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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA The President’s Samson Solution
I am tempted this morning by two major events of the last several weeks to reproduce the speech President Olusegun Obasanjo gave at the closing ceremony of the Presidential Retreat on the Electoral Process and Violence on February 10, 2002 and juxtapose that speech with two articles I wrote on these pages about the gap between the president’s words and his deeds. The first article, titled “Obasanjo’s Samson option,” was published on October 9, 2002 and was in reaction to an interview he gave to a select group of newspapers in the heat of perhaps the most serious attempt by the National Assembly to impeach him.
The second article titled “Obasanjo as a danger to our democracy”, was published on October 15, 2003 and was in response to his October 8 speech which read like a riot act against all opposition to the government’s whopping increase of the prices of oil products at that time. That speech is arguably his most bellicose so far.
The two major events that have reminded me of the president’s speech and my two articles are first, the recent South Leadership Forum meeting in Enugu along with its other subsequent meetings, in particular that of January 12 held at the Yar’adua Centre in Abuja. The second event is last week’s impeachment of Alhaji Rashidi Ladoja as the governor of Oyo State, following the long running battle between the governor and his estranged political godfather, Alhaji Lamidi Adedibu, the inventor of amala politics and recently a self-declared supporter of a lifetime presidency for Obasanjo.
Needless to say, space will allow me the reproduction of neither the president’s speech nor my two articles. I will, however, quote liberally from the president’s speech because it is hard to beat as an illustration of his inclination to say one thing and do another, an inclination with grave implications for the growth of our nascent democracy and even the very existence of our country.
In that speech of February 10, 2002, the president lamented the hold that ethnic, sectional and sectional sentiments seemed to have on our politicians. “What does it say about us as politicians today,” he asked, “where since May 1999, we have more and stronger socio-cultural organizations which are so powerful that no political party can compare to or match them in terms of their appeal and mobilization capacities? Why 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? Indeed why is it easy for the same members of the political elite to play active roles in sub-national organizations which detract attention and energy away from efforts to build national values and unity, and at the same time maintain key positions in our political parties and other political institutions?
“I am not suggesting that as leaders we should not belong to these so-called cultural organizations, but we should recognize them for what they are, first of all they are evidence of our failure as politicians to aggregate, articulate and represent all major political strands.”
As a criticism of the style and substance of our politicians, the president couldn’t have been more accurate. Yet at the first sign of trouble about seven months later, the president’s first resort was to these same vices he had condemned in others. For, in late September he gave an interview to a select group of newspapers in which he alleged for the first time that back in 1988 the Northern caucus of the PDP wanted all candidates for its presidential ticket which had been zoned to the South, to sign a deal that reserved most, if not all, the plum cabinet posts for the North. He also alleged that the caucus wanted the putative president to serve only one term of four years.
“Anybody who signed that deal,” the Sunday Vanguard of September 29, 2002, one of the select newspapers at the interview quoted him as saying, “would be a figure-head president. And there is no way I would sign that document. I didn’t.”
That interview was clearly orchestrated by the president to portray the Northern caucus of the PDP, in particular, and Northern politicians in general, as a greedy lot. It was also a thinly veiled accusation by the president that the region’s leaders were behind the serious impeachment move by the National Assembly. The Northern leaders, he said, were angry with him not only because he refused to sign their supposedly nefarious deal back in 1998, but also because his reforms had put paid to government’s “business as usual” as a source of their unearned extravagant life-style.
That the interview was orchestrated was clear from the fact that none of the newspapers invited – and there were half a dozen or so – was from outside the Lagos - Ibadan axis; not even the New Nigerian based in Kaduna, which the government itself owned 100 per cent was invited. Actually, its editor was invited initially but before the interview could hold he was told that his invitation was in error.
If the interview was orchestrated to break the unified front of the National Assembly along the North/South divide, it succeeded beyond the president’s wildest imagination. For, soon after the interview, which was published by all the selected newspapers on the same day, the National Assembly split right down the middle along ethnic and regional lines. These divisions contributed in no small measure in diverting public attention from the merit or otherwise of the charges against the president.
Not for the last time the president was to resort to the same divide and rule strategy in the run-up to the general elections of 2003 when he seemed to have lost his party’s presidential ticket to his deputy, Atiku Abubakar. The strategy had the same telling effect on our national unity.
And so to the litany of the president’s February 10, 2002 questions about why our politicians seem to prefer ethnic and regional organizations to political parties in playing politics, one can say the simple answer is that those who should lead the way invariably say one thing only to do the exact opposite at the first sign of trouble.
Nothing underscores the accuracy of this simple answer than the recent meeting of the South Leadership Forum and last week’s impeachment of the Oyo State governor, Alhaji Rashidi Ladoja.
There is of course nothing wrong with the SLF meeting in itself. The problem is first, the very bellicose threats it served Nigerians over power rotation, so-called restructuring of Nigeria and resource control, etc, and second, the uneven manner in which the presidency has handled such regional meetings.
In its lead story on January 15, the Leadership newspaper accused the president of directly funding the SLF. “A powerful force inside Aso Rock,” it said, “is now working to make Olusegun Obasanjo the last president of a united Nigeria - Leadership can authoritatively reveal.” The newspaper charged that a “gang” of those who wanted to extend the president‘s tenure beyond 2007 were now working on a sovereign national conference having failed to get the recent National Political Reform Conference to endorse a third term for their man.
More specifically the newspaper repeated speculations that each member of the House of Representatives had been offered 70 million Naira and each Senator 100 million Naira to support a third term for the president. It also said the president funded the Southern Leadership Forum meeting with N150 million Naira “delivered directly from Ota,” the president’s home-town.
These speculations may well be unfounded but the now open secret that the president personally intervened to scuttle a similar meeting of Speakers of Northern Houses of Assembly in Minna, Niger State, in December, while apparently turning at least a blind eye on the Southern Leadership Forum, suggests a sinister move by the presidency to divide the country along regional lines.
And Minna was not the only case where the presidency intervened to scuttle a meeting it did not like. Only last Thursday it surreptitiously tried to stop the meeting of the Movement for Unity and Progress, whose interim chairman is retired Colonel Dangiwa Umar, a foremost critic of the president. The president’s rather loquacious spokesman, Femi Fani-Kayode, who Thisday accused of appropriating “Ikimi’s diplomatic copyright” of “substituting abuse and insolence for argument” in its editorial of January 4, titled “Echoes of Abacha’s Days”, has rejected the charge as so much rubbish. In doing so, however, he could not explain why the management of the Yar’adua Centre allowed the South Leadership Forum to use the very hall that the MUP had paid for well in advance of the SLF. He could also not explain why the Dangiwa group was denied the use of other halls, which were empty. Though supposedly independent, the Yaradua Center has strong links with the federal authorities
The most recent manifestation of the president’s inclination to say one thing and do another was the impeachment of Ladoja as the governor of Oyo State. Once again permit me, dear reader, to quote from our president’s fine February 10, 2002 speech.
These, once again, were very fine words and a very accurate analysis of, and prescription for the problems of, our politics from the president. However, when it came to putting those fine words into practice as in Oyo State, those words rang hollow.
In his Sallah message on January 9 the president once more reaffirmed his commitment to upholding the nation’s Constitution.
Two days later the Nigerian Tribune warned in an editorial that men of goodwill, including presumably the president, must intervene to stop the impeachment of Ladoja. The impeachment it said was “not about principle. It is about profit”. The paper showed that the pro-impeachment camp led by the all-mighty Adedibu had violated almost every rule of procedure in impeaching a governor. In any case, a court had ruled against the proceedings as null and void.
In spite of the president’s fine words of February 10, 2002 that politicians should rise up as statesmen to dowse tensions whenever they arose; despite his equally fine commitment of January 9 to constitutionality, he did nothing to dissuade Adedibu from proceeding down his reckless path. On the contrary, the president seemed to urge him on by singing his praises as the strongman of Ibadan and Oyo politics.
Over three years ago when I said that that the president, not unlike the Biblical Samson, would rather bring down the whole house upon all its occupants, including himself, than suffer the humiliation of impeachment, I never imagined that after overcoming the move, he will still raise the stakes to the same level in an apparent bid to perpetuate himself in office.
Now it does seem to me that when I said on these same pages on October 15, 2003 that our president posed “the most dangerous threat to our democracy”, I grossly underestimated his tyrannical tendency. Today, the danger this tendency poses is not merely to our democracy. It is to the very survival of our nation because I do not see how Nigeria will survive as the most populous nation in Africa and of the black race, if the South Leadership Forum, with the apparent complicity, if not outright promptings, of the presidency, carries out its threats of boycotting the next elections if its demands for power to remain in the South, for restructuring and for resource control, among other demands, are not met.
It is indeed sad and tragic that a president in whom Nigerians had such high hopes barely seven years ago may well turn out to be the president under whose watch the nation disintegrated, not because of issues of principles, but, to quote his own words once again, because of “considerations that are so parochial and petty, that they should not find expression in the political process.”
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