PEOPLE AND POLITICS

2002: As the year ends

Mohammed Haruna

When President Obasanjo finally takes stock of his first term as president, he is very unlikely to count 2002 as one of his happiest times in office; the year started rather disastrously with the avoidable accidental ammunition explosions in Ikeja Cantonment, and more or less ended with the equally avoidable Miss World riots in Kaduna and Abuja. Both tragedies cost hundreds of lives and property worth tens of millions of Naira.

The Ikeja tragedy would have been avoided if the authorities had not willfully neglected the safety regulations for the storage of ammunition. Likewise the Miss World riots would have been avoided, if, in the first place, government did not involve itself in its organisation and if it had promptly assuaged the predictable anger of Muslims in the country to Thisday’s ridicule of Prophet Muhammad because of their opposition to the pageant.

In between the two tragedies, the president was too busy putting out the impeachment fire ignited by the National Assembly in August, to find time for his primary job of promoting the general welfare of the people. Obviously, the year 2002 can hardly count as one of the president’s happier times in office.

These three major vents of the year did test the president’s crisis management skills but he didn’t seem to have passed the tests with flying colours, that is if he passed them at all. The Ikeja explosions may now seem a distant event but few people would forget the president’s angry reply to the crowd at the Cantonment gate who had heckled him with shouts that he should go inside the Cantonment to see the extent of the damage for himself. His angry reply that the crowd should consider itself lucky that he could find time to commiserate with the victims of the explosion, hardly portrayed him as a caring leader.

The impeachment threat seems to have now fizzled out nearly four months after it all started, but his handling of the threat has done considerable damage to his image as a statesman. First, to break the rank of the legislators, he has apparently felt compelled to compromise his stand on, for example, the privatisation of Benue Cement Company and on the onshore/offshore dichotomy. Second, his dubious commitment to fight corruption suffered further blow by revelations of attempts to bribe the Senators into withdrawing their support for the impeachment with about 300,000,000 Naira.

There are people who believe only the legislators are to blame for allegedly accepting the bribe. Prominent among them is the outspoken former Anglican Bishop of Akure, the Right Reverend Bolanle Gbonigi. The other day he told Sunday Punch (December 8) that the North was behind the impeachment threat because Obasanjo had refused to do its biddings. “For them to want to force the first Yoruba person who won an election out of office because he refuses to do their biddings”, said the former Bishop, “we Yoruba should solidly support him and say NO. We didn’t do that to Shagari when he was president of Nigeria, the Yoruba did not gang up against him”.

The Right Reverend Gbonigi then pleaded with the president to insist on probing the legislators over the bribery scandal. “I hope the president would insist that they should be probed, not only for this 300,000,000 Naira that they shared, but for other things we have heard”.

One couldn’t agree more with the man of God that the legislators should be probed. It is, however, strange, isn’t it, that the reverend seems only interested in investigating and punishing the receiver and not the giver, whereas it is possible that the giver in this case is even more guilty of corruption than the receiver.

The Right Reverend Gbonigi has every right to stand up for President Obasanjo as his fellow Yoruba, but he ought to remember that if today Obasanjo is the first Yoruba person to become an elected president, it was no thanks to the Yorubas who had roundedly rejected him at the polls in February 1999. Of course, the fact that the North overwhelmingly supported Obasanjo does not mean that he should do only its biddings for, as president, Obasanjo has a responsibility to both those who voted for him and those who didn’t.

However, if the North should not “gang up” against Obasanjo simply because he refuses to do its biddings, whether the biddings are right or wrong, Bishop Gbonigi should be reminded that it was not true that the Yorubas did not gang up against President Shagari. As a presumably faithful reader of the Nigerian Tribune, the leading voice of the Yoruba, Gbonigi ought to be able to rcall the vitriol and scourn which the paper poured on Shagari until Chief Obafemi Awolowo himself had to call its editors to order. Gbonigi, I am sure, will also remember an interview Nobel Laureate Professor Wole Soyinka, a leading voice among the Yoruba, gave to Ogun State Television in mid 1987 in which he justified the overthrow of Shagari. “If you have a situation which is undemocratic”, he told OGTV as transcribed in the Sunday Times of July 5, 1987, “then you have a duty, if you are serious about transforming a society, you have a duty talking seriously of seizing power.”

Anyway, by all means let us, as the Bishop says, probe the legislators for their roles in the 300 million Naira scandal and “for other things we have heard.” The probe should, however, not be restricted to the legislators alone if we sincerely wish to root out corruption in the country. After all, of the three arms of government, the executive is far and away the biggest spender of the tax-payers money and is therefore the one that should be scrutinised the most.

Besides the 300 million Naira bribery scandal, Bishop Gbonigi must have also been reading about the inexplicable (?) involvement of the presidency in the sponsoring of this year’s Miss World pageant, an involvement which must have contributed in no small measure to the Miss World riots.

Professor Jerry Gana, the minister of information has categorically denied that the Federal Government has spent one kobo for the event. But the verbal exchanges on newspaper pages between Miss Angela Onyeador, who was contracted by Allianz Nigeria Limited to organise the Miss World Royal Charity Gala in London, and Mr. Fidelis Anosike, the boss of Allianz, has given the lie to Gana’s denial. In his brave effort to shield the First Lady, Stella, from Onyeador’s allegations of breach of contract on the part of Miss World Organisation, Anosike seems to have inadvertently admitted that government did underwrite the costs of a pageant which was supposed to be a purely private affair.

First, Anosike admits in an interview with Thisday (December 8) that “FCT was doing a lot in terms of support”. That support is very unlikely to have been purely moral. Second, Anosike says Julia Morley, the boss of Miss World Organisation, has collected 2 million dollars from Nigeria. “Nobody has come and sat down and asked at what point does she return the money?”

The question is who is she to return the money to? Certainly, it is neither Silverbird Production nor the first Lady’s Child Care Trust both of which were involved with the pageant. It could not be Silverbird because according to Anosike, Ben Bruce who, strangely enough, remains its boss inspite of his job as the Director-General of NTA, was the main reason why the pageant was moved out of Nigeria, not excluding the riots in Kaduna and Abuja. “The problem with Ben Bruce”, said Anosike, “is that he was compromised right from the onset… Silverbirds should have paid a hosting fee upfront.” Obviously the Child Care Trust could also not have provided such a hefty amount.

Last, but by no means the least, there is the involvement of the First Lady herself in the whole sordid affair. Until Maryam, military president Ibrahim Babangida’s wife, came along seventeen years ago, the office of the First Lady played only a low profile and nominal role in the affairs of state. Typically, however, the office would set up a trust for one charity or the other.

Maryam changed all that and transformed the office of the First Lady into a high profile one that made claims on the public treasury. Not surprisingly her almost larger than life Better Life for Rural Women (or Better Life, for short) became a subject of controversy, not least because First Ladies have no one’s mandate to run what appeared to be a parallel office to that of the executives at all levels of government.

Chief Gani Fawenhimi, the radical human rights lawyer, objected strongly enough to the First Lady syndrome to challenge it in court during Babangida’s regime. I don’t know if there was a definitive outcome to the court case, but Fawehinmi’s challenge had the salutary effect of forcing subsequent First Ladies to refocus their efforts on private charities even though the other Mariam, General Sani Abacha’s wife, continued with the tax spending Better Life in the guise of Family Support Programme. She even banned the wives of governors and Local Government chairmen from using the title.

When President Obasanjo won his election in February 1999, one of his first promises was to abolish the office of the First Lady as a grandiose affair. However, as with so many promises he has made, he seems to have failed to keep this one too. This failure once prompted Soyinka to wonder if Nigerians could realistically expect Obasanjo to solve the country’s problems if he could not curb his wife’s desire to over-indulge in the First Lady syndrome when it was completely within his power as head of his family to do so.

For Soyinka, the fact that the office did not seem, at least on the surface, to make any demand on the public treasury, was still not good enough. As if in disapproval of the high profile charities that First Ladies at the state and federal levels were competing against each other to set up, the Nobel Laureate told Tempo (June 14, 2001) that “There is a blackmail going on, a blackmail against corporate institutions, against other tiers of government which are made to kow-tow… and I don’t give a damn whether people say ‘oh we are raising private funds here and there, for private functions’. No. I don’t buy that kind of casuistry”.

Casuistry or not, Stella’s Child Care Trust, seems to have embroiled itself in something which does not look too wholesome, gauging from allegations by Miss Onyeador that the Miss World Royal Charity Gala held on November 10, in London, was a scam.

Miss Onyeador has since gone to court in London to demand what she says is her right, based on a contract she had entered into with Allianz on behalf of Miss World Organisation. Whatever the outcome, the Child Care Trust with which Allianz has links, is unlikely to quickly live down the negative publicity which has surrounded the Miss World pageant from the moment the Miss World Organisation was persuaded by Silverbird and the Child Care Trust to stage it in Nigeria.

As I said on these pages over one year ago, First Ladies – and their husbands – should know that the public image of the First Lady Syndrome is that of the wives cynically manipulating their husbands’ exalted office for their own private gains – and possibly even for their husbands’ gains.

Therefore, if Obasanjo wants the question marks over his commitment to fight corruption to go away, he should begin by keeping his three-year old promise to scrap the office of the First Lady as an apparently money-spinning high profile office.

NB: This column will be away for the rest of the month.