Re: “THE ROAD TO KIGALI”

I am prompted to write this open letter to you essentially because of the remarks you made at Arewa House, Kaduna, recently, about the way President Obasanjo has ruled this country in the last four years or so. Those remarks, by common consent, was the bombshell of the year. President Obasanjo, you said in effect, has ruled the country in the last four years literally under the spell of a cult-like clique.

Coming from you, those remarks, I must say, are as perplexing as they are devastating to the already poor image of Obasanjo’s regime as one which is hard of hearing. The remarks are perplexing if only because you have been one of, if not the, most fanatical advocate(s) of Obasanjo.

You will, I am sure, remember what you said in 1998 about checking out of this country if Obasanjo failed to become its president in the wake of Abacha’s five year tyranny. More than one year after that, you still insisted you had no cause to regret your support for the president, even though you sounded not so enthusiastic as before. You will recall you told The Guardian on Sunday (December 24, 2002) that Obasanjo was “easily one of the best rulers we had in this country”. You will remember that you also said that from experience you knew Obasanjo was a “first class administrator under stress and under difficulty”.

In what, however, looked like the early signs of second thoughts about your unqualified support for the president, you insinuated in the same interview that things had changed so much he may not be up to it this time around. “I knew” you said, “that he was the best man of the moment when it came that we started to look for people to succeed Abacha, after his death. BUT THINGS HAVE CHANGED. NIGERIA OF ONE AND A HALF YEARS AGO IS NOT THE SAME AS THE NIGERIA OF THE LATE SEVENTIES. IT WAS THE LAST TIME HE WAS IN POWER”. (Emphases mine).

Inspite of this early signs of second thoughts about obasanjo’s capacity to rule, if not of the sincerity of his purpose, you decided to soldier on in his support. You will remember, sir, that the interview in question was against the background of rumours that you had decided to resign from Obasanjo’s cabinet. Not surprisingly the paper wanted to know if your decision was because you were disenchanted with the president’s performance. You replied in the negative.

“I had no reason”, you said, “to be disenchanted with the administration because the administration was just coming in. So there was absolutely no reason to be disenchanted. It is just that I felt I was not physically fit to cope with the stress of coming into government and truly I said so to Mr. President. He asked me to think about it. And after some consultations I decided to give it a try”.

All this was nearly three years ago. Last month you were offered another opportunity to reassess your four years as one of Obasanjo’s most trusted ministers. (At least that was what most outsiders thought). This was the occasion of the reception organized at NICON HILTON Hotel, Abuja, in your honour by the Middle Belt Forum of which you have been the strongest pillar. Among those who graced the occasion was the president himself and he had nothing but glowing remarks to make about you. Among the many kind things he said about you was that you are one of the country’s best role models, especially as someone who only says what he means and means only what he says.

“You will not like what he will say”, The Comet (October 30) quoted the president as saying of you, “but he will say it. What he says is what he means. He doesn’t try to speak in double”.

On that occasion, you do not, true to your reputation as a straight-talking officer and gentleman, speak in double, to use the president’s expression. You did lament the terrible ethnic carnage in Middle Belt states like Nassarawa, Plateau, Taraba, Adamawa and Benue, during your four years as minister, but you did not show any sign that you had become disenchanted with your former boss. On the contrary, your remarks about him suggested that you only felt sorry for him for being a hapless target of back-stabbing and two-timing subordinates. In reply to questions on whether your final departure from Obasanjo’s cabinet was merely on sabbatical from politics, you said if what you observed about what his own party members especially were doing to him, was the stuff of politics, then “I am not wrong to say I am not going to be part of it. The back-stabbing is too much. In the army you know where the bullet is coming from. In politics, you don’t. Sabbatical; Yes, politics: No”.

Which was at least one reason why your remarks in Arewa House, penultimate Saturday, might have hit the president like the proverbial bullet from an army combatant. Coming from someone whom the president himself has described as plain-speaking and also coming barely a fortnight after your mutual back-slapping at NICON HILTON Hotel, your remarks about the president’s cult-like style of administration must have been as devastating to him as it was perplexing.

Sir, by now you may be wondering what all this has to do with the seemingly strange title of this letter. If you are, allow me to quickly explain.

You may recall an open letter my good friend Professor Adebayo Williams wrote to you in Tell of June 1, 1998. In that somewhat fortuitous letter, - Abacha died mysteriously within a fortnight of the publication of the letter – Williams expressed dismay at your silence over General Sani Abacha’s cynical plans to impose himself on Nigeria, a plan which Williams likened to a “road to Kigali and national calamity”. Kigali, as you know very well, has since become a metaphor for the horrible genocide that took place in Rwanda some ten years back.

“You silence,” Williams said in his open letter to you, “is profoundly eloquent. But it is no longer golden. There comes a time in the life of a nation when silence, however dignifying and statesman like, is tantamount to cold complicity and collusion with the forces of evil. For a man justly celebrated for his seminal interventions in national affairs… your current silence over the state of the nation is bizarre, to say the least”.

Sir, although Williams may have exaggerated a bit by his use of Kigali as a metaphor for Abacha’s attempt at imposing himself on the country, what the professor said about your silence over Abacha’s determination to take us down the road to Kigali seems even more apt about your silence all these four years about what you thought of Obasanjo’s rule. For, in the last four years of what is supposed to be a democracy, Obasanjo has leaned only on his own counsel and on the counsels of what you yourself have described as a cult-like clique. But for your outburst of two Saturdays ago, most ordinary Nigerians, myself included, had assumed you were an inside member of that clique.

That assumption has helped no end to prop up a regime Nigerians did not deserve, just as it must have helped it to get away with the bare-faced robbery last April of the peoples’ mandate for a second term. To this extent, sir, you will find it hard to wash your hands clean from the terrible mess in which the country has been because our “elected” leader would listen to no one but himself and the members of a self-selected clique.

Now that you have spoken out against your former boss one can only hope that your criticism is not too little and too late. But even if it is, there is still a lot that you can do to save your part of and, by extension, the whole, country, from the machinations of a president who has shown a singular determination to divide the peoples of this country, including his own people, against themselves, in order to rule them.

You will recall that during the October reception for you by the Middle Belt Forum, you regretted that you spent much of your four years as minister of defense trying to put out fires of hatred among groups in the Middle Belt. Sir, those fires were the unintended consequences of the determination of your boss to destroy the unity of the North. I am sorry to say, your apparent determination, going all the way back to 1992, and even earlier, to keep Middle Belt leaders who are Muslims, leaders like Senator Mahmud Waziri, Dr. Sola Saraki and Alhaji Abubakar Barde, from the leadership of the MBF, has only helped Obasanjo to achieve his objective.

As one of the initiators of the MBF and probably its single biggest private financier, you are in a position to help heal the division between Muslims and Christians in the North. As you know very well, if any part of this country remains divided unto itself, then it becomes impossible for Nigeria as a whole to be united.

I agree with many people who say it is futile for anyone to seek a return to the days of the Sardauna when the North seemed to speak with only one voice. In those days the North was one region. Even then the Sardauna did not speak for the North without challenge. He was, as you know very well, challenged by J.S. Tarka in the Middle Belt and by Aminu Kano in Kano, with its tradition of radical politics among the core Northern provinces.

The division of the country’s four post-independent regions into 12 states in 1967 permanently changed the geo-politics of the country, the North included, such that even if the old regional leaders were alive and kicking today, they would have found it impossible to speak for their regions. This much was evident from the way both Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe who survived the Sardauna as regional leaders, had serious difficulties in keeping their subordinates in line during and after the transition to the Second Republic.

However, whereas the uniformity of voices after 1967 is almost impossible, their harmony is not. In other words, there is no reason why the differences in the sound of our voices must necessarily lead to acrimony.

Three years ago, sir, the Arewa Consultative Forum, lead by Chief Sunday Awoniyi, a veritable Sardauna legatee if ever there was one, made overtures to the MBF to join hands and work for the unity and progress of the North. Even though the MBF rejected the overture, on that occasion you broke away from its leadership and met with ACF. At the end of your meeting you reportedly promised to persuade the MBF to see that its common cause with ACF is greater than the differences between them. Three years later, you seemed not to have tried or if you did, you certainly did not succeed.

I don’t know what you meant when you reportedly told your Arewa House audience two weeks ago that “For us (Christians) to be singing here today in Arewa Hall, we are making a statement”. I may be wrong, but my own interpretation of it is that you would like the mutual recriminations among Northerners of different tribes and religions to cease henceforth. I say this because Arewa House has been the meeting place of ACF since its inception and, as the former residence of the Sardauna, it also symbolizes Northern unity.

Anyone who wants the unity and progress, not only of the North, but also of Nigeria – after all the whole cannot be united when its parts are divided – can only say a big Amen to my interpretation. Because then, you will have taken perhaps the most important first step in reversing the journey down the road to Kigali on which your former boss seems hell-bent in taking Nigeria.