PERSPECTIVE

Obasanjo’s counter-insurgents

By

Mohammed Haruna

kudugana@yahoo.com

If anyone has any doubts that President Olusegun Obasanjo will be a hard, if not an impossible, sell for next year’s election, the weakness of the operations mounted by a variety of pro-Obasanjo forces to rescue him from the attacks by the anti-Obasanjo forces, should banish those doubts; far from those rescue operations being effective, they have been worse than damp squibs.

Some of the attacks against Obasanjo have come from abroad – specifically from the Americans, who are supposed to be the president’s best friends, because, among other things, he had handed our military to them, lock, stock and barrel. Even then, they have, in-effect, passed a vote of no confidence in him by recently warning Americans, and by extension other Westerners, to stay away from Nigeria.

Internally, the attacks on Obasanjo have come from the Arewa Consultative Forum, the Ohaneze and the Delta People Congress, associations that have accused him of marginalizing the North, the East and the Delta regions respectively. The attacks have also come from even the Afenifere, the association of his own kith and kin, who are vexed by, among other things, (1) his thinly disguised attempt at undermining its hold on Yoruba politics through the floating of a rival Yoruba Elders Committee (2) his rejection of Afenifere’s call for a Sovereign National Conference and (3) his apparent retreat from its demand for linking next year’s election with the implementation of the National Identity Card project.

Again, he  has also come under universal attack for his globe-trotting which he himself had admitted as being a failure in terms of its objective of bringing foreign investments and of concelling our debts. Finally, he has come under a half-hearted attacks from the Lagos press which has been finding it hard to eat crow over its long-held belief, inspite of all evidence to the contrary, that bad governance is the exclusive preserve of Northern, more specifically, Hausa/Fulani leadership.

The latest salvo against Obasanjo has come from the House of Representatives, which, last Tuesday, gave him a two-week ultimatum to resign or face impeachment. Of all the attacks on the president, this one should worry him the most, for although it may turn out to be no more than what in Nigerian parlance is Shakara Olooje (sheer bombast, in Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s popular lexicon), the National Assembly’s attack is the only one that has constitutional authority behind it.

If, indeed, the president is worried about all these attacks at all, he is definitely not showing it. He has, through his spokesmen, Professor Jerry Gana, the information minister, and my good friend and senior professional colleague, Mr. Tunji Oseni, his Special Adviser on Media Affairs, picked up the gauntlet thrown by the National Assembly; he will not resign he has said. While his spokesmen have, in effect, been telling the members of the National Assembly that they can jump into the sea for all the president cares about their threats, his other defenders have been saying rather defensively that whatever have may been the president’s offenses, attempting to impeach him as a result is an over-kill. Others more have been vigorously defending his record in the last three years and, in some cases, they have even gone on the offensive.

Among the counter-attackers on Obasanjo’s side is Dr. Ibrahim Ayagi, lately the Chairman of the National Economic Intelligence Commission. Recently, he wrote a very widely published article in defence of Obasanjo, which was also a vicious attack on the Arewa Consultative Forum, an organization which claims to defend the interests of the North (Arewa). As an economic adviser to the president and as someone whose media image is that of a radical economist and a radical critic of the Establishment, Dr. Ayagi’s counter-offensive on behalf of Obasanjo deserves close examination. We will do that next week, in sha Allah.

For this week we shall only examine the defence of the doves in Obasanjo administration, like Oseni, and others outside the administration like Chief Richard Akinjide, who are content with merely deflecting the attacks on their man. Take Oseni, himself, for a start. He has recently been rationalizing his bosse’s addiction for globe-trotting on the worn-out grounds that it is, among other things, necessary for bringing in foreign investment. His recent rationalizations have obviously been prompted by Thisday’s editorial of August 6, titled As the Nation Bleeds: Our President Goes to Jamaica Again.” As an opinion, that editorial must pass as one of the most powerful, factual and well-informed opinion written by any newspaper for a long time. The president’s travels, it said in summary, can only remind people of “The unfortunate image of Emperor Nero fiddling while Rome burns”.

Oseni’s response has been not to deny that Rome has indeed been burning. Rather his response has been to say that the whole object of his bosses’ many travels is actually to put out the fire. Obviously the fact that you need to be firmly on the ground rather than stay airborne and away from home for as long as his boss does, in order to put out any fire, seems lost on Oseni. It also seems to have escaped Oseni that if his boss had stayed at home long enough in the first place, he would have prevented the fire from starting to begin with.

Again, it seems to have escaped Oseni that Thisday’s editorial was the more telling because the paper has been a very sympathetic critic of Obasanjo, at least up to that editorial. In fact, the same paper had on February 15, last year, written to support Obasanjo’s controversial request to the National Assembly to purchase a new aircraft for the presidency at a time when many critics thought the presidential airfleet was already too large. “Given the faulty state of the present fleet” the paper had argued, “it may be necessary to lend a listening ear to the president’s request.”

Obviously, if a paper that had supported the president’s request for a new aircraft would turn round less than two years later to condemn his tendency to be airborne all the time, the presidency ought to be re-examining that tendency, not defending it.

Besides Oseni’s weak defence of Obasanjo’s globe-trotting, there is the second category of Obasanjo defenders who argue that impeachment does not fit whatever crimes are alleged against him. The other day it was Chief Richard Akinjide (SAN) who attempted to defend Obasanjo over his role in the criminal attempt last year to insert Section 80(1) into Electoral Law 2001, an attempt which would have banned new parties from contesting the next presidential elections, if it had succeeded. “Even when the president does not cough properly”, Akinjide told Saturday PUNCH (January 19), “they will say he should resign, he should be impeached, as if impeachment is something we should talk about glibly. It is a very serious thing. All I have been reading about on this bill in the papers does not warrant any impeachment”.

Akinjide was right to say impeachment should not be trivialized as an instrument for checking the excesses of elected government officials. It is, strange, however, that as a SAN, Akinjide would argue that the attempt to insert any clause into our laws through the backdoor is not serious enough to warrant impeachment. If such an attempt that clearly violates Constitutional procedure does not deserve impeachment, I do not know what does.

In the latest round of impeachment threat against Obasanjo, Akinjide has been joined somewhat by the Labour leader, Mr. Adams Oshimwhole and some student union leaders and even by some members of the National Assembly, in arguing that even if Obasanjo has committed the offences alleged against him, it is rather late in the day to try and impeach him. The logic of this argument is that what is crucial in determining the punishment for an offence is not the seriousness of the offence but the timing of the charges for the offence. This, obviously, is a very strange and unconvincing argument.

Besides the illogicality of this argument, it assumes that to impeach the president automatically means to remove him. This is not necessary the case. A president may be impeached, as America’s Bill Clinton was over his sexual liaison with Monica Lewisnsky, and still remain in office.

In the United States from where we borrowed our presidential system, impeachment is a simple two-step procedure, at least in principle; the House makes the accusations, while the Senate conducts the trial. In our own case, impeachment has been made a lot more complicated, involving no less than four steps. First, a petition against the accused may be considered, if no less than one third of the members of the National Assembly sign the petition and present it to the President of the Senate who, in turn, must, within one week, bring it to the notice of the accused. The Senate President must also circulate the response of the accused to all members of the National Assembly (NA). Second, the (NA) must resolve by no less than 2/3 majority of each of the two Houses and within two weeks of the Senate President receiving the petition, but without any debate, whether or not to investigate the charges in the petition. Third, once the National Assembly resolves to go ahead, the Senate President must request the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) within one week to appoint a panel of no less than seven persons, who, in the opinion of the CJN, are persons of “unquestionable integrity”, to investigate the charges. Fourth, the panel must, within three months, finish its investigations and submit its reports to each of the two Houses. Finally, the National Assembly must consider and resolve by 2/3 majority and within two weeks of its receipt of the report, whether or not the accuse stands guilty as charged. If the National Assembly so resolves, the accused stands removed and there is no appeal against the resolution.

Obviously, this is a cumbersome procedure, but it should take no more than five months to complete. Obasanjo still has over nine months to finish his first term. Therefore, those who say it is rather late in the day to sanction him for his alleged infractions are merely being disingenuous. Instead of making such hardly tenable argument, they should be advising him to refrain from persisting in those infractions, especially since even his most avid defenders have not denied that the charges against him by the House are valid and serious, even if the chances that the House may succeed in making its case all the way to the final stage of the impeachment procedure are slim..