PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Obasanjo vs Atiku Abubakar : Losers All

kudugana@yahoo.com

It is three weeks today since we last met on these pages. Within those three weeks the long-drawn cold war between President Olusegun Obasanjo and his estranged side-kick, Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, finally degenerated into a boiling hot war in which the two exchanged sensational charges and counter-charges of corruption and abuse of office. The lead story in Thisday’s edition of September 7 beautifully captured the transformation of the presidency’s cold war into hot. “Finally” said the newspaper’s headline, “Obasanjo Moves Against Atiku.” The introduction to the story was even more graphic. “Indications emerged last night,” said the newspaper, “that President Olusegun Obasanjo may have finally removed the gloves in the war with his deputy, Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, asking the Senate to commence impeachment processes against him.”

In drawing the first blood in this hot war, Obasanjo used his deputy’s supervisory function over the rather obscure but important Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) as his principal weapon. Instead of using some funds released to the PTDF a few years ago for the purposes they were meant, said Obasanjo, Atiku Abubakar diverted them into certain banks for the benefit of some of his friends and business associates, and through that, for his own benefit. Naturally, the Vice-President denied the charge and proceeded to counter-charge, with photocopies of bank cheques and all, that the president, his aids and at least one of his paramours, were the principal beneficiaries of the fiddling with the PTDF funds.

With each passing day since Obasanjo declared his hot war on Atiku Abubakar, the war has become dirtier and dirtier to the extent that the leadership of the ruling People’s Democratic Party has said it has given up any hope of reconciling the two. Predictably the party leadership, handpicked by the president, has since taken sides with its mentor and suspended the Vice-President from the party for three months, in effect making him ineligible to contest for the party’s presidential ticket in December.

Former Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, it is who I think has best captured the state of despair into which the hot civil war in the presidency has thrown Nigeria and Nigerians into. The presidency, said Gowon penultimate Tuesday, is now in the grip of some demonic spirits seeking to tear the country apart. “There seems to be some demonic spirits haunting the presidency,” said Gowon. “We are,” he continued, “praying that the demons be arrested. We also pray God to give the National Assembly the wisdom to deal with the rift between the president and his deputy. We are asking God for His divine intervention because what is on the ground goes beyond politics of 2007 and anti-corruption war. It has a lot to do with individual differences. But we believe that even when it appears difficult for men to intervene, we believe God can resolve that which man fails to resolve.”

Gowon was right about the demons in the presidency and how they want to tear Nigeria apart, but I believe he was wrong to put the war down to mainly “individual differences” between the president and his deputy rather than to differences over the politics of 2007. To say, as Gowon did, that the war was mainly about personal differences begs the question differences over what? The answer is pretty obvious to anyone who has watched not just the war, cold, tepid and hot, between Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar, it is also obvious to anyone who can discern the presidency’s generally hostile attitude towards almost anyone with a wish to become president next year. Ask Brigadier-General Buba Marwa, former military governor of Lagos State. Ask former military President, General Ibrahim Babangida. Ask former Head of State, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari.

As of the demons in the presidency trying to tear Nigeria apart have not thrown Nigeria and Nigerians into a bad enough state of despair, the country lost some of its topmost and brightest military officers in an aircrash in the mountains of Benue State on September 17, that is ten days after the president declared war on his deputy. All told we lost 12 senior and middle ranking officers, including two General Officers Commanding, in that tragic air crash.

Not surprisingly the air crash started rumours about official culpability for it, very much akin to rumours that trailed a similar air crash at Ejigbo in September 1992 in which scores if middle-ranking officers perished. The rumours of the Benue crash apparently forced the military authorities to issue statements drawing the public’s attention to the fact that the officers who died in the crash did not come from one section of the country alone. The rumours have also probably killed the airing by a television station of a documentary on the Ejigbo crash which sought to accuse General Babangida, who was military president at the time, of a diabolical conspiracy to eliminate officers from a section of the country from the top military hierarchy.

The Ejigbo documentary was supposed to be part of a series, starting with the one on the execution of General Vatsa over the attempted January 1986 coup aired recently on the AIT, aimed at stopping Babangida’s presidential ambitions. Not surprisingly, those sections of the media that over the years have tried to lend credence to charges of Babangida’s culpability for Ejigbo have been reticent in attributing the Benue crash to anything but human error.

The aircrash also bought Nigerians a temporary reprieve from the madness in the presidency. In its wake, the president reportedly asked his men to seize fire unilaterally.

However, the seize fire lasted only a short while. For, even before the smoke from the guns had dispersed, officers from the State Security Service invaded the premises of the Vice-President’s presidential campaign organization in Abuja, seizing documents and computers along with Garba Shehu, the Vice-President’s principal spokesman who seemed to have proved more than a match for the president’s propaganda machine.

As the civil war rages between Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar, the one question on the minds of many Nigerians is who will win or lose it? The answer is pretty obvious; both have lost it already. Personally, however, I think Obasanjo is the greater loser.

Most Nigerians would shed no tears about the irreparable damage the two protagonists have done to themselves, the president mainly to his image that is now left in tatters, the vice-president to his presidential prospects. As far as most Nigerians are concerned the two are merely getting their comeuppance not just for their brazen desecration of the ballot box in the general elections of 2003, but also over how their government has managed our economy as if it was their personal property. More than anything it was this mismanagement that has led to the abject poverty and the insecurity of lives and limbs that have pervaded the land, the record levels of oil revenue we have seen in the last seven years notwithstanding.

The way Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar have exposed their nakedness in public, it will take more than a miracle for the latter to realize his political ambition of becoming the country’s No. 1 citizen. As for Obasanjo it would take an even bigger miracle for him to repair the terrible damage done to his image as an untainted international statesman. Which is why I believe his loss is greater than Atiku Abubakar’s, for, what is political office, even the highest one in the land, compared to a good reputation especially in the twilight of someone’s life?

Far from most Nigerians shedding any tears for the mutual destruction by the two, Nigerians would indeed have been having a good laugh at them if the whole sordid affair did not mean even more suffering for Nigerians. As in all wars, the resources of the country would be used to fight the civil war in the presidency to the great detriment of the people’s welfare. Already, there are rumours of monies flying around the National Assembly to buy votes for and against the impeachment of the president and his deputy. Past records of Nigeria’s politics, especially in the last seven years, suggests that such rumours may not be without substance.

So Nigerians would, in the end, be the greatest losers in the warfare between Obasanjo and his deputy if they do not do something about it. Characteristically, Gowon has said Nigerians should pray for an end to it. I recall that the first time he asked Nigerians to pray for their country’s salvation was way back during the twilight of his tenure in the early seventies. I cannot readily recall the specific crisis for which he asked us to pray, but I do recall that that pioneer female journalist, Theresa Bowyer, writing in her popular column in New Nigerian’s Saturday Extra, replied that Nigerians would not pray because the problem was not in their stars but in Gowon’s own style of leadership.

I would not go as far as Mrs. Bowyer to call on Nigerians not to heed Gowon’s call to prayers, for I believe, just like I am sure Mrs. Bowyer did, in the efficacy of prayers. Like many Nigerians I believe it was the power of prayers that soundly defeated the dubious, if not diabolical, Third Term Agenda (TTA) of the presidency.

But as one old saw goes, the prayers that moved mountains carried a pick axe. One axe which helped our prayers that defeated the TTA was the vigilance of the media and the civil society. For once these institutions refused to allow themselves to be divided into North or South, Moslem or Christian, Hausa or Igbo or Yoruba or whatever, in their determination to hold politicians to their moral and legal obligation to respect our Constitution.

The mad civil war in the presidency makes it even more imperative for the media and civil society not only to hold firmly to that pick axe of a united front against our villainous and venal political leadership, it also makes it imperative to wield the axe very effectively and make sure no one pulls any wool over our eyes.

Neither President Obasanjo nor Vice-President Atiku Abubakar is fighting for our welfare or for accountability or for democracy. Atiku Abubakar may have fought the TTA, but he fought it essentially for himself and not for democracy.

Because our freedom and welfare are the last thing on their minds as they seek to destroy each other, we must organize ourselves to see the back of both of them and to ensure that the massive rigging of the 2003 general elections for which both of them were absolutely culpable is never repeated again in the history of this country.