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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
Dare And Obasanjo’s Fair-Weather Friends
Dr. Olatunji Dare, veteran journalism teacher and columnist with The Nation, is one of the country’s most engaging and rigorous political satirists. He is also a friend of former president, Olusegun Obasanjo. Dare must be among the few of Obasanjo’s friends who have remained faithful since his recent departure from office.
Over seven years ago, Dare wrote a witty defense of Obasanjo in the format of an amusing banter with a friend. Titled “Dis democracy sef”, the piece in The Comet of May 2, 2000 was a satirical dig at opponents of Obasanjo, notably members of the National Assembly who had threatened to impeach Obasanjo so early in his first term.
The gist of Dare’s dialogue with his friend was that the friend could simply not understand how Obasanjo could be so smug in the face of legislators’ determination to emasculate him and even run him out of town completely. Obasanjo had reacted to the impeachment threat in a far away land with the telling sound bite in Pidgin English, “I dey kampe,” meaning he remained unshaken.
“Which kind kampe be dat one” Dare’s friend repeatedly wondered, when the president could not, among other things, “move this the country forward at a gallop but is constrained to inch along at the legislative snail speed,” simply because he was supposed to be running a democracy?
Two and a half years later, Dare wrote again to defend his friend in the wake of yet another impeachment threat. With the more prosaic title of “A president under siege”, Dare this time catalogued Obasanjo’s achievements and concluded that he was under ceaseless attack simply because he had done away with the style of ‘business as usual’ of past regimes.
“No, Obasanjo,” Dare intoned, “was not the trouble with Nigeria”. On the contrary, he said in effect, the man was the best thing yet to happen to Nigeria. Among other things, Obasanjo, he said, “restored Nigeria to respectability.”
In addition, Obasanjo, he said, banished the petrol queues and NEPA under him began to show signs of recovery. “Under Obasanjo’s predecessors,” Dare said, “corruption was a fundamental objective and directive principle of state policy. He launched a war on it.” Etc. Etc.
About five years on since Dare wrote all this, I have often wondered how much of this defense of the former president he can sustain in view of the fact that his friend has since proved himself little or no better than other leaders he had all to often condemned as corrupt, incompetent, self-serving and arbitrary.
At least two of his recent articles suggest that he is more likely than not to repudiate much of his defense of the former president. At the same time, however, a third article suggests that he still remains a friend in need. This is something you can hardly say for many of those who used to threaten fire and brimstone upon anyone who dared criticize their supposed tin-god.
The most notable among these fair-weather friends are the PDP chairman, Col (rtd) Amadu Ali, Chief Femi Fani-Kayode, undisputedly Obasanjo’s most rabid attack dog, and the elderly Chief Richard Akinjide, he of the 122/3rd arithmetical fame.
The two articles by Dare which suggest that he is likely to repudiate much of his past defense of Obasanjo were “Ige: The victim as metaphor” in The Nation of May 29, the very day Obasanjo’s successor was sworn in, and “They just don’t get it in Abuja” in the newspaper’s edition of June 26. Both articles painted a less than flattering picture of Obasanjo’s legacy.
The first article, for example, talked about how the shoddy investigation of Chief Bola Ige’s murder as Attorney-General of the country was, “an apt metaphor for the perversions with which the record of the past eight years is strewn, and of which the inauguration being staged in Abuja today is a culmination.”
The second piece was even more critical of Obasanjo for leaving behind a government headed by a president “mired in a crisis of legitimacy,” a Senate president who, among other vices, had “parlayed a military commission into a multi-billion Naira personal fortune stashed away in distant havens for wealth of dubious provenance,” a lady speaker “who would have had a hard time winning an election as president of the local chapter of the Hairdressers Guild,” legislators who had auctioned public real estate to themselves for a song and a secretary to the government who had “abandoned the struggle to actualize a resounding electoral mandate of which he was a co-custodian to run errands for a loathsome dictator…”
However, in spite of these damning criticisms of Obasanjo, Dare showed he was still Obasanjo’s friend in need when he asked in his column recently, (The Nation September 4), “Where are Obasanjo’s friends?” Many of them, he correctly observed, have deserted the president. “A good many of them who served Obasanjo as cabinet ministers, aides, advisers, strategists and assistants and profited handsomely from his tenure,” said Dare, “do not even want to be identified with that legacy. Where they have not moved on to fresh postures, they are consolidating their gains and desperately seeking new opportunities.”
Dare has shown he is Obasanjo’s friend in need not only because he felt scandalized by the desertion of the man by many of his so-called friends no sooner than he left office, Dare is a friend in need because even when he defended the president in the past, he was always honest enough to talk about several of the flaws in the man’s character and in his policies. More importantly he did not, as far as I know, seek to profit from his defense of Obasanjo and did not, in any case, do so.
Not so these fair-weather friends who have since deserted Obasanjo in droves. The most prominent of these deserters, as I said a while ago, are Col. Ali, Chief Fani-Kayode, and Chief Akinjide.
Only last month Col. Ali, whom Obasanjo had railroaded into the chairmanship of the PDP and who made himself a lead singer in the president’s hallelujah choir, started singing discordant tunes.
“The NWC (National Working Committee of the PDP)”, he told a recent dinner in honour of some of its members who had been appointed ministers and advisers, etc, “celebrates a new dawn. We have never had it so good. President Umaru Musa Yar’adua has taken the party to the grassroots where it belongs. He has given the NWC its due. This has never happened before… Today we have a first class young man as president. He is malam, a teacher.” This could reasonably be interpreted to mean that Obasanjo had cut the PDP off from the grassroots and that he was a senile, half-literate, third rate president.
Next was Fani-Kayode. Once upon a time this young chief was among the most virulent attackers of Obasanjo. Writing in The Comet of March 18, 2001, for example, he said that there could be “little doubt that (Obasanjo) suffers from what the British would describe as ‘debilitating character flaw’.” He even went further to predict that the former president “like the biblical Saul … will end in utter disaster and shame.”
All these changed once the president appointed him an assistant and, after turning himself into the president’s most rabid attack dog, a minister. Obasanjo who had a “debilitating character flaw” miraculously transformed into the best thing to happen to Nigeria. For that reason alone, Fani-Kayode said, he will take no prisoners of anyone who dared to speak, see or hear any evil of his principal. He made good his threat by calling any one who dared criticize Obasanjo, from former heads of state to opposition figures, the most unprintable names and on one occasion even heckled the estranged vice-president of the country during an executive council meeting!
“The president,” he once told the Weekly Trust (December 18, 2004), “has restrained us… Let nobody mistake the fact that we have not been speaking as weakness by the president. But if anybody wants to take it to another level, we will defend the president anywhere, anytime and any day that we deem fit.”
Since the president left office this attack dog seems to have gone to sleep. It now looks like the chief does not even want to be identified anymore with the legacy of his benefactor. Media speculations are that, he, along with several others who thought they were the true heirs of Obasanjo’s legacy but were left out of the scheme of things in the new dispensation, have felt used and dumped by their erstwhile benefactor.
Finally our ageing Akinjide. I simply could not believe my ears the other day when I heard the elderly Ibadan chief describe Obasanjo’s administration as the worst Nigeria has ever had. “We have had”, he reportedly said during a public affairs programme, “the worst government in this country within the last eight years. I am ready to challenge anybody on it.”
If Akinjide should be challenging anyone, he should be reminded, it is himself more than any other person. About four and a half years ago, in case he has forgotten, he told The Guardian in effect that Obasanjo was the best thing ever to happen not only to Nigeria but to Africa. “Let me say this,” he said in The Guardian of May 3, 2003, “Obasanjo is to Africa what Julius Caesar was to Rome in those days. Julius Caesar was a very great statesman. He was a military tactician and a great author. Obasanjo has those three attributes. He is a great author and a great military tactician. So what Julius Caesar was to Rome that is what Obasanjo is to Nigeria, indeed Africa.”
Akinjide, will find it hard, if not impossible, to deny that there was nothing awful, in substance if not in scale, Obasanjo did in the last four and a half years that he had not done before. Possibly then, the only difference between now and the time he was full of praise for the president was that at that time he enjoyed a very lucrative legal brief for wresting the Bakassi Peninsula for Nigeria from the Cameroon at the World Court, plus also the fact that his daughter was one of the former president’s myriads of assistants.
Obviously, with friends like Ali, Fani-Kayode and Akinjide, Obasanjo never needed any enemies.
Needless to say, the lesson in all this for our leaders is too glaringly obvious to need restating. One can only pray that God will give them the wisdom to tell the difference between friends in need and those who, like shadows, stick with their objects only while the sun shines.
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