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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
President Obasanjo as a Serial Spin-Doctor
Last week President Olusegun Obasanjo’s dubious credentials as a consummate spin-doctor went up a notch higher when he said that the political zones in the country, except the South-West where he comes from, are free to contest for the presidential ticket of his party.
The journey to last week’s spin started more than five years ago when he told a select group of newspapers at the height of the first serious attempt to impeach him for several unconstitutional acts, that the attempt was being driven by a Northern PDP leadership that was angry with him for refusing to sign a deal back in 1998 that would have given the region a veto over his decisions as president. The veto was supposed to be his price for the party’s presidential ticket. Not only did the forces behind the impeachment ask for a veto, he said, they also demanded for certain key cabinet posts like defense, petroleum and finance, that, he said, would have turned them into super Nigerians. He could never, he said, have signed such a deal.
Predictably the PDP Northern leadership tried to counter Obasanjo’s claims. Chief S. B. Awoniyi, one of the founders of the PDP and presently the Chairman of the Executive Council of the Arewa Consultative Forum, for example, said Obasanjo did sign a deal and, more importantly, it was, in any case, not the sinister deal the president was trying to paint it. Rather it was the normal give and take that was the stuff of politics.
Whether or not there was a deal at all and whether or not it was sinister, the president seemed to have won the propaganda war that raged thereafter; more than anything else, his claims of a sinister Northern demand took the wind out of the sails of the pro-impeachment camp. Not only that, he subsequently secured his party’s ticket for a second term in office, very much against the initial wishes of his party’s rank and file.
His success at securing the ticket was, however, with the understanding that the ticket will return to the North in 2007. Almost everyone except the president - the party’s erstwhile chairman, Chief Audu Ogbe, its pioneer Secretary-General, Professor Jerry Gana, even its self-proclaimed “Leader” and presently Chairman of its Board of Trustees and the president’s Man Friday, Chief Tony Anenih – has said there has been such an understanding.
The first time the president would deny this understanding was about two years ago when he said his party’s presidential ticket was not reserved for any part of the country. As far as he was concerned, he said, only his South-West Zone would be excluded from presenting any candidate in 2007, since by then he would have served out the Zone’s two terms. It is a measure of the credibility gap between what he said and what he meant, that he still went ahead to seek for an extension of his own tenure through the Constitutional amendment that collapsed several months ago.
The controversy about a deal in 2002 or no deal was still raging when the Southern political leadership gathered in Enugu last December in what was clearly a thinly distinguished Aso Villa sponsored rally to defame and malign the North as a region of leaches, layabouts and beggars. Speaker after speaker heaped unrestrained abuse on the region and it’s leadership and threatened to break up the country if the presidency did not remain in the South.
Among many others, Chief Bode George, the PDP’s Deputy Chairman (South) exultantly repeated the article of faith among many Southerners that the North’s numerical superiority that was the basis of its hold on power at the center, was a fiction scripted by Britain as our erstwhile colonial masters. He assured his audience that this time his government would fix the fiction for good in the recently concluded census.
That December rally emboldened several governors and other political actors who had sat on the fence over the controversy to also deny the existence of any agreement on power shift within the PDP. The bolder ones among them said even if there had been such an agreement, its defiance by Alhaji Abubakar Rimi, former civilian governor of Kano State, and Chief Barnabas Gemade, former Chairman of the party who is from Benue State, in contesting for the party’s ticket against President Obasanjo in 2003, meant that the North had repudiated the deal.
However, whatever the president or anybody may have said, the fact was that there was an understanding, indeed a deal, that the presidency should return to the North in 2007. The most conclusive evidence was the letter, dated August 5, 2002, from Chief Anenih to the party’s National Chairman titled “PDP ZONING ARRANGEMENT,” which the Daily Trust published exclusively in its edition of December 21, 2005. In that letter Anenih conceded that it was the 1998/1999 zoning arrangement, which made it possible for General Obasanjo to secure the party’s presidential ticket and to eventually win the presidential election.
“I am writing this,” Anenih said in the third and last paragraph of the letter,
After the publication of this letter, Anenih himself tried to repudiate it on the grounds that whereas in 1998, Rimi, who had vehemently opposed the party’s zoning arrangement, withdrew his bid before the primaries, in 2003 he went ahead, along with Gemade, to contest.
Ananih’s argument is hardly tenable, for the simple reason that Rimi and Gemade went ahead to contest for the PDP presidential ticket against opposition from the caucus of the party’s Northern leadership. Indeed it was precisely because of that opposition that Rimi and Gemade performed woefully in the primaries.
Now, having spun his way out of impeachment in 2002 and then spun the Southern leadership into an unseemly and unwarranted frenzy against its Northern counterpart last December, it now appears the president has decided to leave the same Southern leadership in a lurch. Now he has chosen to emphasize that the contest for the presidential ticket of the PDP is a free-for-all, except for his South-West Zone. And as is usual when politicians deliberately indulge in double-speak, he can claim, with a straight face, that he was never against the North fielding candidates in spite of Aso Villa’s apparent role in the December Southern leadership frenzied attack on the North.
There is, however, a silver lining in all this dark cloud of presidential spin doctoring whose effect has been to keep the nation’s temperature on the boil. As a beneficiary of “turn-by-turn” democracy and an advocate of the “garrison” variety of same, the president’s faith in the genuine article may be shallow, but it is a good development that he has at last chosen to speak unequivocally against zoning, even if his choice is self-serving as with so many decisions that he has taken.
“Turn-by-turn” democracy is counterfeit democracy that ultimately can only bring trouble to any nation that practices it, as we have seen in, say, Yugoslavia. As such everyone regardless of his tribe, region or religion should be free to contest for any elective office in the country including the presidency. Therefore even those from the president’s South-West zone who would like to lead this country next year, should be free to do so.
It is only when the voters’ choice of who should lead them at all the various levels of government is not restricted by one’s tribe, region and religion that we can hope to nurture genuine democracy in our land. And without the genuine article, we can never hope to become a country where there is the greatest happiness for the greatest number of its citizens.
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