PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

 

Obasanjo’s Revenge

kudugana@yahoo.com

 

 

Last Sunday’s Thisday reported President Olusegun Obasanjo as telling the Nigerian Christian leaders he hosted the day before to a breakfast at Aso Rock Villa that he would be returning home after May 29 as a full-time chicken farmer. As he is wont to once in awhile, he seized the opportunity to take a gratuitous dig at his long standing sparring partner, former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida.

           

“In my own case,” Obasanjo reportedly said in apparent reference to Babangida’s departure from office nearly fourteen years ago, “I am not stepping aside or walking out, I have a mandate to go back to my farm.” When Babangida left in August 1993 after eight years as president, he famously told the world that he was “stepping aside”. This led to a popular belief that the Maradona of Nigerian politics had plans to step back into power in a not-too-distant future.

            

The simple meaning of Obasanjo’s remarks is that, unlike Babangida, his departure from high power-politics is for good. However, anyone who believes the man truly meant what he said is obviously not familiar with how he has since become a grandmaster of doublespeak, which is, talk intended to confuse the listener.

           

First, for a man who says he has a mandate – he did not spell out from whom – to leave power-politics for good and return to his farm, isn’t it strange that he seems single-mindedly determined to impose his men - many of them discredited by their performance - and his policies – which generally stand discredited by their outcome – on the putative president-elect, Alhaji Umar Yar’adua? Surely such an imposition must be the strangest way to keep off power-politics completely.

           

Second, if the president had no intention of being the Master Puppeteer, why did he have to impose himself on his party as its life leader? Such an imposition would have been of little or no consequence if Obasanjo was a man of conviction. But as we have seen in the last eight years he has all too often said one thing and done the exact opposite.

           

The reader may recall the bitter quarrel more than five years ago between the president and the then chairman of his party, Chief Barnabas Gemade, over the supremacy of the party. Gemade had often complained bitterly about how the president had persistently interfered with party affairs while at the same time rejecting party advice on public policy.

           

Matters came to a head in the run-up towards the party’s annual convention in November 2001. By then rumours that the president had decided to remove Gemade as chairman had spread widely. In typical Nigerian fashion most of the leading party members – notably Deputy Senate President, Alhaji Ibrahim Mantu, who said it was the sole prerogative of the president to pick the chairman of his party, and Professor Jerry Gana, who said consensus and not election was the best form of democracy – had pitched their tents on the president’s side.

           

In apparent response to Gemade’s carping, the president had told the convention just before the election that “Party officials need to be reminded that they are not government officials appointed or otherwise… Party officials must stay away from the day to day executive decisions of government once the party manifesto remains the guide for the president.”

           

Come election time and it surprised few Nigerians that Gemade was replaced by Chief Audu Ogbe in what was clearly the coronation rather than an election of a party chairman.

           

No doubt the president was right that in a presidential system, unlike with the parliamentary model of democracy, the notion of party supremacy was a misnomer. Even then he was wrong to have denied his party any meaningful role in policy making. Certainly the founding fathers of the PDP, virtually all of whom he had successfully weeded out, must have had a good chuckle when he claimed that his actions in office had been guided by its manifesto. The president, as everyone knew, was a man who leaned too heavily, if not completely, on his own counseling.

           

Over five years after the president rejected the notion of party supremacy, it is now obvious that he did so not out of conviction but out of self-interest. Otherwise he would not have sought to impose himself on his party as its life leader during its last convention. Nor would he have sought to impose his will and his way on his successor as has become apparent since the end of this year’s farcical general elections.

           

Therefore contrary to his claim that he is returning home to tend to his chickens full-time, it is obvious that he is not done yet with Nigerians in his wish to recreate their country after his own image and to punish each and everyone of those who played a role in frustrating this wish, more specifically his wish to rule Nigerians forever.

           

This much is obvious from at least three facts. First, the man tried, apparently with much success, in seeing to it that those National Assembly members, regardless of party affiliation, who played a role in defeating his Third term agenda did not return to the legislature. He thus succeeded in inflicting upon Nigerians a legislature with little legislative experience eight years after democracy returned to Nigeria in 1999.

           

Next, he used all means, more foul than fair, to make sure his hand-picked man succeeded him as president. Consequently we will, the election tribunals permitting, and all things being equal, have a president in the next four years with the most questionable legitimacy in the country’s history, a legitimacy even more questionable than Obasanjo’s 2003 dubious mandate.

           

Last, but by no means the least, last week the president rejected calls for him to sign into law the Freedom of Information (FOI) bill which has reportedly been with him for over a month. Most people will regard this as his vengeance for the leading role the mass media, as the most obvious beneficiary of the law, played in frustrating the president’s Third Term Agenda.

           

According to Mr. Edetaen Ojo, who led the Freedom of Information Coalition to see the president on April 27, when the president rejected their plea to sign the bill into law before his departure on May 29, he gave three reasons. None of them can stand even the most casual scrutiny.

           

First, the president said he objected to the title of the bill as “Freedom of Information” instead of “Right of Information”. This prompted me to search my three hefty dictionaries and my Thesauruses for the difference between the two words. I couldn’t find any.

           

For example my Encarta World English Dictionary, the most up to date of all dictionaries, has eleven definitions of freedom as a noun and eleven definitions of right as a noun, twelve as an adjective, ten as adverb, four as verb and two as interjection.. None of these shows any fundamental difference between the two words. On the contrary all the definitions show that the two are essentially interchangeable.

           

For example one of the dictionary’s definitions of freedom as noun is that it is the “right to act or speak freely”. Similarly one of the dictionary’s definitions of right as noun is “entitlement, freedom or privilege to do something”.

           

Clearly contrary to the difference the president wants us to believe there is between freedom and right, what we have is not greater than the difference between half a dozen of one and six of the other. The president, in other words, has merely engaged in a very disingenuous hair splitting.

           

Still on the phrase “Freedom of Information,” the president reportedly objected to it because it was, he said, imported “from somewhere.” Considering how many of his policies, especially the economic ones, he has imported from abroad and how much enamoured he is of his friends abroad, this looks like a very strange ground for objection. In any case the president failed to tell his guests how the phrase “Right of Information”, is anymore indigenous than “Freedom of Information.”

           

Second, the president reportedly objected to Section 13 (1) of the bill for restricting itself to the injury the disclosure of a piece of information by government may cause to the “defense” of the country instead of to its “security”. Security, the president reportedly insisted, was different from defense. And so it is. But anyone familiar with even elementary English knows that the difference is that the one is the end, the other the means. Therefore the successful defense of a country means the achievement of its security.

           

Third, the president reportedly objected to Section 13 (2) of the bill because it gave the courts powers to override government objections to a disclosure of information provided such a disclosure was in the public interest. The most charitable thing one can say of this objection by the president is that it betrays his total lack of faith in the separation of powers by our Constitution. It also betrays the hypocrisy of his declared commitment to open and transparent governance.           

            

Personally I never thought the president would be in a rush to sign the FOI bill into law and I said so on these pages on December 6, 2006. Even then I never imagined that he hated the media so much he would go to the ridiculous lengths he has gone to scuttle something which is apparently so dear to journalists and is a useful tool for ensuring transparency and accountability in governance.

           

Clearly any one who underestimates the president’s elephantine memory and his capacity for vengeance does so at his own grave peril.

 

NOTE: This column will be on a short break