PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Obasanjo: Calling God As False Witness

If anyone needed further proof that it’s hard, if not impossible, to find a better example of someone who hardly ever practices what he preaches than our dear ex-president, General Olusegun Obasanjo, the man himself provided it two weeks ago. This was on January 21 on the occasion of the 7^th Trust Annual Dialogue which he chaired.

The theme this year was “The African Woman and Politics.” To discuss it was a very formidable line-up of four of Africa’s leading women politicians, namely South Africa’s Winnie Mandella. Ghana’s Samia Nkrumah, and our own Kofo Bucknor-Akerele and Naja’atu Mohammed.

With a line-up like this you would expect the following day’s newspaper headlines to be dominated by what the panel had to say on the theme. Instead it was the chairman’s rather unkind, but predictable, cut against his erstwhile protégé, the ailing and besieged President Umaru Yar’adua, that grabbed all the headlines.

The bedridden Yar’adua , he said in response to what looked suspiciously like a choreographed attack from the audience against him for his role in foisting a sick president on the country in 2007, is honour as well as morally bound to step aside.

“If,” he said, “you take up an appointment, a job, elected, appointed whatever it is and then your health starts saying ‘I will not be able to deliver’, to satisfy yourself and the people that you are supposed to serve, then there is the path of honour and the path of morality. And if you don’t know that then you don’t know anything.”

Then in apparent self-exculpation he, in effect, swore to God that he never knew Yar’adua was not healthy enough to withstand the rigours of the highest job in the land. “What I need to say,” he said, “is that nobody picked Yar’adua so that he will not perform. If I did that, God will punish me.”

To which someone in the audience, a lady I think, heckled “Who gave you the right to impose any one on us?” or words to that effect. It is highly instructive that the former president chose to ignore this more fundamental aspect of the constitutional crisis which his imposition of Yar’adua on the country in 2007 has plunged the country into.

The answer to this more pertinent question is all too obvious; the man gave himself the right. Nine days before the famous - or infamous, depending on which side you were on - Southern Leaders Forum in Enugu on December 19 2005, a forum which had Obasanjo’s imprimatur all over it and during which all manner of abuses were heaped on the North for its insistence on power shift to the region in 2007, the man told the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Convention that as its leader he should be conceded the sole right to interpret its policy of power shift.

“The party,” he said, “must resist efforts by some individuals or groups to use their pedestrian understanding of power shift and power rotation to hold the country to ransom...When the time comes, they should accord me, as the leader of the party, the opportunity to interpret our policy and principle of power shift to suit the occasion which will definitely consider the seeming agitation from the North of the country.”

When the time eventually came following the defeat, mercifully, of his Third Term agenda, the man did not wait for the party to concede the right to him. He simply usurped it by imposing new rules on the party which effectively reserved the chairmanship of the party’s Board of Trustees (BOT) to himself. He also transferred virtually all the powers of the party’s executive council and congress to himself.

There was hardly a whimper of protest from many of those who have since found their voices in blaming the man for the crisis Yar’adua’s illness has plunged the country into.

But I digress, somewhat. The subject this morning is not who gave the man the sole right to choose who was to succeed him, pertinent as it is. The subject is the moral right he has to pontificate about honour and morality. His dismal record as a man whose word has hardly ever been his bond – ask the group of Northern leaders who thought they had a deal with the man to be president for only a term back in 1998, or Afenifere, which thought it had a deal with him to allow the incumbent Alliance for Democracy governors in the South-West a second term in return for supporting his re-election in 2003, or even members of the Yoruba Elders Forum which he created to undermine Afenifere but dumped as soon as it had served its purpose - shows clearly that it was rich, very rich, of him to preach honour and morality to Yar’adua, or in deed to anyone.

To begin with, it is dishonourable and immoral for a leader to disown responsibility for the consequences of his actions, sometimes even for those of his subordinates who take their cue from his body language. Here the contrast between him and former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, his bete noire, couldn’t be sharper; whereas Babangida has consistently accepted full responsibility for the controversial “June 12”, Obasanjo has chosen to disown his role in bringing about the Yar’adua presidency.

As chief law enforcement officer of the country, President Obasanjo had all the intelligence information on all of the country’s VIPs at his figure tip. By the time Yar’adua became governor of Katsina State in 1999 it was an open secret that he had had a kidney transplant in 1986. And as any medical student would tell you, organ transplants have an average span of 10 years, depending on the organ. After that chances are it will begin to malfunction.

In the case of Yar’adua, it was a not-so-open secret that in his first four years as governor he used to travel to Kano weekly for dialysis. During his second term, Borini Prono, a major Italian road construction firm in the state, offered to build a state of the art dialysis centre in the main hospital in the state capital. This was eventually built by Julius Berger, Nigeria’s most well-connected construction firm.

As president, Obasanjo cannot say he did not know all this. If he didn’t then he was obviously not fit to be president.

It is not clear whether Yar’adua used the facility but he had stopped his regular trip to Kano long before its construction. This could explain his infirmity by the time Obasanjo, for obviously cynical reasons, decided to inflict a decidedly weak PDP presidential ticket on the Nigerian voters.

Not for the first time in his military/political career the man has tried to disown a script because it has not worked out exactly as he had hoped. The last time was, of course, his infamous Third Term agenda which he disowned no sooner than it collapsed around his ears. “If,” he said at the time, “I had wanted a third term, I would have prayed for it...and God would have given it to me. I know this because there is nothing I wanted that God did not give me.”

Before the Third Term debacle he had called on God to judge between him and his then estranged party chairman, Chief Audu Ogbe, as to who had lied about the crisis that was precipitated by an attempt to forcibly remove Chris Ngige as the PDP governor of Anambra State in late 2004.

“I stand before God and man and my conscience,” he said on that occasion, “to defend every measure that I have taken everywhere in Nigeria since I became president and I will continue to act without fear or favour or inducement. And it does not matter what is sponsored in the Nigerian media, in particular the print media.”

This time, however, he did not stop at merely calling on God to be a false witness. He also invoked His wrath upon himself if his motive in forcing Yar’adua on Nigerians in 2007 was not for their best interests.

Obasanjo is entitled to his self-delusion that God dotes on his every whim and caprice but as his teacher as a recent divinity student of the country’s Open University may have told him, no one ever invokes God’s name in vain.