impact range from obfuscation to appeals to our finite wellspring of patience to outright denial of failure. These reactions have been vigorously reinforced in correspondence to the rising wave of publicly expressed disillusionment.

In place of improvements in standards of living and improvement to our infrastructure, Obasanjo has stuffed us on a staple diet of a constellation of empty claims and false assumptions called reform. The sole legacy of this reform agenda has been the transfer of national wealth and assets into the hands of a few, well-connected actors in the Nigerian corporate scene. Transcorp, of which the president is part owner and co-founder, embodies this substitution of the aspirations and needs of a self-described corporate Nigeria for those of 140 million Nigerians.

The petroleum sector speaks eloquently to this theme of gang rule and the concomitant disregard for the welfare of financially un-endowed Nigerians. Jealously circumscribed under the superintendence of Obasanjo in the past eight years, the ministry of petroleum resources, with its cash-laden appendage, the NNPC, has become the key instrument of political patronage in Obasanjo’s Nigeria . Obasanjo has repeatedly violated the constitution and its separation of powers provision to deploy the ministry and the NNPC in the lubrication of his existing political alliances and the building of new ones. Through politically strategic awards of oil prospecting blocs and contracts for the importation of refined petroleum, Obasanjo has transformed a strategic national ministry into a preeminent organ of personal political power. What’s more, the politicization of a product (petrol) upon which the country literarily runs has foreclosed the revamping of Nigeria ’s comatose petroleum refining capacity. But the creation of a fuel importation industry and its manipulation for political gains have not stopped Obasanjo from engaging in the hypocritical act of throwing billions of dollars into contracts supposedly aimed at repairing Nigeria’s four non-functioning refineries. Nigerians are somehow expected to believe that a government that has staked its survival on the politics of oil blocs and fuel importation contracts actually wanted to fix the ailing refineries.

Obasanjo’s deficits and failures are magnified partly by an inherited accumulation of betrayed hopes. But he came to power fully aware of this, and Nigerians showed an uncharacteristic patience with Obasanjo’s failure to deliver on his promises in the first few years of his administration, willing to give a democratic government a long chance after years of being brutalized by a succession of rapacious and callous military dictatorships. And Obasanjo has not made it possible for historians to concede to him some unfair expectations. He has consistently compared his administration to the ones that came before without persuasively demonstrating the qualitative difference between himself and his predecessors. If Obasanjo has suffered from the burden of inherited expectations, it is Obasanjo himself who has often invoked and insinuated it into discussions of his non-performance.

One could credit Obasanjo with the repayment of Nigeria ’s debt, regardless of what one thinks of the wisdom (or lack thereof) of parting with $12billion in one fell swoop instead of holding out and engaging in a harder-nosed bargaining than the one that produced the deal with the Paris Club. This credit in Obasanjo historical balance sheet is however diminished by the unanswered questions about the outrageous commissions, bribes, and other shady payments allegedly made to several local and international interlocutors in the debt negotiations.

Such is the capacity of Obasanjo for self-violation. Even what should count as a positive in his legacy ledger is sooner or later desecrated by Obasanjo’s many political indiscretions. For a president short on achievements and tall on failures, Obasanjo should have exercised more political caution. Instead he obliterated whatever analytical sympathy he might have salvaged with historians of his tenure when by diluting the triumphant celebrations of the debt repayment deal with the plot to secure a third term through an unpopular constitutional amendment.

Before future historians accord Obasanjo the traditional African respite for the dead, the truth must be told of a presidency that was given so much, materially and morally, and did so little with it—indeed managed to achieve the impossible feat of destroying many of the admittedly imperfect national institutions and consensuses that he inherited.