PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Between a former president and his vice

ndajika@yahoo.com

Predictably the visit in January by Vice-President Atiku Abubakar to his former boss, President Olusegun Obasanjo, at his Ota Farm in Ogun State has provoked fierce controversy not least because of the claim and counter-claim between the two about who took the initiative. While Obasanjo claims his estranged lieutenant pestered him for the visit sources very close to the former vice-president said it was the other way round.

Significantly Obasanjo chose Yola, the capital of Adamawa, Abubakar’s home state, to make his claim. “I initially declined but after pressure was mounted on me I had to succumb to the request,” he said at a PDP meeting in the capital late March. “He (Abubakar) kept calling me to the extent that I had to change my GSM line. Even in Katsina during Yar’adua’s daughter’s wedding Atiku begged me to ask Yar’adua to forgive him.”

In a swift reaction through his spokesmen Abubakar denied the claim. He never begged Obasanjo for any reconciliation, he said. Instead it was Obasanjo, according to sources close to Abubakar, who sent emissaries to the former vice-president seeking for an end to their long drawn rift. For months Atiku reportedly spurned those initiatives on the grounds that it would be prejudicial to his petition against the election of President Umaru Yar’adua.

The pressure was reportedly renewed after the Supreme Court threw out the opposition’s case. If this was true the pressure apparently paid off. Abubakar, as we all now know, went to Ota on a supposedly private visit that immediately became the talk of town and may yet prove his costliest political mistake so far; it has caused serious dissention within his own Action Congress and has also handed his former boss, famous for his elephantine memory, a propaganda weapon with which to further discredit him.    

Abubakar has since claimed that his former boss has phoned him to deny the Yola story as widely published in the media. At least one newspaper, the Daily Trust, has published the transcript of what Obasanjo reportedly said in Yola to prove it did not make it up. So far the former president has rebutted neither Trust nor Abubakar.

Even then the controversy essentially remains a case of Obasanjo’s word against that of his former lieutenant’s. My own personal experience back in 2003 suggests that Obasanjo is the one not telling the truth.

The reader may recall that soon after the results of the year’s presidential elections were declared, General Muhammadu Buhar,i who lost out to Obasanjo as the candidate of the main opposition ANPP, threatened to call his followers on to the streets in protest.

To avert a possible bloodshed a leading traditional ruler in the North initiated a move for possible dialogue between the two opponents. The traditional ruler formed a committee of several Northern leaders under the chairmanship of the late Etsu Nupe, Alhaji Umaru Sanda Ndayako. I happened to be its secretary.

The committee first sat in Kaduna for a couple of days and then moved to Abuja. That was when I developed a sneaky feeling that Obasanjo himself was the man behind it all. There had been some whispers to that effect but I’d dismissed them as your typical Nigerian cynicism. But when the odd dozen or so of us, bar the chairman, were accommodated in executive suites in the then NICON HILTON Hotel and the State House gave us a liaison who dropped hints of generous honourarium for us at the end of our assignment I began to wonder if there wasn’t something to those suspicions.

My own suspicions were heightened by the fact that Buhari initially refused to have anything to do with us because some of his aides who had reliable sources in intelligence circles told him it was a ruse to take the wind out of his sail of mass protest. Still the optimist in me said something good could yet come out of it even if it was a ruse.

At any rate the committee eventually succeeded in persuading Buhari to meet with its members through the intervention of  Alhaji Umaru Shinkafi,  Marafan Sokoto andhimself an ANPP stalwart. During the meeting the general said he only accepted to come because of the respect he had for several of the members including, of course, the chairman.

At the end of the meeting I had the impression that the committee succeeded in dissuading Buhari from carrying out his threat to go to the streets. In return the committee recommended that Obasanjo should summon a summit of all parties to consider ways to end the palpable tension that had engulfed the land as a result of Buhari’s threat.

This was the recommendation that we submitted to Obasanjo at a brief ceremony in the presidential villa. Not to my surprise he gave it the shortest shrift possible. A summit of all parties, he said in a short dismissive response to our chairman’s address, was a nonstarter especially as many of the opposition parties existed only on paper. I suspected that the man was angry that the chairman’s speech dispensed of all the niceties about congratulating him over his victory and simply plunged in to the business on hand. Worse, the speech even questioned the integrity of the elections.

A few days after the event he told any one who cared to listen that the whole initiative was a diabolical –his own words – plan to scuttle his victory at the polls. His denunciation of our report finally confirmed my suspicion that it was all his own initiative. It became obvious to me that what he wanted was a respectable group of Northern leaders to be seen as endorsing the controversial election. And when he could not get his wish he decided to wash his hands off the whole initiative even though government’s imprimatur was written all over it.

My choice of Vice-President Atiku Abubakar’s word against Obasanjo’s in the Ota visit controversy is, however, not merely on account of my own experience. Time and again the former president has proved he is not beyond telling blatant lies or reneging on his commitments. Ask the chieftains of Afenifere who are yet to recover from the subterfuge they suffered at his hands in the run-up to the 2003 elections. Ask former president, Shehu Shagari, and former head of state, General Yakubu Gowon, who intervened at his behest to get his near-Nemesis, former speaker of the House of Representative, Umar Ghali Na’abba, off his back during the second impeachment threat he was confronted with. Ask former deputy Senate president, Ibrahim Mantu, who diligently played the script of what every one knew was the president’s Third Term Agenda only for the man to deny that he ever contemplated such an agenda.

Last month the clever general was the subject of the popular BBC personality interview, Hardtalk. Clearly he intended the interview to burnish his image as one of few world statesmen that could bring peace to the troubled Democratic Republic of Congo and its Victoria Lake region. He’d been there several times before the interview as a special envoy of the United Nations’ Secretary General.

Unfortunately for him instead of burnishing his image, the interview turned in to a nightmare of sorts towards the end when the host, Stephen Sucker, raised questions about his possible implication in the Halliburton bribery scandal involving many highly placed Nigerians. I have never seen the man so angry. Such impertinence, he thundered, for Sucker to even suggest that he could be bribed! He was, after all, the only Nigerian leader to have been thoroughly probed and given a clean bill of health by the anti-corruption agencies he himself had set up.

Apparently it escaped his mind that he had used them against other leaders like former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, and although the agencies did not give their target-subjects any bill of health neither did they establish any thing against them. The clever general also forgot that as his own creatures the anti-corruption agencies were unlikely to indict him as long as he was in power, which he still is as the self-imposed chairman of the Board of Trusties of the PDP.

All of which brings me to the point of this piece. And this is that with a well known record like this how could Vice-President Atiku Abubakar have been so naïve to think it is possible, in a manner of speaking, to ever kiss and make up with his ever scheming boss, whatever agreement they had between the two of them?