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PERSPECTIVE The fall (?) of Anenih and other matters arising By Mohammed Haruna The
probability was that he was pushed out of the cabinet, but whether he
was pushed out or he left on his own, the departure of Chief Tony Anenih
from the Federal Executive Council, is very unlikely to bring much
relief to President Obasanjo’s second term bid. By the time Anenih’s
departure as the minister of works and housing was announced last week,
it was pretty obvious to everyone, except perhaps Anenih himself, and,
of course, his boss, that the Benin chief, had become too much of a
liability to Obasanjo. First,
he had failed disastrously as a minister of works who was too busy
fixing Obasanjo’s enemies, real or imagined, to find time to properly
fix our highways and public buildings. The president himself was the key
witness when he lamented the current state of our highways inspite of
over three hundred billion Naira appropriated for Anenih’s ministry in
a period of over three years. Anenih defence has been that he got only
half what was appropriated, but what the people have seen on the ground
is not worth a fraction of even that half he has admitted receiving. Second,
he had offended the sensibility of the Nigerian voter by his arrogant
and gratuitous assertion that there was no vacancy in the presidential
villa long after the people had entered a verdict that his bosse’s
performance in office on almost all counts – economic, political,
security, even foreign affairs, where he was supposed to have friends in
high places – was an almost unqualified disaster. Not
only did he persist in his arrogant contempt for the voter, regarding
his bosse’s bid for a second term right up to the time he left the
cabinet, Anenih was even more arrogant regarding the second term bids of
the PDP governors; they were, he said in effect, his candidates, all the
21 of them, whatever their record, and anyone who did not like it can go
suck a lemon, if you pardon the expression. Third,
he managed to alienate from his boss, just about every key actor who
contributed to his bosse’s return to power. These key actors included
the vice-president, Atiku Abubakar, former military president Ibrahim
Babangida, the president’s own National Security Adviser, Lt-General
Aliyu Mahammed, the man who released Obasanjo from life jail, granted
him state pardon and handed over power to him, General Abdulsalami
Abubakar and even his scarecrow, minister of defence, Lt-General T.Y.
Danjuma. How
Anenih managed to erect a wall between his boss and these key
political/military actors who made Obasanjo king, will make for a study
in the manipulation of the fears and insecurities of a king by a
machiavellian palace official to make himself indispensable to the king.
But this is another topic for another day. For
now, the important thing is that Anenih did manage to make himself seem
indispensable to his boss and in the process alienated not just the
tax-payer, the voter and several kingmakers, he also managed to alienate
many other key political actors including, most importantly, the federal
legislators whose cooperation the president needed to rule well. It is,
indeed, one of the important indices of Obasanjo’s failure as
president and as a leader, that his most serious opposition among the
legislators should come from those belonging to his own party, the PDP. Anenih,
is of course not the only palace official who has managed to erect walls
between Obasanjo and all these myriads of Nigerians as well as even his
erstwhile foreign friends. There is our loquacious minister of
information, Professor Jerry Gana, whom one anonymous columnist in the Vanguard,
described as “the university geography teacher who had held the
nation’s attention with his words, not his deed (and whose) defence of
whoever he works for sometimes tilts to the absurd, all in his concerted
bid to prove that his master right and others usually wrong”. (Vanguard,
December 3). Not
too long ago the professor used to tell Nigerians, at each and every
opportunity, that Babangida, who was then his boss, never put a wrong
foot forward. Next, he said the same thing of Ernest Shonekan who
“stepped in”, or rather was “stepped in”, when Babangida
“stepped aside” in August 1993. Then it became the turn of General
Sani Abacha, who had rather unceremoniously shoved Shonekan aside and
who had ran things completely differently from the way Babangida did, to
receive Gana’s unqualified loyalty. So filial was Gana to his boss,
that on one occasion he one quipped that God, Himself, spend an extra
time in creating the beautiful Mariam, his bosse’s wife. Gana
has, of course, been singing the same song about Obasanjo, who,
once upon a time, was highly critical of Babangida’s policies and
politics, policies and politics which he has since been repeating, but,
without Babangida’s mitigating charm. There
is also the other professor, this time of divinity, who many have
described as Obasanjo’s Rasputin. Gregory Yefimovich Rasputin, for the
reader who may not know, was a Russian peasant and self-proclaimed holy
man who cultivated the friendship of the last Russian emperor and
empresses in the late 19th and early 20th century,
by mysteriously healing their son who had suffered from blood disease.
Rasputin exploited the power he consequently gained over the couple so
negatively that he wrecked the Tsar’s prestige, which in turn
contributed to the coming of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Like the
original Rasputin, Professor Yusuf Obaje, the Villa chaplain has been
Obasanjo’s oracle, since 1998 when he was reported to have predicted
that Obasanjo would rise from his humiliation by Abacha, to become the
country’s second elected president after Alhaji Shehu Shagari. The
professor has become the president’s oracle whose spiritual guidance
is the key to what the president does or doesn’t do as well as the key
to who gets the president’s ears or doesn’t. Between
Chief Anenih and the two professors and some odd three or so ministers
and advisers, they have managed, in the years since 1999, to convince
Obasanjo that anyone who is not for him, is, by definition, against him.
They have managed to convince him that any criticism of the
president’s policies and politics and of his style, is, by definition,
malicious. The
sad thing in all this, however, is not simply that Chief Anenih and
Company managed to run rings round the president, it is sadder still
that he seemed more than willing to allow them to do so, especially
given the fact that he had been there before and ought to have known the
danger of allowing himself to be a captive of self-serving palace
courtiers. True,
Anenih and Co. should have learnt lessons from the fate of earlier
palace courtiers like Alhaji Umaru Dikko who made himself seem
indispensable to President Shagari and Major Hamza Al-Mustapha and
Alhaji Ismaila Gwarzo, who made themselves seem indispensable to General
Abacha. Truer still, however, Obasanjo, himself, should have learnt
lessons from the fate of Generals Muhammadu Buhari, Babangida, Abacha
and Abubakar, who, once out of power, were turned upon by many of the
very people who told them, when they were in power, that they could do
no wrong. Even
more important still he should have learnt lessons from his own
experience in between his first coming and the second, the most
important of which is that once you are out of power, you become an
orphan. Because he does not seem to have learnt the lessons of power,
history seems to have been repeating itself for him, and for Nigerians,
as a farce. For isn’t it indeed farcical that Obasanjo should come to
depend on Senator Arthur Nzeribe, of all people, to stave off the most
serious impeachment threat he has faced in his three and a half years as
president? The same Nzeribe, who was the first to move a motion of
impeachment against the president when he was barely one year in office?
The same Nzeribe whose global notoriety in playing high stakes politics
and business is legendary? As
things now stand, Nzeribe’s confession that he was involved in the
distribution of tens of millions of Naira to his colleagues in the
Senate to buy their support against the impeachment of the president may
yet turn out to be the most damaging evidence that could expose the
president’s anti-corruption crusade as a charade. Nzeribe’s
confession is serious enough to warrant an investigation of the whole
sordid episode by the Akanbi anti-corruption panel, on who collected how
much and where the alleged bribe money came from. So far, however, there
is not the slightest indication that there will be such an
investigation. As
if in an afterthought following his confession that he took bribe to
block the president’s impeachment, Nzeribe has since taken out pages
in some newspapers to advertise what he says are the sources of his
financial commitments in high-stakes politics. These, he says, are the
Nzeribe Trust, and the Agunze Trust, which, between them, were worth
nine hundred and twenty five million pounds sterling as at 1988, plus
another one hundred and eighty one million Naira or so worth of
investments in Nigeria as at the same period. With
such a net worth, says Nzeribe, he is amused that anyone should question
the source of the money with which he finances his political projects,
including his new found opposition to the “undeserved impeachment
intrigue” against Obasanjo. He is also amused, he says, that anyone
should imagine that he plays politics “to make money”. If
Nzeribe is amused that anyone should think he is in high-stakes politics
for the money, he should have himself to blame. In case he has
forgotten, a little over two years ago when he led the move to impeach
Dr. Chuba Okadigbo as Senate President, he gave an extensive interview
to the National Interest newspaper, which the paper published on
April 1, 2000. In that interview, he said, inadvertently perhaps, that
he led the impeachment against Okadigbo because Okadigbo did not give
him any of the contracts he had been accused of awarding fraudulently. “Chuba”,
said Nzeribe, “told us he doesn’t know anything about the award of
contracts. That was how it all started. I believed his story. All of a
sudden he ordered the senate clerk to distribute the (contract)
papers… When I got my own and I saw contract, contract, contract. So I
went to meet him at Ike Nwachukwu’s house where the eastern senators
normally meet and I said to him, my friend you told me that you know
nothing about contracts and that all the contracts were awarded by
Enwerem. Look at so, so and so, AND HOW COME NO IGBO GOT ANY? That’s
all I said. He just opened up blasting me left, right and center…”
(Emphasis mine). In
another interview on the same subject with another newspaper, Nzeribe
tried to qualify his query about Okadigbo not giving the Igbo any of the
contracts in question. “I didn’t say Ole ka onyelu Arthur
(How many were given to Arthur) or Ole ka onyelu Ike Nwachukwu
or Ole ka onyelu Jim Nwobodo. My question was Ole ka Ndigbo
ketalu (How many did Igbos get)?” Two
things can be quickly said about this without any fear of contradiction.
First is that for Nzeribe clearly what was wrong with Okadigbo’s
alleged contract scam was not its alleged fraudulence, but the fact that
he purportedly did not award any to the Igbo. Second, Nzeribe’s
distinction between himself, Nwachukwu and Nwobodo as individuals, on
the one hand, and the Igbo, on the other, is sheer sophistry. Tribes,
being no legal entitles that can sue or be used, do not receive
contracts. It is individuals who do. These individuals may be Igbo,
Yoruba, Hausa, Nupe, or whatever, but there is absolutely nothing
collective about who gets the benefits of the contracts or how those
benefits are shared. It
is a great tragedy for Nigeria that President Obasanjo, who started out
with such immense goodwill blew his opportunity to make yet another
history as the first leader to successfully execute a civilian to
civilian transition programme. He blew his chance by surrounding himself
with people whose terrible record of serving any government in power
should have warned him that they will treat him no differently from how
they have treated those before him. Surely Obasanjo could not, for
example, have been unaware of the fact that the same Anenih he had come
to depend so much upon, once betrayed his second-in-command as Head of
State, Major-General Shehu Yar’adua. Obasanjo could also not have been
unaware of speculations that the same Anenih who spear-headed
Yar’adua’s initiative in the 1995 Constituent Assembly to end
Abacha’s rule, also authored a blueprint for Abacha on how he could
succeed himself. The president could also not have been unaware of the
role Anenih played in the now infamous Abacha’s two-million-man march. Even
now that Obasanjo has apparently got rid of Anenih as a minister, the
Benin chief remains an influential figure in Obasanjo’s re-election
bid. The chief may have apparently fallen, but anyone who thinks he is
down and out and that he and his other fellow fixers for Obasanjo are no
longer in a position to hold him hostage to power, such a person has got
another think coming. NB: This column will be away for the rest of this month.
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