By Ochereome Nnanna

Fancy this. Hosni Mubarak ruled Egypt for 30 years. He is forced by popular revolt to quit and is confined to his Sharm el Sheikh resort by the new military leaders – for his own safety.

In his long years of dictatorial rule, he reportedly accumulated personal fortunes of between 40 to 75 billion dollars, thus putting him unofficially in the charmed circle of the world’s wealthiest people.

This man was a mere senior air force officer before fate thrust him into the presidential seat when his boss, Anwar Sadat, was shot by his guard at a parade.

Just as popular anger begins to simmer down, the interim military leadership propose that the new constitution should ensure that Mubarak and his family members should be paid hefty sums as gratuities for life. What would the Egyptian protesters say to this?

They would simply return to Tahrir Square in Cairo and Liberation Square in Alexandria and demand that the military must also leave.

That is how absurd the law giving our “past leaders” and their dependants life-long upkeep allowances is.

Ordinarily, people who have served their nations meritoriously should be rewarded with prebends and gratuities that will keep them in comfort until they pass on. No South African will argue against such perks for FW De Clerk, Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. No Ghanaian would go against similar provisions for former presidents, Jerry Rawlings and John Kuffour.

These were democratically elected presidents who took their countries from darkness into light and set them on the path to sustainable greatness.

In Nigeria, what do we have? Let me first of all list the names of our surviving past leaders: General Yakubu Gowon, General Olusegun Obasanjo, President Shehu Shagari, Major General Muhammadu Buhari, General Ibrahim Babangida, Chief Ernest Shonekan (even him, ha, ha!) and General Abdulsalami Abubakar.

Apart from Shagari who was democratically elected and Chief Obasanjo who was imposed on Nigerians by the military through a parody of democratic processes during his second coming, the rest came through military coups. If you ask them they would argue that they were “invited”, but they would not tell you under which article of our Constitution the invitation was offered to make it stick.

Each and every one of these fellows contributed his own quota to the destruction of the foundation and fabric of our nationhood, reducing its potentials for greatness to a cretinish contraption. Gowon led a war that restored the unity of Nigeria.

But is the country united? Are many Nigerian groups not now praising the Biafran warlord, Emeka Ojukwu, for his “foresight” in bidding for separation? Gowon failed to properly reintegrate the former Biafrans and later sabotaged our democracy by refusing to hand over on due date. He thus opened the gates for other power hungry buccaneers in military uniform to invade. Today, Gowon sits on the boards of several blue chip companies as chairman or director.

Obasanjo and his group believed that having fought the “war of unity” they deserved to eke out their own booties out of Nigeria. The Land Use Decree was created to steal vast parcels of land from the Nigeria people and deny them their rights to their resources. Soldiers became “farmers” overnight. They also became “oil magnates” commanding oil blocks and concessions.

When Obasanjo returned in 1999, he sold Nigerian commercial enterprises and today, many see him as one of the richest people in the country. This was a man who on being released from prison in 1998, came back to a near-bankrupt chicken farm in Ota.

Today, Obasanjo and Abdulsalami’s names are being mentioned in the Halliburton and other bribery scandals. Babangida is also seen to be considerably wealthy and well connected in some of the fat-cat businesses he helped facilitate while in power.

Apart from insuring their future and bloodline against poverty, these chaps ran this nation aground. They reduced this country to an entity where nothing works and progress is impossible. Under their rule a nation that was billed as one of the great potentials of the Third World in the 1960s (along with India and Brazil) is caught in the trap of failure in every material index.

In their bid to retain colonial legacies, they fuelled ethno-religious differences and sectional inequalities, while centralising economic and political control to ensure the dominance of their home region – the North.

These were the sort of policies that Northern Sudan promoted, thus leading to the disintegration of Africa’s largest political territory. Even though Nigeria has survived a civil war and many near-misses in disintegration, there are still many negative prognoses indicating that the danger is not yet over.

It is my considered opinion that Nigeria does not owe these past leaders anything. They rewarded themselves handsomely at our expenses while in power. Each of them bears the highest national honour of Grand Commander of the Federal Republic (GCFR) which they automatically “earned” by shooting themselves into power.

They are, in fact, lucky to be alive to enjoy the proceeds of their disservices to the nation. In other climes such as Ghana, Korea and China, a different fate would have awaited them.

I am of the view that only genuinely democratically elected leaders of this country deserve the kind of gratuity the National Assembly has packaged for “past leaders”, but which is now causing a rumpus as we confront the cold reality of the N1.2 billion this would take from our treasury for just one year.

The only person who qualifies in this category is President Shagari, who, incidentally, did not loot our public till. For the mere fact that he was elected under our constitution, we can (reluctantly) add Obasanjo’s name on the list. The late Yar’ Adua’s dependants can also benefit. That would be all.
For our past military rulers, the answer is: Lagbaja, nothing for you!