PEOPLE AND POLITICS WITH MOHAMMED HARUNA

Between the President and his party chairman

kudugana@yahoo.com

When Chief Audu Ogbeh became the chairman of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) over three years ago, many people, including Chief Sunday Awoniyi, then newly estranged from the party, expressed great optimism about his chances of turning it around as a party that had become directionless, incohesive and ill-disciplined. Awoniyi, now chairman of the Arewa Consultative Forum, had been rigged out of the chairmanship of the party at the previous convention in favour of Chief Barnabas Gemade, the obvious candidate of the presidency. Worse still, the chief was later to be humiliated out of the party altogether as one of its trustees along with some of his fellow trustees including the chairman of the Board of Trustees, former vice-president, Chief Alex Ekwueme.

“Now we have Audu Ogbe as chairman” said Awoniyi in an interview with the Sunday Vanguard ( November 18, 2001 ). “I know his record, I know his lifestyle. He is a man of integrity, one of the people who left public office at a very high level absolutely untainted and his reputation untarnished by any form of scandal. He is bright, articulate and I believe his heart is in the right place … I have no doubt in my mind that for sheer ability, dedication and drive, he could make a great success of PDP. But he has a great uphill task, not just for the PDP but for the whole political programme of this country, in view of the dominance of the PDP. My hope is that Audu Ogbeh will succeed and succeed abundantly….”

Chief Awoniyi is as clear-sighted and far-sighted as they come, for the simple reason that he abhors self-aggrandizement -- and few things obscure one’s vision like it - with a passion, as the record of his decades of public service shows.  But long before the latest letter exchanging episode between President Olusegun Obasanjo and Ogbeh over the whirlwind the PDP has been reaping in Anambra State since last year as a result of the wind the party sowed by blatantly rigging the election in the state along with the elections elsewhere all over the country, I have often wondered if, for once, Awoniyi’s political sight did not fail him in his optimism, albeit a cautious one, about Ogbe’s prospects. True, Ogbeh was all that Awoniyi said he was in the Sunday Vanguard interview – someone with a clean past, someone who is bright, articulate, hard-working, the lot. In his optimism, however, I thought the chief overlooked the circumstance under which Ogbe became chairman. Because of this circumstance, I was, unlike Awoniyi, skeptical that Ogbeh would make a difference to the party’s negative image. On the contrary, I feared that the party would be the ruin of his reputation.

Gemade, the reader may recall, had been going about complaining to just about anyone who cared to listen that the presidency was not only interfering too much in purely party affairs, it was also rejecting all advice from the party on matters of state. Indeed on the very day of the convention at which he was trounced by Ogheh, he exchanged words with the president over his grouse. “A situation,” he said, “where other avenues other than the party are the focus of actions is definitely not healthy and cannot generate the required allegiance, commitment and dedication to the party. Our candid observation is that we have only paid lipservice to the concept of party supremacy.”

To which President Obasanjo retorted with an unequivocal rejection. “Party officials,” he said, “need to be reminded that they are not government officials, appointed or otherwise. Party officials are renumerated from party headquarters and they must stay away from the day to day executive decisions of government, once the party manifesto remains the guide for the president.”

In this squaring off between Obasanjo and Gemade, I thought the message for Ogbeh, as Gemade’s pre-anointed replacement, was clear and unambiguous; in plain English, the chairman, as far as the president was concerned, was to lead the ruling party as a rubber-stamp of presidential whims and caprices. Ogbeh, as a bright politician, must surely have understood this. If he did - and I don’t see how he couldn’t - and still went ahead to accept the job, the probable explanation could have been that he entertained great illusions about his will to resist the corrupting ways of power, especially the way it had been wielded by the President during his first term.

Ogbeh may have survived the Second Republic as a minister with his reputation intact, but in between then and his enticement to replace Gemade, he had fallen onto hard times materially. So hard that he needed to be a Superman to throw away a second, and possibly last, opportunity to escape the hard times for good at the alter of principles and integrity.

Ogbeh, it had turned out quite predictably, was no Superman. Like most ordinary folks, he seemed to have learnt the wrong lesson about his fall onto hard times. The most glaring evidence was his active participation in the massive rigging of the last general elections by the PDP. In this respect I would like to refer the reader to my article on these pages on July 23, 2003 titled “The Awka whirlwind”. In it I showed how himself, the party Secretary, Chief Vincent Ogbulafor, the president’s fixer-in chief, Chief Tony Anenih, and Chief Chris Uba, the man at the centre of the diabolical goings-on in Anambra, railroaded the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) into declaring Chief Adolphus Wabara the winner of the election in his senatorial district in Abia State in time to contest for the Senate presidency. I also showed how the same Uba single-handedly replaced the names of at least two successful candidates for the national legislative elections in Anambra with the names of his proteges who never even contested the elections. Both the party and INEC turned deaf ears to the petitions of the successful candidates.

For me Ogbeh had lost his innocence once he accepted to replace Gemade knowing fully well why Gemade was getting the presidential boot. After his active participation in rigging the last general elections, it was difficult, if not impossible, not to conclude that he had lost that innocence for good. Therefore it did not surprise me when, soon after the elections, he, in effect, told a meeting of the new PDP legislators that the only question they were permitted to ask anytime the almighty president told them to jump was, How high?

In the light of all this, it is impossible to disagree with the president that Ogbeh’s letter of December 6 which triggered the latest twist in the festering Anambra crisis is, to use the president’s own words, “opportunistic and a smokescreen.” These words alone, not to mention the bile that dripped from almost every word in the rest of the letter, should persuade Ogbeh that the most honourable thing for him to do is to vacate the party’s chair, if not leave the party altogether.

The party is of course greater than the president and its officials should not leave or stay on account only of the president’s mood. This, however is only the theory of it. In practice, as Chief Awoniyi, himself admitted in his Sunday Vanguard interview, the party lost its supremacy over the presidency - to the extent that such a thing is possible in a presidential system - long ago. This supremacy was, in Awoniyi’s words, “lost from day one, the moment we had a cabinet composed with hardly any input from the party; that supremacy was completely denuded until it virtually existed no more. This is the truth.”

What, in other words, Ogbeh took over from Gemade three years ago was essentially a rubber-stamp party. Not that the president was wrong to have rejected the notion of the supremacy of the party. On the contrary, he was, I believe, correct to have done so depending on whether the kind of party supremacy Gemade had in mind was a veto-wielding party. This kind of supremacy was true only of the communist system and, to a lesser extent, the parliamentary system of democracy where the prime minister has only a constituency mandate and is no more than the first among equals in his cabinet. By comparison the executive president has a national mandate and is free, both in principle and in practice, to chose his cabinet from outside his party. Of course he should consult the party but he does not have to do its biddings all the time. By the same token legislators in a presidential system are also free to vote on issues according to their consciences rather than strictly along party lines.

However, even though the president is right to reject the notion of party supremacy, in the sense of a veto-wielding party, he has been inconsistent even in his rejection. First, the same president who had warned the party to steer clear of government affairs turned around in his diatribe against Ogbeh to claim leadership of the party. Ogbeh, the president said in his letter, not only shirked his responsibility in Anambra as party chairman, Ogbeh insulted him “not only as president of the nation, but also as leader of the party which you seem never to recognise on acknowledge.” Surely if, as the president claims, he is the over-all leader of his party, it is illogical that it should have little or no say in the affairs of state.

And as if to confuse matter even more, barely a few months after he had told his party to steer clear of government he told his audience at the closing ceremony of the Presidential Retreat on Electoral Process and Violence in February 2002, that “we must work to make political parties the main structure for the political process…” The political process may be more than government, but surely government is the central pillar of that process.

His flip-flop about how prominent a role a party should have in a presidential system is only one reason his response to Ogbeh’s letter is no less self-serving than the PDP chairman’s. A second and perhaps more important reason is his longish account of what steps he said he took to resolve the Anambra crisis. Between appointing a committee of elders led by Igwe Alex Nwokedi (his Chief Press Secretary as military Head of State) to look into the feud when it first started, and his appointment this month of the governor of Ebonyi State, Chief Sam Egwu, to broker peace between Governor Chris Ngige and Uba, the governor’s estranged god-father, the president listed no less than six steps.

None of these six, however, included what he should have done if he had truly wanted to save Anambra State from the deaths and destruction that have been inflicted on the hapless citizens of the state in the last one year or so. This was simply to have ordered the Inspector General of Police to arrest and prosecute Uba, along with his henchmen, some of them members of the National Assembly, as the self-confessed chief perpetrator of the mayhem in Anambra. Instead, the president merely talked about facing “a moral dilemma” on what to do, where no moral dilemma really ever existed. What has gone on in Anambra in the past one year is simply criminal in nature and there are no two ways about how to deal with crime.

“I can stand before God and man, and in clear conscience”, boasted the president, “to defend every measure that I have taken everywhere in Nigeria since I became the president and will continue to act without fear or favour or inducement. And it does not matter what is sponsored in the Nigerian media, in particular, the print media.”

Few Nigerians, I suspect, will agree with the president that everything he has done in the last five years is defensible. On the contrary most would probably agree with the Nigerian Tribune which said in a front page comment on February 14, 2002 that because of the president’s belief that he is Nigeria ’s messiah, he needed to be saved from himself, if we are to save our country. “Given the polyvalent character of the Nigerian crises,” said the paper, “the Nigerian Tribune submits that the president has to be saved from himself, so as to save the nation.”

“The image of an infallible president, a pretender to the Pope-status, a be-all-and-end-all leader,” the paper had said in the opening paragraph of the editorial, “has haunted Nigerians with frightening consequences … Indeed President Olusegun Obasanjo would appear to be getting progressively worse in every quarter of his personal shortcomings.”

These are indeed harsh words, but after the altercation between the president and the chairman of his party over the Anambra State crisis, the words sound even truer today than they did more than two years ago. As someone who obviously thinks he is infallible, the president may still insist he has taken no wrong step over the Anambra crisis, but the problem really lies not in what he has done, but in what he has refused to do.