PEOPLE AND POLITICS

Obasanjo as the Trouble with Nigeria

kudugana@yahoo.com

And so the mother-of-all-presidential-primaries came and went over the weekend.  Predictably, Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar’adua, the Katsina State governor, who President Obasanjo anointed as his successor barely several weeks ago, won the party ticket by a landslide. The Peoples Democratic Party’s may be the first to have held its presidential primary but, as the ruling party and the self-proclaimed biggest party in Africa, it is unlikely that its convention can be matched, let alone surpassed, by that of any other party in its extravagance or intrigue or whatever.

Governor Yar’adua, as we all know, polled over 3,000 delegates, leaving his closest rival, the moneybag and perpetual rolling stone, Chief Rochas Okorocha – he has changed parties at least twice in the last six years - a very distant second with 372 votes. The wily General Aliyu Mohammed, Obasanjo’s former National Security Adviser and the first person ever to think of drafting the former head of state back into service straight from prison in 1998, was a poor third with about 271 votes. Between all of Yar’adua’s nearly 12 rivals, they scored less than a third of his votes.

Even the blind can see that what Yar’adua had going for himself was Obasanjo and not much else. As someone relatively young in politics, he lacked the political sagacity to beat old timers like General Mohammed and Professor Jerry Gana, who came forth. As the governor of a relatively poor Katsina State, he lacked the resources to match rivals like Dr. Peter Odili, Mr. Donald Duke and Obong Victor Attah of the oil-rich Rivers, Cross-River and Akwa-Ibom states respectively. It is an open secret that these three were forced to withdraw from the race at the very last minute by the presidency.

Again, though Yar’adua’s reputation for frugality in managing the resources of his state should stand him in good stead in any contest, the fact is that among most politicians and, alas, even among most ordinary people, frugality in practice hardly counts for much. Last, but by no means the least, his performance as governor, though acknowledged fairly widely as impressive, was not exactly stellar.

On his own, Yar’adua was very much unlikely to have won last weekend’s PDP presidential primary, much less to have made a very clean sweep of it. In any case until recently, the man himself never showed any interest in being president until, according to a reliable source, he was prompted by the president himself. Even then he reportedly sought to excuse himself on the grounds that his health has not exactly been sound. The president apparently found the governor’s excuse unacceptable.

And so it was that he was drafted, probably kicking and screaming, into the PDP’s presidential primary with the almost certain knowledge that he would clinch the ticket. The big question is, why him? The question becomes even more pertinent when one recalls that all these years those widely speculated as possible successors to Obasanjo were Alhaji Abdullahi Adamu, the governor of Nassarawa, Alhaji Ahmed Mohammed Makarfi of Kaduna and Alhaji Adamu Muazu of Bauchi, in that order.

So why Yar’adua? The answer, I believe, is fairly simple; With Yar’adua, Obasanjo probably imagines he can kill at least three birds with one stone. First, if he succeeds in making Yar’adua president, Obasanjo would have, once again, rewarded the Yar’adua family for the unalloyed personal loyalty with which the late Major-General Shehu Musa Yar’adua, the governor’s elder brother, served him as his second-in-command in his first coming as military head of state.And like his elder brother, Umaru remained faithful to Obasanjo over his Third Term agenda where some of his colleagues were dubious in there support. Here, it is noteworthy that for Obasanjo personal loyalty seems to be the ultimate virtue. Anyone in doubt should ask his “disloyal” deputy, Vice-President Atiku Abubakar.

Second, through handing over the presidential baton to Yar’adua, Obasanjo, presumably thinks he can assuage the terrible hurt he had inflicting on the Northern leadership by, among other things, denying he ever entered into a deal with it back in 1998 to serve for only a limited term and to protect its interests as the most economically backward region in the country.

Third, but by far most importantly, by passing the baton to a relatively young and relatively inexperienced Yar’adua who, because of his cultural and religious upbringing, is likely to defer to the elderly Obasanjo even as an ex-president, he (Obasanjo) probably thinks he can still snatch victory from the jaws of the sound defeat that his Third Term agenda suffered not too long ago.

As a politician, it seems Obasanjo has come a long way from his days of semi-innocence. Not that he lacked the guile of politicians. As an army officer he had shown himself, time and time again, as excellent at seizing opportunities when they come. However, military politics is obviously a different kettle of fish from civilian politics.

As he himself told the Council of Foreign Affairs, an American quasi-governmental organization in New York in September 2004, “I had to learn the ropes of what political parties do, how they do it, and then become a party political man, and also to be able to etch my own stamp on my own political party.”

Needless to say, Obasanjo as a student of politics has since graduated with flying colours and “etched” his stamp on the PDP, so much so that what he said of military president, General Ibarahim Babangida, in his interview with Tell in the newsmagazine’s edition of April 26, 1993, can now be said of him exactly word for word. “The only programme in town,” he said in that interview, “is President Babangida’s progamme as he plays it, as he unfolds it and as he enunciates it. He is the programme, he is the government, he is what goes and what does not go.”

In other words it can now be said of the general without any fear of contradiction – if you pardon the outworn cliché – that since at least 2003, he has managed to turn himself into the country’s one-man dictator in a way that not even General Sani Abacha, possibly the country’s worst dictator, succeeded in doing.

As Mahmud Jega, the managing editor of the Trust newspapers and the Daily Trust Monday columnist, said the other day somehow the president has managed successfully to grab the powers of the other two arms of government, in part by dictating the leadership of the legislative arm and by routinely defying the decisions of the judicial arm whenever he found them disagreeable.

Apart from neutralizing and compromising the other two arms of government, the president also seems to have outsmarted and outgunned all opposition within his own party and outside. Thanks to his reputation as a master of the strategy of divide and rule, he has managed to factionalize the major opposition parties, particularly the Alliance for Democracy, the party of the region he comes from. Not only has he managed to factionalize the parties, he has also kept the factions, as well as the country’s various regions, at each other’s throat while he proceeded to impose his agenda of self-perpetuation and dictatorship.

The most glaring manifestation of his divide and rule strategy was his thinly disguised sponsorship of the Southern Leadership Forum’s political summit in Enugu on December 19, 2005. At that summit several of the president’s lapdogs and attack dogs like Chief Tony Anenih, Chief Olabode George, Chief Ojo Maduekwe and Chief Chris Uba, rained unrestrained abuse on the North and its leadership. The North, they said, will never smell the country’s leadership again until the South-South and South-East has taken their turns.

Since that summit hardly a day passed without one Southern leader or another saying one nasty thing or another about the North and its people in the media, particularly the African Independent Television, AIT. It took a lot of hard work and persuasion by level-headed Northern leaders like Chief Sunday Awoniyi, the chairman of the Arewa Consultative Forum, to restrain many of the region’s political hot heads from returning fire for fire. Awoniyi always warned that returning fire for fire would amount to falling into the president’s trap of permanently keeping the country divided.

Not surprising for someone with an agenda of remaining in power, Obasanjo got the Southern leadership to work itself into a frenzy about retaining power, only to turn around at the last minute and return it to the North. However, even the politically naïve should see through his gesture as more apparent than real.

It is as clear as day light that Obasanjo picked Yar’adua as the next president essentially because he thinks that way he can continue to rule by proxy. A more cynical view is that he picked Yar’adua because there is a good chance that his ill-health may make his tenure short-lived. This way power will constitutionally revert back to the South where the vice-president would have to come from.

When the president told an emergency meeting of PDP’s national executive committee on November 21, that the party’s failure to retain power will spell calamity for Nigeria, most Nigerians, I suspect, had a pretty good idea what he meant; whether they like it or not he will not leave. And to leave no one in doubt that he meant what he inferred, he got the party’s convention to anoint himself its next Chairman of the Board of Trustees.

However, contrary to the president’s belief that PDP’s failure to retain power will spell calamity for Nigeria, it is precisely its success at perpetuating itself in power and through it, himself, that will be calamitous for Nigeria.

At the November 21 meeting in question, the president boasted that PDP will remain in power to continue with its reform. “They keep saying” he said, “they will continue with our reforms. If all they want to do is to continue what we are doing, why should we leave it for them to continue? Why can’t we continue what we are doing? The PDP will continue its reform.”

The president and his party may engage in self-denial and indulge in self-delusion about their record, but for most Nigerians the last eight years have arguably been the most politically and socio-economically disastrous Nigeria and Nigerians have had to endure. The country has never been more divided, more unstable and more insecure than in the last eight years – thanks to the very socio-economic and political reforms the president and his party are fond of boasting about.

The evidence of the disastrous result of these policies is there in the depressing assessment of the country’s economy by such institutions like the United Nations Development Fund, the World Bank and the IMF. The 2004 UNDP’s Human Development Index, for example, ranked Nigeria as the 158^th poorest country among the 177 surveyed, down from a previous low of 144^th, and this at a time when Nigeria benefited from it longest run of oil windfall. Again only last year an American think-tank predicted that Nigeria will become a failed state in the not-too-distant future. Given the terrible and pervasive insecurity in the land particularly in the Niger Delta region, it can be argued that Nigeria is already a failed state.

With a record like this it is truly amazing how Obasanjo continues to imagine that he is Nigeria’s messiah rather than the trouble with Nigeria that he has become since his return to power in 1999.