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PEOPLE AND POLITICS WITH MOHAMMED HARUNA OBJ and the PDP Crisis: Forward to the Past
In the past few weeks two events have competed closely for media attention. These are (1) the arrest of Bayelsa State governor, Chief Diepriye Alamieyeseigha, in London ostensibly for money laundering and (2) the crisis in the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party over membership registration, a crisis which itself is the latest development in the larger crisis over President Obasanjo’s apparent determination to stop his deputy, Atiku Abubakar, from succeeding him in 2007. The epic battle between the two for the heart and mind of the party has clearly divided it right down the middle.
The common factor between the Alamieyeseigha crisis and the PDP crisis is the role of the president himself. In the first case there are speculations that he engineered it less to fight corruption than to fight his deputy, Atiku Abubakar, whose supporter the Bayelsa governor is. In the second case, the warring factions of the PDP have been fighting the battle for membership registration ahead of the 2007 general election as if their (political) lives depended on it, which, indeed, they do.
Having previously routed his deputy at the top level of the National Executive Council and the National Working Committee by stuffing the two organs with his men, the president clearly chose not to take any chances over the battle for the grassroots. The way events have played out since the silent war of succession between the president and his deputy came out into the open in August, it now looks like the boss has the ruling party completely sewn up so much so that one can safely say that Nigeria is headed for, not just a one party dictatorship but, worse, it seems headed for a one-man tyranny.
This development is bound to set someone thinking about the huge gap between Citizen Obasanjo’s criticisms of every government since 1979 and what he himself has done since returning to power in 1999 to tackle the vices and failures he had condemned in others. As a study in credibility gap, the contrast between the president’s words and deeds would make a classic case. For the doubting Thomas’s and even for his most faithful apologists, I invite them to read his exclusive interview in Tell magazine of April 26, 1993, titled, “IBB’s REGIME IS A FRAUD”, and compare his unrestrained diatribe against military president, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, with his own record since 1999. For those who may not have access to the magazine, I’ll like to devote the rest of these pages to excerpts from the interview.
Before I do so, however, I’ll like to examine the issue of the Bayelsa governor. Alamieyeseigha himself has accused the presidency of being behind his humiliating arrest. “It is apparent,” Daily Trust of September 22, among other newspapers, reported him as saying, “that the Metropolitan police were informed of my movements by the federal government, hence the unlawful arrest aboard the aircraft.” President Obasanjo’s CNN interview on the case on September 17 could only confirm Alamieyeseigha’s charge. “The fact that the police arrested this man,” the president said in the September 17 CNN interview, “is an indication that our anti-corruption measures are working.”
The Bayelsa governor’s supporters and he himself have said his arrest, inspite of his apparent immunity, has nothing to do with President Obasanjo’s declared war on corruption and everything to do with his opposition to the apparent wish of the president to perpetuate himself in power. If that is the case, the governor, I am afraid, has only himself to blame for what befell him in London. Afterall, he ought to have known that he who goes to equity – and the fight to stop anyone from perpetuating himself in power or, failing that, imposing his stooge on the people, is a fight for equity – should go with clean hands. If, however, he chooses to go with soiled hands, he would be foolish and reckless, to display those soiled hands for all the world to see. And that was exactly what his trip to the UK, where he had apparently stashed away so much unexplained personal wealth, amounted to.
I share Alamieyeseigha’s sentiments about President’s Obasanjo’s motives. One good reason for doing so was the recent attempt at removing Alhaji Bello Masari as Speaker of the House of Assembly for no worse crime than his declaration that President Obasanjo must leave office in May 2007. The ostensible reason for the attempt was that Masari made multiple age declarations and claimed academic qualifications he did not have. Yet when the same presidency backed Masari for the job two years ago, the same allegations were in wide circulation. The difference clearly was where Masari stood then and where he stands now. The issue in Alamieyeseigha’s case, however, is not the president’s motive but, first, whether or not the governor has a case to answer and, second, whether he has immunity from prosecution in and out of Nigeria.
From the look of things the governor does have a case to answer. So far neither he nor his supporters have bothered to deny the allegation that he has stashed away so much loot in the U.K. Instead, they seem, in effect, to say that even if the governor is a crook, the law says you can’t touch him.
Expert opinions seem to differ on this. Some say the immunity Section 308 of our Constitution confers on the governors and their deputies does not go beyond our borders. Others say because state governments in a federation are, at least in principle, coordinates and not subordinates of the central government, governors and their deputies enjoy as much immunity outside our borders as the president and the vice president.
We can debate this matter till the end of time but there is no disputing the principle in law that where there is doubt the benefit should go to the accused. The proper place to resolve the matter therefore are the courts but this is not what the British or the Nigerian authorities seem to be talking about. Rather they have presumed the Bayelsa governor ineligible for immunity and have decided to prosecute him accordingly.
Alamieyeseigha may have been a money launderer, but until the courts have established that he can be prosecuted for such a crime inspite of being a governor I would have thought the only sensible option open to the British authorities was to have seized the monies he could not account for and let him go. Although Alamieyeseigha has only himself to blame for his humiliating arrest in London, a principle of law is a principle of law and we should not bend or break it because we must make an example of someone.
And now to return to our main issue of the day, which is about how our president has moved our country to worse than the very past that he had ceaselessly condemned before his return to power 20 years after he left as military head of state. I leave the reader to judge for himself from excerpts of his Tell interview how far since 1999 the president has fulfilled the public expectations he has raised by his diatribe against every government since 1979, especially that of General Babangida.
His supporters may consider it unfair to judge him by the expectations he had raised rather than by the enormity of the problems he had inherited. There is no doubt that President Obasanjo’s burden is truly gargantuan. The problem, however, is that he appears to have made matters only worse than what he inherited
Here we go: “As a result of what someone called financial and fiscal rascality, we now have an administration in-deficit. Deficit budgeting, deficit financing, deficit trading but more importantly, we now have an administration that is deficit in credibility. That is very very important. It is deficit in honesty, deficit in honour, deficit in truth.”
If these were not the president’s own words, you would be pardoned to think he was attacking his own records in the past six years plus. His, after all, is an administration that has ran worse than deficit budgets – that is, no budget at all. Again few people believe him when he says he will leave in 2007 and fewer still believe he is sincere about his war on corruption.
“One legacy that this administration will be leaving us is not only making Nigeria 500 per cent poor but moving Nigeria from among one of the leading 50 nations of the world economically to out of the 25 poorest nations.”
According to the latest United Nation’s Development Programme report on the Human Development Index, Nigeria has sunk from its previously low 141 position to 158 out of the 177 countries assessed. It is, in other words, 19th from the bottom.
“For what purpose do you have the rules of the same game being changed in the middle of the game?”
Like has been happening in the PDP in recent times? Here it may interest the reader to note what the president told the New York based Council on Foreign Relations in a briefing on September 24, 2004. “I had,” he said, “to learn the ropes of what political parties do, how they do it and then became a party political man, AND ALSO TO BE ABLE TO ETCH MY OWN STAMP ON MY OWN POLITICAL PARTY. Now after we came to the new term, or the second term, and the economy became a major issue … And of course because I have a little more leeway, I was able to pick my team with LITTLE INTERFERENCE BY THE POLITICAL PARTY THIS TIME” (Emphasis mine). Well, the president, it seems, has since graduated first class as a student of politics and has, by his own admission, succeeded in stamping his authority on PDP. Unfortunately the result has not a pretty sight to behold..
“The only programme in town is President Babangida’s programme as he plays it, as he unfolds it and as he enunciates it. He is the programme, he is the government, he is what goes and what does not go.”
In recent times it seems the only programme in town in President Obasanjo’s. “We were deceived that SAP was a Nigerian homegrown, home prepared idea. SAP was designed by one clique who (sic) work for the international financial institutions.”
You would be right to substitute NEEDS for SAP. Afterall the authors of NEEDS, notably Professor Charles Soludo, the Central Bank governor, and Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the finance minister, were either consultants or staff of the World Bank and the IMF.
“You also ask us to remove subsidies in areas where it hurts most and it hurts the poorest of our society most.”
Today, the president holds the record for the number of times any Nigerian leader has removed subsidies on petroleum products, a sector where it hurts Nigerians and poor Nigerians most.
“SAP has created a new class of noveau riche from commission rather than production.”
The new rich like members of the Transcontinental Nigeria Ltd who got concessions for just about every thing you can think of for no better reason than that they helped – fraudulently, one must add - finance the president’s 2003 election campaign and his presidential library project?
“You would have had a successful transition if the manager of the transition is honest with it … When you are manipulating and you are playing games as President Babangida is playing now … then you have this type of situation.”
Vice-President Atiku Abubakar would find this one amusing if the matter were not so deadly serious.
And last but by no means the least.
“There are only two things that can make a man give his word and go back on it. Fear or greed. I hope Babangida has only one.”
There are, alas, many Nigerians who will swear that our president has gone one better than Babangida given the record of his cloak and dagger political games with friends and foes alike..
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