PEOPLE AND POLITICS

Obasanjo’s Samson Option

Mohammed Haruna

Last week I tried to show on these pages, how President Obasanjo has, in the last three and half years, become the most divisive president this country has ever seen. Penultimate Sunday and the following Tuesday, which was our 42^nd Independence Anniversary, the president provided even more evidence to prove my point.

Penultimate Sunday, five or six newspapers led their Sunday editions with a story, which was clearly orchestrated by the president himself, that he never signed any deal with the North on what he would do for the region in return for its support of his presidential ambitions. “Anybody who signed that deal”, the Sunday Vanguard version of the interview quoted him as saying, “would be a figure-head president. And there is no way I would have signed that document. I didn’t”.

The Guardian-on-Sunday’s version of the interview, quoted him somewhat differently. “No”, the paper said, “there is no other document. There may be a third document but I will get it. Anybody who signed that will only be a figure-head president.”

The Comet, which was one of the five or six papers present at the purported interview, did not carry one single word of this central aspect of the presidential interview in all of the three pages it devoted to the interview.

It was not only on this central aspect of the interview that the newspapers present at the interview carried different versions of the president’s answers to their questions. As a matter of fact, even the questions on similar subjects differed from one newspaper to the other. For example, on the on-going controversy over the privatisation of Nigeria Airways, which has pitched Nasir El-Rufai, the Bureau of Public Enterprises boss, against the “Queen of the Cabinet” and Minister of Aviation, Dr. Kema Chikwe, The Guardian-on-Sunday’s version of the question Obasanjo was asked, was “Talking about privatisation of Nigeria Airways, could you explain sir, the nature of agreement that government had with Airwing Aerospace and why is the BPE (Bureau of Public Enterprises being sidelined?” These were 31 words all told.

Sunday Vanguard’s version was a rather longish 73-word question about widespread public perception of a lack of transparency in the privatisation exercise, using the El-Rufai/Chikwe war of words as an example.

The Comet’s version was the most concise. It simply sought to know in about 25 words who between El-Rufai and Chikwe was telling the truth about the controversial privatisation of the Nigeria Airways.

The texts and the lengths of Obasanjo’s answer to these three versions of the question on Nigeria Airways privatisation, were equally as varied as the questions.

All of which raises questions about the authenticity of the interview. In an authentic question and answer interview, the questions and answers should be the same. On several issues, the five or six newspapers at the so-called interview, carried different versions of the questions and answers. It is therefore, fair to suspect that the newspapers were merely handed a prepared presidential text with instructions to feel free on how to use it, provided they all used it on the same day.

While legitimate questions can be raised about the integrity of this strange genre of journalism, the greater worry is Obasanjo’s apparent intention in orchestrating the interview. Obviously the man had at least three intentions in mind, all of them either very self-serving or very dubious, to say the least. First, it is obvious he wanted to plant the seed of acrimony among the members of the Northern Caucus of the PDP that negotiated the controversial deal – or is it no-deal? – with him. “I got it (meaning the so-called minutes of the meeting where the deal was discussed)”, he told his more-than-willing-to-spread-your-word reporters, “from one of the northern politicians not too long ago”. However, Obasanjo’s minutes was probably fiction not fact; he got the venue wrong, (it was Hilton not Agura), he got the number of the participants wrong (there were fewer than 10 against his 23), and he got the name of the Chairman wrong (it was Professor Jubrin Aminu and not Alhaji Lawal Kaita). According to some key participants at the meeting, actually no minutes of the meeting were taken.

Second, it is obvious that Obasanjo wanted to show himself off, alone of all the six Southern presidential candidates, as the patriotic hero who was unwilling to trade off the national interest for his presidential ambition. Yet by his own account he pleaded with Professor Aminu and Co. to accept his word that he can be depended upon from his past second to protect the Northern interest.

Chief Awoniyi has since averred that Obasanjo did indeed sign the document, albeit indirectly, by signing a compromise text Awoniyi drafted to break the deadlock between Aminu’s team and Obasanjo. I will believe Awoniyi’s word anyday against Obasanjo’s, given their past individual record. But this is really besides the point, which is that Obasanjo, as a born-again Christian and as an officer and gentleman ought to have kept his word when he gave it. For him now to gloat over his imaginary victory over so-called Northern sectionalism by his refusal to sign the deal, is to unmask himself as someone who all along was a man of very bad faith.

Third, it is also obvious that he wants to pitch the rest o the country against the North by joining the age-old game of demonizing a region whose leaders have held the reigns of power the longest in this country. Obasanjo quotes Ekwueme from his probably fabricated minutes as refusing “to allow the North to head the army and the police. He also refused to allow Northerners to occupy some ministries like Defence and Petroleum”.

Here it is instructive that whereas Obasanjo would quote copiously from the purported minutes of his meeting with the PDP Northern caucus, he would not let his co-conspiring reporters see a copy of the document he refused to sign. “You see”, he told the reporters, “the document itself, is a different thing, but here is the minutes of the meeting. They wanted us to sign that document as described.”

Obasanjo did not let even his trusted newspapers have a glimpse of the actual document for the simple reason that it would have given the lie – a very big lie – to his claim that (1) the North wanted him to serve only one term and (2) that it also wanted to corner all the so-called juicy ministries to itself. A copy of the chart of the allocation of the ministries and parastatals in possession of one of the key participants at the meeting shows quite clearly that the “juicy” ministries of finance, communications and transport was to go to the South-West along with the presidency itself. The South-East was to get the ministries of power and steel, federal Capital Territory, water resources along with the Senate President. The Ministries of petroleum, foreign affairs and agriculture along with the Secretary to the Federal Government and the Speaker of the House of Representatives were to go to the South-South. In return, the North was to get the Vice-President, the ministries of defence, justice, education and the party chair.

Clearly Obasanjo was being less than honest in trying to create the impression that he rejected the deal with the North because it wanted him to serve for only one term and because it also wanted to corner everything for itself in exchange for supporting power shift to the South.

Obasanjo carried his game of demonizing the North one step further in his Independence Anniversary speech, penultimate Tuesday. In a speech which was so pedestrian I am almost certain neither the cerebral Dr. Stanley Macebuh, one of the president’s close aides, nor Mr. Tunji Oseni, his chief press secretary, had a hand in writing it, the president was at his banal and divisive worst.

“A deeper, more profound and potentially more destructive debate”, he said affecting some undity, “is going on in Nigeria today; that debate is about wealth, who creates it, who benefits from it and by how much”. If his speech writers had put on their thinking caps, they would probably have saved him the embarrassment of sounding off on something which is so elementary that it is hardly new to even the most average secondary school kid. For, which civics student does not know that politics is about sharing society’s values, material or otherwise? What then is so unique about the crisis of our politics that the president had to sound off as if he was discovering a new law of nuclear physics?

More serious that this gratuitous and embarrassing sounding off, however, was his inability to resist the use of divisive words even on as solemn an occasion as our independence anniversary, when, as president, he should have been at his unifying best. “The fiercest critics of our administration”, he said “are those who are unhappy about the slow pace of the development in the various sectors of the economy” (Thank God for that admission). “The real opponents of our government are those who previously, or who are enjoying enormous and inordinate economic and political power, and who now sense the closing down of the avenues from which they have hitherto amassed – or are presently amassing ill-gotten wealth.”

All this is a thinly disguised reference to the North from where the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the president’s nemesis, Alhaji Ghali Umar Na’abba, as well as many of the president’s fiercest critics come from. It is also a thinly disguised reference to Vice-President Atiku Abubakar who must number among those still enjoying :enormous and inordinate economic and political power.” After all, isn’t it an article of faith of virtually every Southern politician, that the North, to paraphrase a Guardian editorial 10 years ago, which contributes the least to the common pool takes away the most?

A drowning man, they say, will clutch at a straw. Should it then surprise anyone that Obasanjo, sensing he is drowning politically, will clutch at the primordial bashing of the North even if in reality there is little or no justification for it? Should it surprise anyone, if Obasanjo seeks to adopt the Samson Option of bringing down the whole political edifice rather than accept defeat arising from his failure to deliver on each and everyone of his promises?

Much of the propaganda about the North contributing little to the common pool is based on the mistaken notion that the country’s economy depends on oil. It is truly tragic that the president, himself, would subscribe to such economic illiteracy. “Nigeria”, he said in his Independence Anniversary speech, “still has the distinction of being one of the few countries in the world that depends on one single commodity – oil.” (emphasis mine). Apart from the problem of the president mixing up his grammar and his metaphor in this sentence – you can’t be distinct and yet belong to a group of more than one – it is not true that Nigeria’s economy depends on oil. The Nigerian government yes. But the Nigerian economy is 39 percent dependent on agriculture, which is the North’s strong forte, and a much smaller 11 percent dependent on oil for its Gross Domestic Product. Any economist will testify to this.

But even at that 11 percent, which , admittedly, is a very important component of our GDP, it is not as if anyone really works at generating the oil wealth. As Professor Sam Aluko told The Country newspaper (May 20), “The offshore oil belongs to the whole country, not to a particular state… Frankly the resources are near them, but they are developed by the whole wealth of Nigeria, not by their wealth… The oil producing states do nothing about oil, they just wait to collect the money. Unlike groundnut, does government plant groundnuts in the North or cocoa in the West? It is the individual farmer. So you cannot say there was resource control in those days”.

Aluko, it must be said, is the last person anyone can accuse of being anti-Delta. His wife comes from there and he lists some of the governors in the region among his best friends. However, when he says the oil producing states merely collect unworked for oil wealth, he should have included the Federal Government as well.

It is possible Obasanjo knows all this, but chooses in his desperation to cling on to power to pretend otherwise in order to pitch the North against the Southern minorities, between whom there has always been amity. This explains his sleight-of-hand bill to the National Assembly on removing the dichotomy between on-shore and off-shore oil revenue. As The Comet was honest enough to point out in its editorial on the subject on October 1, “The bill suggests that the Federal Government is trying to give, through legislature, what it does not have. There is real constitutional dilemma here. Should this anomaly be allowed to pass in the political expediency? Or the rule of law and due process should be allowed to take its course?”

Several of the leaders of the South-South, notably Chief David Dafinone and Professor Itse Sagay (SAN), have seen through this presidential subterfuge, but that has not stopped the president from trying to drive a wedge between the North and the rest of the country.

The potential tragedy of Obasanjo’s divide and rule strategy is that he may well succeed beyond his wildest imagination.