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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA Between Dangiwa and Fani-Kayode A friend remarked the other day that he had always wondered why retired Colonel Abubakar Dangiwa Umar chose a career in the army instead of journalism. Dangiwa’s frequent interventions in public affairs, my friend said, were always as thorough as they were readable. So thorough and readable, he said, that they could make even the best investigative journalists and the best writers go green with envy. After the colonel’s most recent intervention titled “For an Effective Fight against Corruption”, it is hard, if not impossible, to disagree with my friend. Dangiwa’s statement is, so far, arguably the most comprehensive indictment of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration as probably the most corrupt in the nation’s history. There is, of course, the recent General T.Y. Danjuma’s devastating two-part interview with The Guardian on Sunday in which he accused Obasanjo of rank hypocrisy in his anti-corruption crusade. However, compared to Dangiwa’s statement it was more like the diatribe of a jilted “lover” than the dispassionate appraisal of the record of his “partner”. Certainly it was not as well documented. The colonel’s statement was widely circulated among the mass media and it received a lot of coverage by the press, but as far as I know only the Leadership Weekend and the Insider magazine ran it in full. In the LW which, in size, is a cross between a tabloid and a broadsheet, the statement ran for four full pages. This was in its edition of March 18. The long and short of the statement was that Preident Umaru Yar’adua has no choice but to institute a comprehensive and thorough probe of his predecessor’s eight-year tenure if he wants Nigerians to take his anti-corruption crusade seriously. “Although Umaru Yar’adua’s administration has been making efforts to reinvigorate the war on corruption in line with the rule of law”, Dangiwa said, “most Nigerians remain unimpressed”. This, he said, is because the president seems determined not to probe Obasanjo as his benefactor. But not to probe Obasanjo, said the colonel, can only detract from the credibility of the president’s anti-corruption crusade, if only because 56% of the corruption in the country allegedly took place in Obasanjo’s presidency while it controlled 52% of the nation’s revenues. “I want to believe that this administration will do all it can to distinguish itself from the hypocritical regime of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo by prosecuting a sincere and purposeful war against corruption,’ Dangiwa concluded. Presumably in a bid to persuade Yar’adua of the need for a comprehensive probe of his benefactor, Dangiwa embarked on a tour de force of virtually all of Obasanjo’s major projects to show how comprehensively and thoroughly the former president pillaged the nation’s treasury. Along the way, Dangiwa talked about how he believed Obasanjo cynically manipulated the high rate of the plane crashes in the country between 1999 and 2006 “to enrich himself and his cronies”. One such crony, said the colonel, was Chief Femi Fani-Kayode, former aviation minister. “After the Bellview plane crash in 2006 which claimed over 100 lives including that of the Sultan of Sokoto (Alhaji Muhammadu Maccido)”, Dangiwa said, “the president saw an opportunity to reward his most overzealous defender, Femi Kayode. He appointed him the minister of aviation in a cabinet reshuffle. He handed over the sum of over N11.5 billion unbudgeted to the new minister, to do as he pleased. And so he did.” Never one to turn the other cheek in line with the biblical injunction he knows all too well as a Bible thumping pastor, Fani-Kayode quickly issued a rejoinder to Dangiwa which ran for half a page in the Leadership of March 12. In that rejoinder the former aviation minister threatened to sue Dangiwa for libel. Before then, however, the minister made it clear that he was obliged to let the world know that, contrary to Dangiwa’s claims, Obasanjo “did not capitalize and enrich himself and his cronies from the mishap in the aviation industry.’” His own appointment as minister, he said, “was not an opportunity to ‘reward’ me for what Umar has described as ‘overzealousness’ but it was well deserved and I am eminently qualified to have manned or to man any ministry in this country.” Fani-Kayode is obviously entitled to his own opinion. But if he cared for the truth, which he should as a man of God, he should know that most Nigerians believed he got his job, first as an aide and then as a minister, not because of any qualifications he might have had, but because, like Dangiwa said in effect, he was easily the most fearsome of Obasanjo`s self-appointed attack dogs. If Fani-Kayode is honest with himself, he will not deny that before his good friend Otunba Akin Osuntokun managed to convince him that Obasanjo meant well for Nigeria and before the same Osuntokun introduced him to the president, his main hobby horse was abusing the man on the pages of newspapers – that and denigrating Muslims and their religion as well as Northerners, in that order. If he is honest with himself, the chief will not deny that he changed from abusing Obasanjo to being his praise singer and an attack dog only after the president gave him his first job as a presidential aide. There can be no batter proof of this than the grave yard silence the former minister has maintained since the coming of Yar`adua in May in the face of all the attacks Obasanjo has suffered from foes and erstwhile friends alike. It is also instructive that when the former minister chose for once to speak out against an attack on his former mentor, he did so only in one sentence. In sharp contrast he spent the rest of his half-page rejoinder telling the world what a wonderful aviation minister he was and how, almost virtually alone, he ended all those plane crashes that Nigeria had become notorious for. As if in answer to his self praise, an aircraft on its way to Calabar to pick the governor of Cross River State, Chief Liyel Imoke, went missing. The aircraft and its three-man crew have since been found, sadly with all the crew dead. At any rate in singing his own praise, the minister seems to have conveniently forgotten the near misses, thank God, that several aircrafts have experienced since his departure. Now that Fani-Kayode has replied Dangiwa on the pages of newspapers, the next thing the public expects is for him to carry out his threat of suing the colonel for libel. For, there can be no better way to clear his name – not even the National Assembly investigations that have proved more drama than substance - than proceedings in the magisterial atmosphere of the courts. The only thing is that if I were Fani-Kayode, knowing the controversy that still surrounds the transactions of the Obasanjo appointed Implementation Committee for Aviation Safety, I will not be in a rush to head for the courts. As for Dangiwa’s counsel to the president to probe Obasanjo for the sake of his own credibility and integrity, he couldn’t get a better advice. After all, was it not one of Obasanjo’s first acts in office back in 1999 to institute an enquiry into all the contracts and appointments awarded and made by his predecessor and benefactor? The only thing is that Yar’adua can and should go one better than his benefactor by making his own probe judicial rather than administrative. And there can be no better place to start than the NNPC, the government’s cash cow.
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