PEOPLE & POLITICS

Obasanjo, Atiku and the New Nigerian

Mohammed Haruna

Long before president Obasanjo’s April declaration of his bid for a second (?) term – Chief Olu Falae, his rival for the job over three years ago, told The Comet (June 28) at …….justification that the bid is actually the third – the marriage between the president and his vice, Atiku Abubakar, which seemed like a marriage made in heaven, had apparently started coming apart. The papers occasionally speculated about the lovers’ tiff, which, of course, was always promptly denied by both sides. On one occasion, the president, in one brave attempt to disprove doubters, actually said his marriage to Atiku was auren zobe, which is the Hausa metaphor for describing the marriage as indissoluble.

Then came Obasanjo’s declaration which Atiku’s name was conspicuously absent as his running mate. Asked during his first …..Media Chat broadcast ……….. after the declaration why he did not name his running mate, he said, not very convincingly, that doing so before he secured his party’s ticket, would have amounted to jumping the gum.

The next day, he reversed himself. It has since become an open secret that the president did so because of a threat from the vice-president’s camp that unless his boss put him on the ticket, he would have no choice but to challenge the boss for the ticket.

Since this April falling-out, the lovers’ denials of any tiffs at home have become less and less convincing. On the contrary, the tiffs have come out in the open more and more. One apparent consequence of these tiffs has been the palpable chill in the president’s very …….campaign headquarters in ……..central Abuja. Two months after he declared his bid, the headquarters is yet to become a beehive activities. Part o the problem, if not the main one, is reportedly the stalemate over who controls the campaign purse between the three some of Alhaji Adamu Ciroma, Minister of Finance and Campaign Coordinator, Chief Tony Anenih, Minister of Works and deputy Campaign Coordinator, and Atiku, himself, as the deputy chairman of the Campaign committee. This stalemate has, along other things, made it difficult to recruit staff and procure materiel.

So far probably the most open disagreement between Obasanjo and his vice, is over whether or not the country should revert back to a foreign technical adviser for the national football teams following the Super Eagles’ disappointing outing at the just concluded World Cup competition in Japan and South Korea. According to last week’s Saturday PUNCH, Atiku recently countermanded Obasanjo’s order against the recruitment of any foreign technical adviser by the Nigerian Football Association. “President Olusegun Obasanjo and Vice-President Atiku Abubakar”, said the paper, “Love disagreed on the desirability or otherwise of a foreigner handling the Super Eagles and the other national teams”.

A few days after the president’s order, Mr. Steven Ibn Akiga, the Sports Minister, announced that the NFA would, after all, recruit foreign technical adviser, apparently suggesting that the president had reversed himself. Subsequently, or apparently thoroughly miffed president summoned the minister for explanation which was not forthcoming. According to the Saturday PUNCH, the president took exception to the breaching of his orders ……., about the time Akiga was enduring a presidential rebuke, the vice-president on a visit to Far away China, Nas, according to PUNCH, telling the News Agency of Nigeria that “There (was) nothing wrong in hiring a foreign coach. After all the coach of England is from Sweden”.

Akiga, it would appear, was hopeless victim of either a miscommunication or a cross-fire between Abubakar and his boss. The Saturday PUNCH in question quotes Abubakar as claiming that he was able to persuade his boss to reverse his rejection of a foreign technical partner. “I read that (the president did not want foreign technical advisers any more) and I went to the president. We exchanged ideas and he accepted”. The president’s rebuke of Akiga could only mean that either Abubakar misunderstood his boss, or the boss decided to go back on his word to his vice. Whichever is the case it is difficult to dismiss speculations that there is some disharmony at the Villa.

Beyond this domestic rift over football, there is another probably more serious rift over what is certainly a more serious subject – the privatization of the New Nigerian Newspapers. Anyone who had read my piece on “The New Nigerian, Turi and I”, on these pages nearly one and a half years ago, knows how sentimentally attached I am to the paper. As I said in that article, it is “an institution to which I have given much of my working life and which in turn has given me even much more”. It is the place where I cut my journalism teeth in 1973/74 as an undergraduate and where I remained as a staff from 1979 rising from the ranks to become its boss in 1985.

It is only natural therefore, that I should show some interest in goings-on at the newspaper, the more so when its hard-working and creative managing director, Dr. Omar Farouk Ibrahim, has been doing his best to restore the paper to its glorious old days. Those days of Malams Adamu Ciroma, Mamman Daura and Turi Muhammadu have been tough acts to follow, but Ibrahim has mad substantial progress, if not on the editorial side, at least on the technical quality of the paper and in reversing the physical decay of the premises.

Ibrahim has been able to make considerable progress largely due to the huge financial and other support he has received from Obasanjo. Which is somewhat strange if you know, as those of us who worked in the New Nigerian in the 70s, when Obasanjo was military head of state, do, that Obasanjo never forgave the paper for its editorial which thoroughly ridiculed hit controversial experiment with rotating vice-chancellors of universities. For that piece of audacity he tried to starved the paper of its subsidies until he left office in 1979. But even if you are not aware of the president’s past hostility towards the paper, you may still find it strange that Obasanjo would want to support a paper which, inspite of its federal government ownership, is still regarded as a voice of the North, a region which has shown much hostility towards him because of its belief that he has returned to office with a vengeful malice towards the region.

This is all the more reason why it is stranger still that for some times now Obasanjo has become an allay of those in the region who are uncomfortable with the impending privatization of the paper. Goings on between the management of the paper and the Bureau of Public Enterprises suggests that the president too is uncomfortable with privatizing the paper. So uncomfortable that sometimes last year he quietly removed it from the privatization list to that of commercialization.

This, apparently, did not go down well with the BPE and the vice-president, its overall boss. He was actually away on a long vacation in the U.S. when this happened. It is not clear whether his boss briefed him about this development when he returned, but the development has since become a source of serious friction between the BPE and the management of New Nigerian. The BPE, on the one hand, has insisted that whatever reservations anyone, the president including his ……has about privatizing the paper, it should not and cannot get in the way of implementing the government’s official policy. The paper’s management, on the other hand, has refused to cooperate with the BPE presumably because it is aware that the president is no more in a hurry to sell off the paper.

The result is that while the privatization of the Daily Times, owned mostly by the federal government, has proceeded apace, that of the New Nigerian, owned completely by the Federal Government, is at a complete standstill.

Recently, the BPE tried to break this stalemate by reporting the management of the New Nigerian to the vice-president and requesting that the management be called to order. Abubakar, in turn, requested his boss in writing to give the New Nigerian a categorical marching order to cooperate with the BPE. The paper’s management, has been defying the BPE with impunity, probably because it believes it has the backing of forces more powerful than the BPE.

Still Obasanjo would not give the paper its marching order. Instead, he showed some annoyance with his deputy’s thinly disguised accusation that he (Obasanjo, that is), was trying to frustrate the privatization of the New Nigerian. He reportedly explained to Abubakar that if the privatization of the paper has not proceeded apace, it is because, an elected president, he has to take the sentiments of the governors of the Northern states into consideration. The governors, he explained, are naturally concerned that the paper should fall into the hands of those who may be hostile to the interests and values of their region.

Although Abubakar could not force a categorical marching order to the New Nigerian from his boss, he still proceeded to instruct the Minister of Information and the ………….. ………… , Professor Jerry Gana, to instruct the paper’s management to cooperate with the BPE. So far as I am aware, Gana is yet to carry out the vice-president’s instructions, torn, as it were, between sticking to government policy and his personal loyalty to the president.

The obvious question is why are the president and his vice pulling in opposite directions on this matter of privatizing the New Nigerian as in several others? Probably that in the case of New Nigerian that somewhere along the line no one knows for sure. However, the president probably ……….. ………………. intelligence information that his vice has an interest in the paper to give his future presidential ambition the voice that it clearly lacks at the moment.

Is loyal vice-president, Abubakar’s ownership of the paper is something Obasanjo should be only too willing to push. But then in politics, as in anything human, there are no certainties, no absolutes. And with a paper like the New Nigerian, who knows, the vice-president may be tempted to get ahead of himself and decide that 2007 is too far off.

Abubakar, of course, has other options. He could revive The Reporter, the paper set up by his late mentor Major-General Shehu Musa Yaradua. But then his relationship with the Yaradua family may not be as rosy as the public is made to believe it is. In any case as a Muslim, Abubakar knows better than to get himself involved in a family estate that he has no inheritence claim on.

His other option could be to start a new publication from scratch. As someone who reputedly has since become stupendously rich, this should not be a difficult option. The problem, however, is that it takes more than money to build up the kind of goodwill that the New Nigerian still has, inspite of its steep editorial decline since the early 1980s. all things considered, therefore, the New Nigerian is obviously Abubakar’s best option.

All this, of course, is mere speculation. But the speculation is not baseless. Certainly not when the crack in the presidency that surfaced in April, when the president declared his second term bid with no intention to carry Abubakar along initially, seems to be widening with each passing day.