In his latest open letter to the nation, the former president attempts to cut a fine profile in marketing himself to the young demographic, whom he singled out as the target of his message, as a longstanding patriot. But his remembering of our political history, especially the periods in which he was in charge of the affairs of the country, was excessively filtered. There are events he wouldn’t want the young partisans to remember correctly and that probably explains his clever reminder that nobody is a saint.
There’s no Nigerian, dead or alive, who’s had the opportunities Obasanjo was given to overturn the fortune of this country. They can’t be summarised in a single think-piece. He was there in two strategic periods, and that his transgressions aren’t under scrutiny shows how far his successors have also veered off. Whether as a military head of state or a democratically-elected president, Obasanjo’s fingerprints are on most of the behemoths tormenting Nigeria today, and there are interesting positions in his letter that shouldn’t be overlooked by this hero-seeking generation.
In endorsing the Labour Party presidential flag-bearer, Peter Obi, which is a democratic right for which he owes nobody an apology, Obasanjo attributed the decision to his wariness of “‘Emi Lokan’ (My turn) and ‘I have paid my dues,” which are utterances by known but unstated presidential contenders. This well-aimed shot should’ve ordinarily made him a hero to this generation, only that Obasanjo pioneered such an audacious and entitled presidential bid, and it was memorably inglorious.
Obasanjo left Abacha’s prison in 1998 a defeated man and, by his admission, broke, but rescued by foreign donors and a segment of the nation’s political elite. He was seen by this class as the right person that could appease the South West, who were still hurt by the annulment of the 1993 presidential election and the undeserved imprisonment of the winner, M. K. O. Abiola, who died in prison in what seemed like a carefully-designed conspiracy. But Obasanjo was not the choice of his people. The North, however, stood by him and gave him that chance to be the architect of modern Nigeria in 1999.
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Seven years later, with his second tenure coming to an end, Obasanjo embarked on a war with Nigerians. He was now the commander-in-chief, and no longer that political prisoner who said he could neither afford his children’s tuition fees nor upkeep. He acquired sit-tight syndrome, a pandemic that generations of patriots had died and suffered to stop, and deployed the resources of the state to bribe and compel the influential politicians to change the constitution and allow him to remain in office beyond the two elected four-year terms.
Obasanjo “invested” billions of taxpayers’ money to fight, hound and ostracise every politician that stood against his tenure elongation, including his Vice President, Atiku Abubakar. Even though he infiltrated the National Assembly to procure certain lawmakers to push for a dubious constitutional amendment in his favour, a section of them fought back, and that was the biggest threat to Nigeria’s democracy to date. Defeated, Obasanjo made sure that the politicians who opposed his bid never returned to the National Assembly in 2007, and he kept his promise. He had the money, the state’s money, to mastermind any size of electoral malpractice as he did in rigging himself to power four years earlier. The 2003 presidential election, which got Obasanjo re-elected, was evidently the most fraudulent in Nigeria.
But foiling hostile politicians wasn’t even Obasanjo’s worst infraction in 2007. It was his political sabotage. When it was certain that he had been checkmated, he resolved to spite his most competent and fit potential successors by settling for Katsina State Governor, Umaru Musa Yar’adua, a candidate he handpicked to remote-control from his farm in Ota after handing over. Yar’adua was his former deputy’s younger brother who had been reported to be medically challenged and even spent days at hospitals abroad that he was rumoured dead during the campaign, but he was Obasanjo’s preferred puppet. Their relationship backfired when Obasanjo began to show his hand from Ota, and then came the ill health, Obasanjo played down when he imposed him on Nigeria, leaving Nigeria at a constitutional crossroads that pushed it to the edge.
In their book, Too Good to Die: Third Term and the Myth of the Indispensable Man in Africa, Chidi Odikalu and Ayisha Osori documented that about $500 million was illicitly spent on Obasanjo’s failed third-term bid, and that the fund was withdrawn from the nation’s Excess Crude Account, which could’ve been easy because the former president had sole control over the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) during his reign.
So, it’s interesting for those of us who witnessed Obasanjo’s second tenure as politically conscious adults to watch him attempt to mount a moral high horse as some self-sacrificing patriot. The same man who fought the legislature aggressively to seek constitutional backing for his desperate third-term bid, and even deployed state resources to fight the disagreeing lawmakers, is lecturing Nigerians on the morality of self-advertised candidature. This is the extent of amnesia we must never condone.
While “Emi Lokan,” for instance, is an individual’s reminder to a political party in which he had invested extensively, those who witnessed third-term politics know it was cruder, a state-destabilising antithesis to patriotism. The politicians Obasanjo reviled in his letter didn’t break any law by merely admitting that they had paid their dues or that it was their turn to lead. We are in a democracy and it’s left for Nigerians to decide whether they are what they claim to be. None of them has attempted to subvert the constitution as the self-styled patriot did.
Obasanjo also noted in his letter that “One ridiculous point that has been touted to justify unjustifiable appointments and selections is ‘competence’. In truth and in reality, genuine competence can be found in any region or section of Nigeria…” I wonder if he was aware of this ubiquity of competence when he paraded himself as Nigeria’s sole messiah in 2006, and whether this was his post-office clarity.
Even in appealing to the youths to see that “no human being is an angel let alone a messiah” in the letter, Obasanjo draws our minds to his third-term spectacles. There’s nothing that spells out messiah complex like Obasanjo’s life, in and out of office, and he needs a life-sized mirror into which he must stare unblinkingly to come to such a realisation. The former president reserves the right to endorse whomever he prefers, but we must never be unfaithful to our history—and our unfiltered recollection of his critical roles.
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