PERSPECTIVE

The President’s promise of a clean campaign

By

Mohammed Haruna

kudugana@yahoo.com 

 

 

Over two years ago, precisely on October 22, 2000, The Comet newspaper led its edition of that day with a story about how President Olusegun Obasanjo had been planning to secure a second term by playing the Alliance for Democracy (AD) card. “Plans are on”, the paper said, “to secure President Olusegun Obasanjo’s re-election bid in year 2003, using the AD/South West as a trump card. According to a source close to the President, a machinery has been put in place to strategize on ways of achieving this.”

 

The paper further disclosed that a Minister (the late Chief Bola Ige, obviously) was heading the committee set up to liaise with AD and certain leaders in the South-West. The objective of the committee, said the paper, was to ensure that in his re-election bid, the president was “not humiliated in his home again.” This was an obvious reference to his overwhelming rejection by his kith and kin in 1999, in favour of his rival, Chief Olu Falae, the presidential candidate of the APP/AD alliance.

 

Two years on, it is now obvious that the objective of using the AD/SW card has been achieved; last week when INEC released the list of the candidates for the next general elections, a presidential candidate for AD was conspicuously missing, thus virtually ensuring a Yoruba block vote for the president.

 

This fruit of the two-year old AD/SW/Obasanjo deal is only one manifestation of what many suspect has been the president’s subterranean use of tribal and religious politics to maintain his hold on power, even as he tries to portray himself as a genuine nationalist. During last year’s independence anniversary, there was another manifestation of this not-so-subtle use of the ethnic card. The reader will recall that last year’s anniversary was celebrated against the background of an impeachment threat hanging over the president’s head. To demonstrate solidarity with the president, the banned Odua Peoples Congress (OPC) held a huge rally on that day, marching right across one end of Lagos to the other. At the end of the march, its factional leader, Dr. Frederick Faseun, threatened brimstone and fire, if the National Assembly carried out its impeachment threat. “If they continue with the impeachment process,” Faseun said, “we will regard it as an extension of June 12 and we will no longer take it. If the civilian impeachment takes place, the Yoruba people will not condone it. We will move out of Nigeria.” (The Comet October 2, 2002).

 

I have no evidence that the October 1 OPC rally was instigated from the presidency. It is, however, instructive that the police did not make any attempt to disperse the rally even though it was clearly illegal. Perhaps the authorities feared a breakdown of law and order if the police tried to disperse the rally, but the police could have either prevented it, to begin with, or having failed to do so, it could have prosecuted its leadership for organizing an illegal assembly. The authorities did neither, making it quite valid to suspect they probably did have a hand in the rally.

 

Item No. 3. Last year The Country newspaper, reported in its edition of December 1, the very interesting story of how Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye, the well-known General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), instructed his huge church members to submit their voters’ cards for onward delivery to headquarters. Its curiosity aroused by this rather strange instruction, the newspaper sought to speak with the church’s authorities on the reasons behind the instruction. Pastor Adeboye, the paper was told, had received spiritual orders from on high that he should guide his flock on who to vote for in the coming elections.

 

As with the OPC rally, it would be idle to speculate on any direct links between the pastor’s instructions and the president. It would not be idle, however, to conclude that the president, as a born-again Christian, would definitely be a major beneficiary of Pastor Adeboye’s instructions in the event, that is, that this man of God’s instructions are heeded.

 

I have decided to draw the reader’s attention to these three episodes because of the president’s press conference in Abuja last Thursday, in which he promised to conduct a presidential campaign that would be a model for all candidates. “We”, he said at the press conference, “intend to set our standard for the campaign beyond the primordial. Our campaign must be a model. To this extent, the language, tone and tenor of our campaign shall be devoid of mudslinging, ethnicity, religion and such other mundane and pedestrian context.”

 

  The president should be commended for promising to run a campaign that will be a model for all to follow. However, his record in the last four years and the not-so-sublime method he was prepared to employ to secure his party’s presidential ticket for the second time, suggests that the promise cannot be taken at its face value.

 

Actually his promise of a model presidential campaign would not be the first time he had foresworn ethnic and sectarian politics. In February last year he did actually denounce ethnic and sectional organizations like Afenifere, Ohaneze and the Arewa Consultative Forum for fanning the embers of tribalism and sectionalism.

 

“Why”, he had asked in his closing remarks at the February Presidential Retreat on Electoral Process and Violence, “are many key members of the political elite more willing to pitch their tents with parochial, ethnic-based, sub-national organizations than with our mainstream political institutions?” His answer was that it was because political parties were yet to play the roles expected of them as instruments of aggregating political demands and mediating political power. This answer, however, begs the question of why the parties have failed in playing their roles.

 

The obvious answer lies in the fact that all too often political leaders like the president himself do not practice what they preach. For it is pretty evident from the three examples above, namely (1) AD’s decision not to field a presidential candidate, (2) the way the federal authorities have consistently condoned OPC’s innumerable breaches of law and order, including the mass murder of innocent people and even the killing of policemen, and (3) Pastor Adeboye’s strange instructions to his flock to hand in their voters cards to the church, that the president has hardly practiced what he has been fond of preaching.

 

So that while one would like to commend him for promising a model campaign, it would be more prudent to wait and see whether his action will match his words. One’s reticence in believing the president’s word is justified the more because the president indulged in a bit of half-truths in the very speech in which he made his promise to eschew mudslinging and “such other mundane and pedestrian context,” which presumably includes avoiding distortions, half-truths and bare-faced lies, among other vices.

 

Nigeria before May 1999, the president said in his speech, “was characterized by several human rights abuses, intimidation, brutalization of the collective psyche of the citizenry, as well as state-inspired violence and elimination of real and perceived enemies of state.” Apart from this pervasive insecurity, he said, nothing in the country, not our refineries, not our fertilizer plants or steel rolling plants, worked, until, that it, he came along to rescue Nigeria and Nigerians from its sordid immediate past.

 

Even the president’s most ardent admirers must admit that this claim is hardly the truth, and nothing but the truth. It is certainly not true that any Nigerian was brutalized or eliminated by the State between June 1998, when General Sani Abacha suddenly died and was succeeded by General Abdulsalami Abubakar, and May 1999 when Obasanjo himself took over. On the contrary, all the political prisoners in the country, including the president, gained their freedom. At the same time all political exiles had the option to return, which most of them did.

 

It is therefore obviously not true for the president to say that the country he inherited from General Abubakar was a gulag. It was also not true to claim that the country he inherited was still isolated by the international community because General Abubakar had broken that isolation long before Obasanjo was released from prison  and pardoned as a victim of Abacha’s tyranny.

 

Again it is also not true to say that nothing worked in the country before he took over, just like it is also not true to claim to that after nearly four years of his rule, El Dorado can already be seen on the horizon. The president knows that before he took over, the refineries and the electricity generation plants were beginning to work and the queues at petrol stations were beginning to disappear and power outages were beginning to decline.

 

President Obasanjo also knows that inspite of massive investments he has made in the   refineries and in power generation, the refineries have not progressed much beyond what he inherited and electricity supply has remained unstable.

 

True, inspite of still malfunctioning refineries, the queues at petrol stations have disappeared for a long time, but the president knows all too well that the price of their disappearance is not sustainable even in the medium term. Between January and September last year, for example, the NNPC lost over 52 billion Naira on imported petroleum products, according to its own figures. During the corresponding period the year before, it had lost over 88 billion Naira. Obviously last year was an improvement on the year before, but equally obviously such huge losses can only be sustained for a short while.

 

 We all know that the only way to make the queues in our petrol stations disappear permanently and at reasonable cost is to make the refineries work. So far it seems obvious that the presidential will to do so is simply lacking.

 

It is all well and good for the president to espouse a campaign devoid of all manner of negativism, but if, as the country’s number one citizen, he wants others to listen to his gospel, then he too must begin to practice what he preaches.