PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Ozobu, the Third -Term Agenda and the North

kudugana@yahoo.com

 

The PUNCH of last Thursday, December 15, carried a story about the remarks by a former Chief Judge of Enugu state, Justice Eze Ozobu, in which he campaigned for extending President Obasanjo’s second term beyond its expiry date on May 29, 2007.  All sorts of absurd excuses have been advanced in support of this extension, most notably the one about the president’s indispensability to the on-going socio-economic reform. Its absurdity is pretty obvious from the old saying about cemeteries being full of the bodies of indispensable men and women, or words to that effect. For sheer stupidity, however – not to mention its downright demagoguery – Ozobu’s remarks, with the greatest respect to the office he once occupied, really takes the cake.

           

First, Ozobu, who until a few years back was the chairman of Ohaneze Ndigbo, accused the North of being the sole opposition to the president’s third term agenda.  Second, the region, he said in effect, was opposed to this agenda because the president has stopped its leaders from practicing its alleged cardinal principle of chop and let chop.

           

Ozobu’s words deserve to be quoted extensively, if not in full. “The problem here,” PUNCH quoted him as saying, “is that Obasanjo has not opened the nation’s treasury for people to loot as it was the case in the past when these people were in power. That’s what is happening.  In their own time all sorts of people were coming in and taking money from our treasury. They even used command cars to carry drugs and stuff like that.  These things are not happening today. If you can stop a man from looting, can it be said that you are endangering democracy? Just because some people have been stopped from stealing our collective wealth? I think that the northerners must learn to respect the sensibilities of other people. They have produced so many Heads of State and yet they still want more. Its not fair”.

           

This, I must repeat, is the most absurd excuse anyone has given for extending President Obasanjo tenure. First, unless Ozobu has just returned from a long holiday to the moon, he cannot be unaware that the opposition to the third term agenda has come from all corners of this country, including the South-East where he comes from, and the South-West where the president himself comes from.

           

Just to refresh the former chief judge’s memory, barely little over three years ago when he was still chairman of Ohaneze, the organization issued a joint statement with the Arewa Consultative Forum, under Chief Sunday Awoniyi, in which the two organizations denounced what they said was the president’s dictatorial tendency.

           

“His preference for executive selection in place of election”, said Ohaneze and ACF in mid-2002, “has been the root cause of virtually all our political crises under his administration. The fear of well meaning Nigerians therefore is that Obasanjo, who is now so obsessed with his election for a third term, will try the same undemocratic tactics in 2003 and impose himself on the country to continue as president. The result will be disastrous.”

           

The question to ask here is what has made Ozobu to now execute a political somersault barely three years after Ohaneze, under himself, warned Nigerians about the dangers of an imperial presidency? Has the ruling PDP, with all its “affirmatory” congresses and convention, become more democratic today than it was three years ago? With the federal government shutting down state radio stations that broadcast news and views the federal authorities do not like to hear, like it did in Bayelsa State last week, and with the Chief Justice of the Federation decrying the proclivity of the federal government to pick and choose what court rulings to obey, is the country itself any more democratic and safer from jungle justice today than it was three years ago? Unless Ozobu chooses to play the ostrich, he knows that the answers to these questions are negative.

           

Again unless Ozobu chooses to play the ostrich, he would know that the country’s independent press is as much against the third term agenda as are most Nigerians. For example, the Nigerian Tribune, that pre-eminent Yoruba mouthpiece, carried an editorial on November 21, about the parable of dictators in Africa. Titled “Africa: The same sad story,” the editorial said, among other things, that African leaders are bad at scoring goals because they “are too busy moving the goalposts to aim well at the goal. Many of them have changed or simply ignored their country’s constitution to remain in power.”

           

The newspaper’s editorial writers did not name Nigeria but it was pretty obvious that they had recent political events in Nigeria in mind when they wrote the editorial.

           

If the Tribune avoided direct reference to Nigeria, Tell, Vanguard and The Guardian, did not. All three can hardly be accused of being Northern mouthpieces.

           

Long before Tribune, Vanguard unequivocally told the president to “stop third term campaigners.” This was in an editorial in its edition of July 27. “Each denial of these moves,” said the paper, “is more unconvincing…President’s Obasanjo’s avowed patriotism is a poor excuse – though none would be acceptable – to desecrate the constitution.”

           

Tell magazine, on its part, took the rare step in its nearly 15-year history of writing an editorial against the third term agenda. The strong worded editorial accompanied its cover story whose head line was “2007 – Why Obasanjo Must Go.” This was in its December 5 edition.

 

“This magazine,” Tell said in its editorial, “reserves an emphatic No for this appeal”, that is the appeal from certain quarters for the president to be allowed to carry on beyond May 29, 2007.

 

The Guardian was even more forceful than Tell in denouncing the third term agenda. In its editorial of November 23, titled “Dangerous echoes of third term agenda,” the newspaper urged “the president, the legislators and all those face-less, hypocritical and dead-to-honour agitators for the third term project to perish the idea, once and for all.”

 

Indeed more than one and a half years earlier The Guardian had warned against the agenda in its editorial of April 1, 2004, titled “Third Term for President Obasanjo?” In that editorial the newspaper told the president that his studied silence on the controversy, which was yet to become full-blown, was unwise. “Here”, said the newspaper, “is a case where silence is not golden.”

 

Since then the president has himself denied that he has any third-term agenda. But as Vanguard said in its editorial of July 27, the more the denials the less Nigerians believe them. This is for the simple reason that while the president says one thing, his fixers do the exact opposite. Besides the oga himself has equivocated enough about the issue to make his denials suspect. Only the penultimate weekend, the president, in effect, dismissed those opposed to his third term agenda as political blackmailers. “As a party,” he told the December 10 convention of his party in Abuja, “we must resist efforts by some individuals or groups to use their pedestrian understanding of power shift and power rotation to hold the country to ransom”.

 

The president then proceeded to ask his party to allow him, “as the leader of the party” to be the sole interpreter of “our policy and principles of power shift.”

 

Such equivocation can only open the president to suspicions that he has every intention to carry on beyond May 29, 2007.

 

From all this, Ozobu can see that opposition to the third term agenda does not come from the North alone.

 

As for his charge that the region’s opposition to the agenda is because President Obasanjo has stopped Northern leaders from stealing, there are at least two simple answers. First, after all the stories of incredible financial shenanigans involving hundreds of millions of Naira by senior government officials in ministries like Defence (remember Dr. Makonyinola?), Internal Affairs, (remember the National Identity Card scandal?) and Works (remember Chief Tony Anenih’s highway scandals?) and after all the queries by the Revenue Commission about the murky operations in our oil industry, after all these stories and more, it is the height of self deception for anyone to claim that President Obasanjo has succeeded in stopping the massive stealing of public funds at anytime since May 1999.

 

Second, the habit of stealing is not, has never been, and will never be, the prerogative of one region, religion, tribe or class. Just like Northerners have their fair share of villains so also do other people from other regions. Human nature is such that every people has its own share of the good, the bad and the ugly.

 

It is, in any case, not Northerners who stole the regional banks in the old East – the African Continental Bank – and in the old West – the National Bank – blind, eventually leading to their collapse. Nor is it Northerners who loot the statutory allocations to the states outside their region such that the citizens of those states have remained ill-served by their governments – just like those in the North.

 

Ozobu is entitled to campaign for an extension to anyone’s tenure. But he is not entitled to insult our intelligence in the course of exercising that right. With due respect to the exalted office of the chief  judgeship of Enugu state he once occupied, his interview in the PUNCH of December 15 is the greatest insult anyone can inflict on the intelligence of Nigerians.