PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Obasanjo’s Samson Option II

The current edition of the Weekly Trust has as its lead the political chaos and confusion which the ruling Peoples Democratic Party has plunged the country into. The story is written by Mahmud Jega, the managing editor of the Media Trust Ltd., publishers of the Trust newspapers. Before moving to Trust recently, Jega was the editor of the New Nigerian. He left because he fell out with the managing director, Mr. Ndanusa Alao, over a story which disparaged the now failed attempt by President Obasanjo to get himself a third, possibly a life, time as president by amending our constitution.

Jega’s one page and a half story, written in his usual simple colloquialism, paints a graphic picture of the political hurricane towards which the PDP is dragging Nigeria and Nigerians, kicking and screaming. No summary can do justice to the story, not even its own graphic summation at its beginning.

“Three ‘governors’, two Chief Judges and two impeachment panels”, said the summary, “existed side by side in one state. Two more governors received impeachment notices. Then emergency rule was clamped in Ekiti State. Confusion, contrivance, contraption and chaos may be the new names of the game in the Fourth Republic.”

Graphic as this summary is of the political mess the PDP has plunged Nigeria into, it does not, of course, contain the important details. To get those details you simply have to read the whole narration by Jega.

The background to the story itself is – no price for guessing right – the failed attempt by President Obasanjo to secure an extension to his tenure through a constitutional sleigh of hand. Long before that attempt some of us have said the president has an agenda to perpetuate himself in office and would sooner bring down the whole house upon all its occupants, including himself, than leave.

“A drowning man, they say, will clutch at straws,” I said in an article over four years ago, titled “Obasanjo’s Samson Option”. I wrote it against the background of the president’s desperate attempt to defeat a serious impeachment threat in the run-up to the 2003 general elections. “Should it,” I also said in the article, “surprise anyone if Obasanjo seeks to adopt the Samson Option of bringing down the whole political edifice rather than accept defeat, arising from his failure to deliver one each and every one of his promises?”

I hate to claim vindication but events in the last few weeks suggest that far from being wrong, those of us who feared that we may be in for a one-man dictatorship under Obasanjo, grossly underestimated the man’s determination and capacity to have his way.

The president himself – and his courtiers – would, of course, be the last person to admit that he wants to impose himself on Nigerians. On the contrary he wants the world to believe he has the greatest respect for our Constitution and the rule of law. At least he said as much in his October 19 dawn broadcast in which he imposed emergency rule over Ekiti State.

“We must,” he said, “save our democracy and preserve our Constitution and that was the oath of office I took. We must save Ekiti State from anarchy. And we must preserve law and order, good governance and ensure probity in governance in Ekiti State.”

A more classic case than this of what George Orwell, that great political satirist of the 20^th century, described as doublespeak – that is talk intended to deceive and confuse – is hard to imagine. “Political language”, Orwell said in his 1946 essay on Politics and the English Language, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Obasanjo talks about saving democracy and preserving our Constitution, yet virtually every step his party and his government took in respect of the Ekiti debacle – from the massive electoral fraud in 2003 in which PDP managed to upstage the Alliance for Democracy as the ruling party in the South-West, to the party’s internal “garrison” democracy, to providing security cover for the political shenanigans of the Ekiti House of Assembly that purported to have sacked the judiciary and the executive arms of government – was nothing but an attempt to undermine Nigeria’s Constitution and the rule of law.

The president talks about preserving good governance and ensuring probity in Ekit State. Yet from his highly secretive personal supervision of the ministry of petroleum since May 1999, to the many conflicts of interest that has existed between his job and his businesses, notably his ownership of huge shares in the controversial Transcorp Plc, not to mention several other cases, it is not incorrect to say that his government has elevated impunity and despotism into cardinal principles of state policy.

There are of course some of his courtiers who will object to this characterisation of his administration as essentially one that says one thing and does something else, often the exact opposite. One such courtier is the controversial Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Malam Nasir el-Rufai. Last week he tried to defend his boss over the civil war that has ravaged the presidency of recent. “The presidency” he said in a briefing to some selected media, “has more or less finished his term and the president is A MAN OF DESTINY as far as the history of Nigeria is concerned… Even if you dislike President Obasanjo, when you write the history of Nigeria you will have to dedicate a chapter to him because he is a MAN OF DESTINY as far as Nigeria is concerned.”

“But what about the Vice-President? He is the first Vice-President to be indicted for fraud, embezzlement and corruption. THAT IS WHAT HISTORY WILL SAY OF HIM.” (Emphases mine)

Obasanjo is Nigeria’s “man of destiny,” says el-Rufai, because, first, he ended Nigeria’s civil war, second, he was the first military ruler to hand over power voluntarily to a democratically elected government and, third, he was “selected by Nigerians to be president three times.”

The first thing to note about el-Rufai’s claim is that “a man of destiny” is one of those dead and meaningless clichés politicians often use to, in George Orwell’s words, “give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Second, el-Rufai should know, as an intelligent person, that with the civil war in the presidency still raging it is too early to say who, between his boss and the vice-president, is its villain or hero. Chances are both may end up as villains, with his boss as the worse. In any case as one of the commanders in the president’s regiment, el-Rufai should know that he is not in any position to write an objective view of the war.

Third, el-Rufai’s reasons for claiming that Obasanjo is Nigeria’s “man of destiny” are gross exaggerations of the man’s role in Nigeria’s history. First, Obasanjo did not end Nigeria’s civil war. True he received the surrender instruments from the rebel leadership, but the civil war was practically over by the time he took over the command of the Third Marine Commando from Brigadier-General Benjamin Adekunle.

Second, Obasanjo’s handover in1979 was not as voluntary as the world has been made to believe. There is, as I have said several times on these pages, evidence to show the man wanted to hang onto power by dragging in the Organisation of African Unity to issue a statement at its 1979 summit in Monrovia, Liberia, saying the 1979 deadline was not realistic. Thanks to Guinea-Conakry’s Sekou Toure and the host William Tolbert, the OAU declined to issue such a statement.

In any case had the OAU obliged him it would still have been a futile statement because the “Young Turks” that were the powers behind Obasanjo’s throne, notably Major-General Shehu Yar’adua and Lt-General T.Y. Danjuma, were determined to return the army to the barracks for good from October 1979.

Lastly, Nigerians never “selected” Obasanjo three times to be president. The only time they did so was in the 1998/1999 transition to civilian rule. By definition Nigerians had no say in the military coup against General Gowon which Obasanjo benefited from as a senior officer. Similarly the electoral fraud the ruling PDP perpetrated in 2003 took the fate of the contestants out of the hands of Nigerians.

Over four years ago, that is on September 24, 2002, former American president, Bill Clinton, gave a speech on “Democratisation and Economic Development” at the ECOWAS Secretariat in Abuja. In that speech Clinton made the telling remark that “The essence of democracy is not just winning power legitimately, it is also knowing when to let go.” Clinton said this in the context of widespread suggestions that Obasanjo should have done a Mandela in the run-up to the 2003 elections, that is, he should have quit after his first term when the ovation was still loud enough.

El-Rufai’s characterization of Obasanjo as Nigeria’s man of destiny may be an Orwellian turn of phrase but there can be no doubt that Obasanjo is indeed a very lucky man who has repeatedly reaped where others have sown. The choice before him now is to listen to Clinton this time and become Nigeria’s man of destiny in the true sense of the phrase or stretch his luck and cling on to power by hook and crook and end up as the man who, like the Biblical Samson, brought down the whole political edifice upon himself and other Nigerians.

The big difference, of course, is that whereas Samson brought down the house for the right reasons and was therefore a hero, Obasanjo would be doing so for the wrong reasons and end up as a, if not THE, villain of Nigeria’s democracy.