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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA A letter to Obasanjo: The Lesson of Power
Your Excellency,
The subject of this letter, as you may have guessed from its title, is the widespread rumour about your bid for a third term, or at least, a two-year extension of your second term. You and some of your lieutenants, including your Political Adviser, Professor Jerry Gana, have repeatedly denied this rumour. Yet it has simply refused to go away because of your administration’s credibility problem, as I shall explain presently.
First, however, permit me to take you back to August 1998, and then a little further back to August 1985. In August 1998, the late Tunji Oseni, who was to become your chief press secretary half way through your first term, organized a seminar on “The Media, Transition and Nigeria,” to examine what happened to journalism as Nigeria moved from one military administration to the other. About one year later, Tunji compiled the papers presented at that seminar into a book with the same title.
In his Preface to the book, Tunji spoke about how one military ruler after the other broke their vows to return power to civilians. “Since January 1966 when Nigerian soldiers first seized power,” Tunji said, “heads of respective military administrations have designed programmes to impress Nigerian masses of their willingness to voluntarily hand over power. Save for 1979 when General Olusegun Obasanjo handed over to Alhaji Shehu Shagari, other soldiers have always pledged, only to renege.” Actually not all the military rulers even bothered with the pretence of pledging to return power to civilians. Major-General J.T.U. Aguiyi-Ironsi simply had no such plans while Major-General Muhammadu Buhari told The Guardian in one of his first interviews as head of state that democratic rule was not his priority.
Your Excellency, as you know very well, being the exception to the tradition of sit-tight military rulers, at least until General Abdulsalami Abubakar who handed power to you on May 29, 1999, came along, earned you the status of a statesman. As an exception to the rule, not only in Nigeria but in Africa, you became a highly sought after figure in international circles.
Sir, with due respect, the dismal record of your administration in the last six years, whether it is in managing the country’s political-economy or in fighting corruption, etc, has done a lot of damage to that reputation. I fear that if you do not do something drastic that will show that you are indeed above the fray in the battle to succeed you in 2007, what remains of that reputation will suffer even more, perhaps irreparable, damage.
You have, of course, said you have no intention whatsoever to remain in office a day beyond May 29, 2007, but your word, I am afraid, no longer carries the weight it did back in the eighties and nineties. This is largely because you have often entered one pact after the other with friends and political opponents alike only to turn round and deny or even denounce the pact as soon as you have achieved your objective. You will, for example, remember you struck a deal in 1998 with some Northern leaders to do a Mandela (serve only one term). However, you promptly and volubly denounced the deal as soon as you felt you were powerful enough to do so. Then you struck another deal with the Alliance for Democracy and Afenifere leadership to keep your party from challenging AD’s hold on the South-West provided this time, unlike back in 1998, the Yoruba leadership mobilized the Yoruba to vote for you as PDP’s presidential candidate. Indeed as a sign of goodwill AD refused to even put up a presidential candidate. They upheld their own side of bargain, but you didn’t. Instead you routed all but one of the AD governors and many of their senators through a subterfuge that would have made Hitler and Machiavelli rolled into one, look like a political neophyte.
Remember also how you dragged General Yakubu Gowon and President Shehu Shagari in to persuading the National Assembly hawks under Speaker Umar Ghali Na’abba to end their moves to impeach you ahead of the last general elections. They accepted Gowon’s and Shagari’s intercession under certain conditions which you promptly accepted. However, no sooner did the National Assembly call off its hunt than you let down your own side of the bargain.
Remember also that often times when you had a disagreement with your compatriots and then you appear to kiss and make up, in a manner of speaking, that was when you always plunged your dagger deep into their hearts for the final kill. You did so with the late Chuba Okadikpo and Anyim Pius Anyim as senate presidents, and with Audu Ogbe as the chairman of your party.
One could go on and on, but these examples are enough to show why many people are no longer prepared to take you for your word. Even more telling that these examples, however, is the fact that your people seem to have a well-orchestrated strategy of erecting obstacles in the paths of credible candidates for the 2007 general elections, candidates like your Vice-President, Atiku Abubakar, and Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Muhammadu Buhari, while also playing them and other prospective candidates against each other.
Sir, at this stage I will like to take you back to Tunji and his August 1998 seminar. I was a participant at that seminar and was invited by Tunji to deliver a paper on what I thought was the strange topic of “Why don’t they listen?” Tunji said he came up with the topic because I had written a number of fairly well-received open letters to many leaders including Generals Babangida and Abacha that they should never ever listen to those who were urging them to succeed themselves.
I had also written articles critical of some of their policies and programmes. For example, I was highly critical of the main pillars of Babangida’s transition programme which included banning politicians merely on account of age, using the open ballot system instead of the time-honoured secret ballot, and imposing a two-party system on Nigeria.
Tunji wanted me to share my knowledge of why none of them seemed to listen to my advice and I told him they should be the ones to answer that question, not me. Even then I accepted to write the paper because I thought it was an opportunity to discuss and debate my belief that the problem with Nigeria is not only that our leaders don’t listen but it is even more because (1) Nigerian pundits, critics and politicians alike are all too often inconsistent in their comments on policies and issues, (2) we seem to lack a sense of history, even contemporary history and (3) we often even distort history.
Sir, you are among those I have written open letters to who never listened, assuming, that in the first place, you indulged my presumptuousness and temerity in writing such letters. Chances are you probably never even saw one such letter I wrote to you in the now rested London based West Africa magazine, of September 16, 1985. In that letter, I challenged your thesis that only fools contend on forms of government in a paper you presented early August 1985 to the Annual Conference of the Agricultural Society of Nigeria in Ibadan. In that paper you argued that what is important about government is performance not form. And because by your reckoning the country’s military regimes had done better than the civilian governments, you said we should stop regarding military rule as an aberration. I counter-argued in my letter in West Africa, that although performance matters, form, as a rule, matters even more because it matters whether a government comes to power through the ballot box or through the barrel of the gun or, worse still, through rigging the ballot box.
Sir, it is apparent that you have not changed your position of nearly 20 years ago. This seems to me to be why your party pulled all stops to make sure it “won” the last general elections. For obviously understandable reasons, you yourself seem to believe you were doing a fantastic job managing the Nigerian political-economy and fighting corruption, etc, and therefore it did not matter how you retained power. However, whatever your courtiers and advisers might have told you, most Nigerians did not share your belief and still do not. But even if they did, that was no excuse for not allowing them to freely chose who should govern them in 2003. And what was true of 2003 is still true for 2007.
The other day at least one newspaper reported your Man Friday, Chief Tony Anenih, as telling the world that only you and not anyone else, including himself as the chairman of PDP.s Board of Trustees, indeed not even the party itself will have a say in deciding who would succeed you as its presidential candidate, and by extension, who will be the next president, seeing how Nigeria, for all practical purposes, has become a one party state. The last time he told Nigerians, ahead of the 2003 presidential elections, that there was no vacancy in the villa, Nigerians shouted themselves hoarse. They shouted and shouted but Anenih and your other numerous fixers still prevailed in what has since become regarded as the most blatantly rigged election in Nigeria’s history.
Sir, you can give your word a million times that you have no intention of staying put in office beyond May 29, 2007 but as long as you surround yourself with men of Anenih and you are seen to put obstacles in the way of credible and even non-credible presidential candidates, few, if any, Nigerians will believe you.
Here’s hoping that you will, for once, listen and repeat your own feat of October 1, 1979. That way you would have shown that you have learnt the lesson of how History has dealt with dictators of all ages and of all shapes and sizes since Adam. |