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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
The Fall of Anenih and All That
For Chief Tony Anenih, the fabled Mister-Fix-It of the Obasanjo regime, the chickens finally came home to roost last week Wednesday. On that day, as we all know, the man who did President Obasanjo’s dirty laundry the past eight years got his own comeuppance; he was tossed out of office four months ahead of the end of his tenure as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the ruling People’s Democratic Party by the very man he seemed to have served ever so diligently.
The list of the dirty laundry he did for his erstwhile boss was long and too well known to need recounting. Sufficient to note that probably the most famous was nearly seven years ago when he told all those hoping his boss would do a Mandela – i.e. serve for one term only and return to his chicken farm – so that they could realize their own presidential ambitions, that theirs was mere wishful thinking. “I do not see any vacant seat in the Year 2003. A word is enough for the wise,” he intoned in November 2000 at a reception somewhere in Rivers State for Governor Peter Odili.
He then proceeded, like a mafia don’s consiglieri, to ensure that aspirants like Alhaji Abubakar Rimi, a former governor of Kano State, and Chief Barnabas Gemade, a former PDP chairman, who were foolish enough to ignore his advise, were driven into the political wilderness.
This was where the foolish aspirant had not died a conveniently mysterious death similar to that of Chief Bola Ige, Obasanjo’s attorney-general and heir-apparent to Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s legacy. Ige’s well-known but undeclared presidential ambitions, no doubt, posed a formidable threat to Obasanjo’s second term agenda. It is unlikely that Ige’s murder by assassins almost on the eve of Christmas 2003 will ever be resolved.
More recently, the former president’s Mr.-Fix-It told Nigerians, ahead of the last general elections, that only his boss and not anyone else, not even the electorate, would determine who was to succeed him. As was the case with his warning in 2000, this too came to pass. And that, as we all know, was how Nigeria came to be saddled with a president whose mandate is the most questionable in the country’s history.
Anenih’s carrier as a political enforcer did not start with Obasanjo. Before Obasanjo, there was Major-General Shehu Yar’adua, elder brother of President Umaru Yar’adua. The elder Yar’adua’s political machine was the most formidable throughout military president General Ibrahim Babangida’s longish eight-year transition. Anenih headed that political machine until General Sani Abacha emerged through a bloodless coup in late 1993 as head of state with ambitions to swap his khaki for mufti and remain in power forcefully ever after.
Ever adept at reading the handwriting on the wall, Anenih ditched Yar’adua for Abacha at the earliest sign of trouble for Yar’adua in the inevitable confrontation that ensued between the two generals over the country’s leadership. However, even though he played a key role in trying to sell Abacha to Nigerians and to the world as the country’s saviour, Anenih did not have the good fortune of becoming Abacha’s principal enforcer until the general died mysteriously in June 1998.
For a while after that Anenih disappeared from the political scene, only to raise, phoenix like from the ashes of Abacha’s discredited rule, to become Obasanjo’s Mr-Fix-It. This, of course, was after the general was released from his life imprisonment to which he had been sent by Abacha, laundered by the successive regime of General Abdussalami Abubakar, and sold to Nigerians by a coterie of retired generals, notably Babangida, Aliyu Mohammed and Theophilus Danjuma, as the messiah to move Nigeria forward from the “June 12” presidential elections crisis, a crisis which, bar our civil war in the late sixties, posed the most serious threat to the country’s unity and territorial integrity.
It was this chequered carrier that came to a not-so-surprising dismal end last Wednesday. Not-so-surprising, because it can be said that fixing things for others is a lot easier than fixing things for ones-self, especially where one’s principals have enormous state resources to play around with. Anenih’s carrier came a cropper last week because he apparently thought he could fix himself into a job his erstwhile political master, unwilling to let go power, had programmed for himself on the eve of his reluctant departure from Aso Villa.
Our main concern this morning, however, is not the rise and fall of Anenih. I have talked about it at length only in so far as it has an obvious lesson for the big man himself. This lesson, like the late controversial British politician, Enoch Powell, reportedly said in his biography of the British Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain, is that “all political lives, UNLESS THEY ARE CUT OFF MIDSTREAM AT A HAPPY JUNCTURE, end in failure” (Emphasis mine).
Last Wednesday’s high noon of the long knives shows quite clearly that Obasanjo is yet to learn the lesson of the defeat of his Third Term Agenda. His own humiliation of his erstwhile political enforcer is a reminder that - to use the words of his one-time-traducer-turned-attack-dog, Chief Femi Fani-Kayode - if he is not careful, “like the Biblical Saul, he will end in utter disaster and shame.” (The Comet of Sunday March 18, 2001).
The problem with Obasanjo, as we all know, again to use Fani-Kayode’s words, is that “He believes he has all the answers. He believes that he can never be wrong.” It is obviously because he is a Mr-Know-It-All that he made a complete u-turn about his views of the role of political parties in a presidential system, as he prepared to depart Aso Villa.
Throughout his eight years as president, Obasanjo persistently but wrongly fought off the PDP leadership from having any say in how he ran the country. The idea of political party supremacy in a presidential system as advocated by the PDP leadership, he said, in this case quite correctly, was a misnomer. At the same time, however, he persistently meddled in the day-to-day affairs of the party. Quite in keeping with his character, his was all the way through clearly a case of “do as I say not as I do.”
No where did the president betray his contempt for even the slightest party involvement in the affairs of government than in a talk he gave the American Council of Foreign Affairs, New York, on September 20, 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 be able to etch my own stamp on my political party,” he told the Council.
“Now after we came to the new term, or the second term, and the economy became a major issue,” he added,
It is this same Obasanjo who created a kitchen cabinet that he made more powerful than the platform he used to get to power that has now suddenly discovered the virtue of party supremacy and party loyalty.
Any one who needs a reminder about how Obasanjo kept the party at bay but simultaneously meddled in its day-to-day affairs should read the report of the seven-man panel headed by former vice-president, Chief Alex Ekwueme, set up by the PDP in November 2000. The panel examined the crises that riddled the party almost from the word go and suggested ways to end them.
The report, published in full in the rested National Interest of December 17, 2000, showed quite clearly that Obasanjo was the principal villain of the instability in both the party and the National Assembly which, in spite of having a huge majority of PDP members, was almost always at loggerheads with the president right through his tenure.
The most obvious manifestation of the instability in both the party and the National Assembly was the frequency with which they changed their leaderships. It was an open secret that Obasanjo was behind all the changes.
Needless to say, if Yar’adua wishes to govern Nigeria properly and effectively - that is assuming the courts do not nullify his dubious election – he should begin by retrieving the Ekwueme report and reading every word of it. He can hardly find a better guide on how he should relate to his party than the report’s conclusion.
The party leadership, said the report,
What Obasanjo has proposed with his new fangled notion of party supremacy and absolute party loyalty, now what he has succeeded in imposing himself as its life-leader and chairman of its board of trustees, is the exact opposite of Ekweueme’s recommendation – a party which, far from being a benign father-figure for all, is a malicious “headmaster” who loves nothing better than caning his wards into submission.
As former Senate President, Ken Nnamani, said to Obasanjo in reply to the former president’s demand of absolute loyalty of legislators to the PDP, Yar’adua should remember that he is the president, not of PDP alone, but of Nigeria and, of course, not all Nigerians are members of the PDP.
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