People

People & Politics

Mohammed Haruna

As the chickens return to roost

The last time we met on these pages early September, Nasir el-Ruifai, minister, Federal Capital Territory , and the enfant terrible of the Obasanjo regime, had grabbed the headlines with his dismissal of the Senators of Federal Republic of Nigeria as fools for daring to question his management of his ministry. The senators were, of course, not amused and demanded the minister’s head. He quickly apologized, but the senators seemed in no mood to take a prisoner; they threatened to ignore or even reject some key presidential bills unless the president sacked his troublesome godson. The president, ever protective of his godson, demurred. Instead he apologized on behalf of the minister.

The rest, as they say, is now history. The minister survived, somewhat diminished after being forced, for once, to eat crow, and the senators gave the president his bills, including the controversial one against organized labour. I wrote about all this on September 8, and then took a French leave.

Since then all have been relatively quiet on the senatorial front. However, as things quietened on that front, all hell broke loose elsewhere. This time the butt of the fury has been the presidency itself. First, a little known Dokubo Asari, self-styled mujahid - which is not surprising because the word is Arabic for holy warrior and the gentleman says he admires Osama bin Laden - literally shot his way into national prominence, threatening to bring down, not just the Niger Delta, but the whole country, if his Ijaw people were not allowed to control the oil under their land. At first, the Federal Government thought it could easily call his bluff and quickly snuff him and his somewhat rag-tag army out. It soon discovered, however, the same rag-tag army that the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, the PDP, raised to rig elections in Niger Delta, similar to what it did elsewhere, had grown into a Frankenstein monster.

While Asari’s potential rebellion was exercising the mind of the presidency, former rebel leader, Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu, decided apparently to add to its woes. In the September 13 election edition of Newswatch, Ojukwu told the world that he fully endorsed the secessionist agenda of MASSOB, the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra. Did he support the MASSOB people, Newswatch asked him. “Yes. Very much so,” he answered. Not only did he support MASSOB, he said, he believed that its agenda was ultimately realizable. All it needed, h said, were “trained personnel, guns, good command charter and a willingness to fight.”

The uppity Newswatch interviewers would not let him get away with this. If success is that easy, they asked him, how come you couldn’t bring off your own rebellion in the late sixties? His answer was that the Igbos had alienated the Eastern minorities. Things, he said rather presumptuously, have since changed. “I believe a lot of people from those areas (Akwa Ibom and Cross River ) will (now) go for the Biafra option.”

Naturally the federal security agencies were not amused by this potential treason. They invited the former rebel for a chat to clarify matters. Ever the quintessential demagogue, Ojukwu manipulated the invitation to rouse Igbo anger against the federal authorities. The invitation, he said in effect, was an attempt by the federal authorities to further humiliate the Igbos and so he would not honour it. The alternative, taunted Ojukwu, was “for you to come and take me away, hand-cuffs and all”, or words to that effect.

As if all these were not enough headache for the presidency, in particular for the president himself as the general who accepted Biafra’s surrender in 1970, some leading figures from the Yoruba Council of Elders which he himself created, along with the late Chief Bola Ige, in order to undermind the hold on Yoruba politics by a somewhat hostile Afenifere, suddenly and inexplicably launched an attack on him.

Actually the YCE leadership had become critical of the president long before Asari burst on to the national stage and before Ojukwu’s taunts. The first to take a dig at the president was the late YCE’s secretary, the septugarian Justice Adewale Thompson himself. It is not clear why the very Thompson who had said repeatedly that Obasanjo was the best thing ever to happen to Nigeria would suddenly became hyper-critical of the president, but in one of his last articles in his column, Megaforce, in the Tribune of November 12, 2003, he simply went for President Obasanjo’s jugular. “Obasanjo’s democracy,” Thompson said, “is a farce.”

Not fully done with the president, the retired judge dredged up all the vocabulary he could muster to denigrate Obasanjo, yes, the very same Obasanjo, as the worst enemy of the Yoruba. “The rancorous, objectionable and gasconading statements of the president, the presidency and the ruling Peoples Democratic Party on such sensitive issues as Bola Ige, corruption, the total exclusiveness of Yoruba interest in the over-all governance of Nigeria even though the president is a Yorubaman,” said Thompson, “can no longer be tolerated by the people .... Obasanjo is Yoruba but his interest in Yoruba begins and ends in his village in Owu sector of Ogun State of the Yoruba nation.”

Coming from someone who only two months earlier had eulogized Obasanjo’s second coming as “The dawn of a new era” (Tribune June 4, 2003) and described Obasanjo as “a Yorubaman by birth but the only Nigerian in Nigeria” because of which the YCE had “coerced” him into taking up the second term assignment, Thompson’s bitter words were simply incredible.

Lately, Chief Richard Akinjide, also a leading member of YCE, seems to have taken over from where the late Thompson left off. As with Thompson before he changed tack, Obasanjo could do no wrong in Akinjide’s eyes. Until, that is, very recently. Only as recently as May last year, Akinjide was busy painting Obasanjo in superlative terms. “Obasanjo”, he once told The Guardian ( May 3, 2003 ) “is to Africa what Julius Ceasar was to Rome in those days. Julius Ceasar was a very great statesman. He was a military tactician, a general and a great author. Obasanjo has those three attributes. He is a great author and a great military tactician. So what Julius Ceasar was to Rome , that is what Obasanjo is to Nigeria , and indeed, Africa .”

Lately Akinjide’s eyes seem to have cleared and his African Caesar seems to have become the villain of the piece. “People”, he told The News (September 13), don’t trust (this) government….” Asked what he now thought of the president’s war on corruption, as the principal item in the president’s self-declared agenda, Akinjide said “The only yardstick I can use, since I am not an insider, is that of Transparency International, the global watchdog on corruption, which rates Nigeria high as very corrupt.”

Akinjide then proceeded to claim that, compared at least to Obasanjo’s administration, that of President Shehu Shagari in which he served, was as clean as a whistle. “I challenge anybody to tell me anybody who served in the Second Republic who is a rich man today,” he said. If Akinjide has paused long enough to think before throwing the challenge, he would have realized that nothing could have been easier than meeting his challenge. For he himself is probably one of the richest men in Nigeria . At least only rich men would own the lavish property in a choice part of London which he displayed inside-out in the glossy Ovation magazine a couple of years ago. But this is another matter for another day.

With Asari, Ojukwu and the YCE leadership snapping at his heels, you would think the president would refrain from anything that would only compound matters for him. But no, not this president. With all these problems crowding in on him , he chose the inauspicious eve of the 44th anniversary of our independence this month to allow a hefty 25% increase in the price of petrol, apparently confident that the public has become too strike-weary to heed the Nigerian Labour Congress’s predictable call for the rejection of the increase.

Perhaps the president does not know it, but there is palpable pain, hunger and anger in the land even without the increase. This pain, hunger and anger is the underlining reason why the Asaris and Ojukwus of this world seem to get away with their potential treasons and why leaders like Akinjide can get away with their blatant contradictions and equally blatantly false claims.

The question is how did we come to this sorry state? The short answer is two-fold. First, the president apparently saw his survival in office as more important than anything else and so he used all means, fair and foul, to succeed himself last May. Naturally every incumbent down the ladder followed the president’s example.

Second, the president seems to value the endorsement of his foreign benefactors as more important than the voice of his own people, hence his cozy relationship with the IMF and the World Bank, even as they pushed for policies that could only impoverish the people. By the same token the president also seemed to value the patronizing flattery of Western leaders like President Bush and Prime Minister Blair more than the love and respect of his own people.

In the circumstance it is easy to dismiss the president’s predicament as self-inflicted. This, in other words is to say, using the agricultural metaphour which the president must be all too familiar with as a world-famous chicken farmer, that the chickens are merely returning home to roost.

However to gloat over the president’s predicament is not going to solve anyone’s problem, certainly not those of the poor Nigerians who have been the victims of bad government policies and the dubious motives behind them. The solution lies not in gloating but in suggesting possible ways out of the problems, self-inflicted or not.

The existing problems will not disappear over night, whatever the president does. But they will not disappear at all, if he does not accept the fact that no one, absolutely no one, is indispensable to this country. Once he accepts that, he will see that it is not necessary for him to insist on choosing for Nigerians who will succeed him in 2007, like he insisted on succeeding himself in 2003. He is, of course, entitled to his own preference, but he is not, as his fixer-in-chief, Chief Tony Anenih, has said, entitled to foist it on Nigerians whether they like it or not. It is, after-all not hard to see that dictatorship of the party or of the individual, whether in khaki or mufti, lies at the heart of the problems of this country.

Second, Obasanjo must learn to accept the conclusion of his erstwhile Malaysian counterpart, Mahathir Mohammed, which is that the first love of the IMF and the World Bank and of our Western “benefactors” is profit for Western conglomerates, not our welfare. Nowhere is this so well articulated, though inadvertently so, than in a not-so-recent book by Robert Cooper, variously described as “ Europe ’s pre-eminent scholar-diplomat.” Titled The Breaking of Nations, the book, whose apt sub-titled is “Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century,” shows clearly that those of us the author describes as living in “pre-modern” nation-states, are ultimately on our own. The “modern” and “post-modern” nation states of America and Europe , he says, may intervene militarily in our pre-modern nation-states to restore order when chaos breaks out - like they did in Somalia , Bosnia and Liberia - but when such interventions fail or if the costs becomes too great, “there is no alternative but to withdrew.” How I wish the president will find time to read this little book.

Since we are ultimately on our own, our leaders must begin to look inwards for solutions to our problems. No nation is, of course, an island, but no nation will solve its own problems by seeking for solutions principally from abroad.