PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

A President and His Credibility Problem

kudugana@yahoo.com

 

Penultimate Sunday the Sunday Trust reproduced an article by Ambassador Herman Cohen published recently in the International Herald Tribune. Cohen’s article was a damning criticism of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s presidential tenure and an even more damning criticism of the president’s thinly disguised attempt to perpetuate himself in office. “Obasanjo,” the headline of Cohen’s article said, “(is) a liability to Nigeria.”

         

Cohen’s article should interest each and every Nigerian as much for what he said about Obasanjo as for how he said it.

         

Cohen had served in the senior hierarchy of the United States government in the seventies and early nineties as a diplomat and as an expert in African affairs and on intelligence and research before retiring into consulting, mostly on Africa affairs. His last job was as assistant secretary of state for African Affairs.

        

“The President of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo”, Cohen said in the opening paragraphs of his telling article, “is America’s friend. The Bush Administration admires his leadership in promoting conflict resolution, peacekeeping and democracy in Africa. Some American friends are promoting him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

             

“Unfortunately, Obasanjo’s role in Nigeria’s internal affairs has been far less laudable. His energy policies have done little to alleviate Nigeria’s crushing poverty and social unrest….

           

“Obasanjo began to monopolize power from the day he entered office in 1999. He kept the oil portfolio so that he could use Nigeria’s vast oil wealth for political ends. All politicians were beholden to him for money. He established an anti-corruption commission. But the records show that his friends were exempted while his enemies were investigated whether or not they had dirt on their hands. He also manipulated the awarding of contacts and mineral concessions to intimidate potential rivals”

           

Cohen concluded his article by warning that the president may have plans to rig the general election in April, if at all he allows it to take place. The Nigerian voters, Cohen said, “are not likely to be fooled. But the April election may not be the first in Nigeria to be rigged by the incumbent, if it actually takes place.”

           

I am sorry if I have bored you with such a long quote from the article but, in my view at least, the entire piece deserved to be reproduced, if only because it shows clearly how dangerously the president is driving the country towards chaos.

            

In apparent response to critics and skeptics like Cohen, the president told Nigerians during his latest quarterly radio chat show, “The president explains “, broadcast last Saturday, that those who say he does not want to go are simply being malicious and mischievous and they need to see a physiatrist.

           

“Some people”, he said, “still say Obasanjo does not want to go when I have said farewell to ECOWAS, AU, and I am saying farewell wherever I go. Yet they do not see Obasanjo as wanting to go… People of malice and mischief are still saying that elections will not hold, Obasanjo will not go…Those who are saying that Obasanjo does not want to go for whatever reason need to have their heads examined”.

           

The president may feel justified to lash out at those who remain cynical about his promise to go in May, but he should know that he has only himself to blame for the persistence of such cynicism. And if he does not know, it is not just “some people” who are cynical about his promise. It is most Nigerians.

           

The reason for the widespread cynicism about his promise is simple; since joining civilian politics in 1998 he has gained a terrible reputation for saying one thing and doing the opposite and for giving his word only to break it as soon as he has achieved his objective.

           

For example, while the president has persistently denounced ethnic and regional organizations like Afenifere, Ohaneze and Arewa Consultative Forum for allegedly undermining national unity, his involvement in the creation of the Yoruba Elders Forum principally to undermine the Afenifere, was one of the worst kept secrets in Nigerian politics. Worse, while he denounced the organizations in the day time, at night he consorted with them to achieve his political objectives.

           

Again while the former general proclaimed himself a democrat he showed himself to be highly intolerant of dissent. There can hardly be a more telling evidence of this than what the PDP’s Secretary General, Chief Ojo Maduekwe, said in an interview in the  Saturday Vanguard of May 10, 2003.

             

“One wants to believe”, he said, “that (potential dissident  legislators) will have learnt the lessons of their colleagues who could not come back to the National Assembly because they had to pay a price for challenging a man placed by God to lead this nation to the promised land”.

             

Maduekwe, as the president’s hand picked secretary general of the PDP, may merely be toadying up to his boss, but the president has never been known to frown at bootlicking, especially of the kind that massages his messianic complex.

             

As for giving his word and breaking it no sooner than he has achieved his objective, who does not know how at various times the president has used and dumped people and organizations who were either naďve or foolish enough to believe that his word was his bond? For example, did he not route the AD from its South-Western stronghold in the 2003 elections after promising its leaders that the PDP will not contest AD’s lock on the politics of the region in return for their support in the presidential race?

             

The shock the AD suffered probably explains the strong language Chief Bisi Akande, one of the president’s principal casualties, used to condemn Obasanjo as an untrustworthy person. “You know”, he said in the Tell newsmagazine of February 9, 2004, “Obasanjo is a liar… Oh, the man can lie. He lied politically, physically. He is a political liar of the highest order”.

           

With a record like this is it any wonder that few people, if any, believe the president when he says he will not stay in office a day longer than May 29?

            

And as if he has not done enough damage to his own credibility by the gap he often created between his words and his deeds, he has lately resorted to a thinly disguised manipulation of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Independent National Electoral Commission to stop opposition elements from contesting the April elections. And all this in the face of several court decisions that the two institutions have no power to dictate to the parties who they can field for the elections beyond such basic conditions as the stipulated age limits, academic qualifications and mental fitness.

             

Presently there are rumours of a plan by the government to shift the elections from May to October using, among other excuses, the seemingly programmed failure of INEC to produce a credible voters’ register. It is easy to dismiss these rumours as precisely that – rumours. But the president’s record shows clearly that no smoke has come out of the presidency without a huge fire eventually breaking out.

 

Back in 2001 when some people cried out that there was an attempt to manipulate the electoral bill ahead of the 2003 general elections, they were dismissed as rumours mongers. Not too long after, it turned out that there was indeed a conspiracy between the president himself and a clique of like-minded legislators to smuggle a clause into the bill that would have limited the voters’ field of choice of parties and candidates. When the “rumour” turned out to be true, the president blamed it on “the printer’s devil.”

           

The latest and most dramatic case in this long line of smokes with fires was the president’s third term agenda which started with an attempt to smuggle in a draft constitution into the ill-fated National Political Reform Conference of last year.
That draft constitution would have allowed the president a third, possibly a life, time. The president himself tried to denounce the attempt – after it failed. But his denunciation sounded hollow.

           

“Throughout the period (of the Third Term campaign)”, he told a meeting of the PDP executive council on May 18, last year shortly after the attempt suffered a sudden and ignomious defeat, “I resisted the invitation to be drawn either side and I maintained studied silence. I was maligned, insulted and wrongly accused but I remained where I am and what I am.”

           

What these remarks show clearly was that the president was at the least complicit in the plan to perpetuate his rule. Otherwise he would have come down squarely and unequivocally on the side of the moral principle that you don’t change the rules in the middle of the game. As The Guardian said during the heat of the controversy in its editorial of April 1, 2004, there are times when silence is never golden. The period of the Third Term controversy was one of them. Yet the president said he “maintained studied silence.”

           

Inspite of the sound defeat of Third Term agenda, public opinion remained skeptical about the president’s promise to go. This skepticism has now been rekindled by rumours of a presidential plan to shift the April elections to October. The plan, as the speculations go, is to be implemented by simply bribing the National Assembly to approve the shift. The carrots to be dangled before the legislators are said to include the usual “Ghana-must-go” in hard currency and a reminder that with most of them defeated or rigged out of contention in their party primaries, the six months or so between May and October is a bonus.

           

If these rumours are true the federal legislators must know that, as members of the first arm of government which makes law, they owe Nigeria and themselves the great responsibility of putting it out before it blows into a huge conflagration that will consume us all.

           

As former army chief General T. Y. Danjuma, Obasanjo’s self-proclaimed greatest supporter now turned a great adversary, said in Kaduna before a conference of the Northern States Christian Elders Forum on the very day the president was denouncing his doubters in his “The President Explains” radio programme, “Let us pray that our leaders will not turn a blind eye to the lessons of history so they don’t fall into self-created pits. Let us pray that they may see the futility of egocentric and megalomaniacal schemes for self-perpetuation whether in or out of political office.”

           

Nigerians can only say a loud Amen to that. However, Nigerians need to be constantly reminded about the adage which says the prayer or miracle that moved mountains carried a pick axe. Our pick axe is to remain eternally vigilant and be prepared to stand up to anyone who wants to turn Nigeria into a dictatorship.