By Ochereome Nnanna

I DEY laugh o!” Former president, Olusegun Obasanjo used this expression to scorn his political enemies in the build-up to the general election. When on Friday November 6, 2010 his estranged former deputy, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, emerged as the consensus candidate of the Northern Political Leaders Forum (NPLF) to face President Goodluck Jonathan for the presidential ticket of the Peoples Democratic Party,PDP, OBJ mocked him.

When Jonathan defeated Atiku in the primaries that held in the Eagle Square, Abuja on January 14, 2011, reporters who were excited by the result went back to Obasanjo to sample his view. He told them: “I still dey laugh”.

With the outcome of last Saturday’s National Assembly elections where his daughter, Senator Iyabo Obasanjo-Bello failed her re-election bid the laughter stopped. Not only was his daughter stopped in her first real test of her popularity at the polls, Obasanjo reportedly lost the vote in his polling booth and ward.

Does that sound like déjà vu? The first time that Obasanjo stood for election in his life in 1999 he won to emerge the president of Nigeria but lost in his polling booth, ward and geopolitical zone (South West). Let’s correct that. The first election he ever participated in was in 1991 when he gunned for the post of Secretary General of the United Nations. He lost to Egypt’s Dr Boutros Ghali, mainly because he did not speak the French language.

After 1999, Obasanjo went on to win the 2003 presidential election as Nigeria’ sitting president. He became so convinced of his own awesome electoral abilities that he tried to change the constitution to enable him run for a third term in 2007. It was only when that was popularly rejected by Nigerians that Obasanjo picked ailing governor Umar Musa Yar’ Adua and plunked him into the presidential race willy-nilly. Yar’ Adua was clearly medically unfit for the job and was returning to the quieter atmosphere of the university classroom when Obasanjo dragged him into the race and procured a landslide victory for him.

The retired soldier seized the same moment to build a political career for his medical doctor daughter. After a brief stint in the government of Governor Gbenga Daniel as Commissioner for Health, Iyabo was given the ticket to represent Ogun Central in the Senate and easily won the election leveraging on her father’s presidential clout.

The former military head of state arranged the political setting such that most of the governors produced both within and outside his party, and many federal legislators (including those who became principal officers of the National Assembly) only got there because he gave the nod.

Obasanjo’s road to the status of the biggest godfather of Nigerian politics since 1999 started shortly after he was sworn-in. He craftily created what he called a “government of national unity”. He broke the ranks of the Yoruba mainstream, Afenifere, and brought the political leader of the Alliance for Democracy, AD, Chief Bola Ige, into his government as a minister.

He also offered employment to children of the Afenifere leaders and succeeded in extracting an undertaking from them to support him for re-election in 2003. That was the death knell for the AD because with Bola Ige murdered in December 2001, Obasanjo converted all South West states (except Lagos) into PDP states. He became the single most powerful stakeholder in the Party and even made himself its Life Leader while he took up the position of the Chairman Board of Trustees (BOT).

The Governor of Lagos State, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, a visionary and astute political leader, knew that a political handshake with Obasanjo was a death sentence, so he engaged the former president in pitched battles over the control of Lagos. Tinubu’s strategy paid off in the end. The result is that as Obasanjo’s political empire rapidly disappears that of Tinubu is expanding exponentially. In fact, Tinubu is feeding fat on the territories that Obasanjo had used his presidential power to acquire.

Some have described Obasanjo’s loss of the South West and the emergence of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) as the rebirth of the “Action Group”; while Tinubu is also seen as the new “Obafemi Awolowo”.

The South West is said to have rediscovered its essential politics, more so as the Tinubu political group has been pushing the decentralised federalism agenda of the defunct AG. However, there is already evidence that the “new AG” is studiously side-stepping the oft-derided tribal or ethnic political agenda of the old Awoists.

The ACN quickly took the bold step of picking a Northerner, Malam Nuhu Ribadu, as its presidential candidate rather than the leader of the party, Tinubu, jumping into the fray as its presidential flagbearer. Right now, even though the ACN still has its base mainly in the South West, it has not been branded as a regional or “ethnic” party, since it is generally well received in all parts of the country, mainly as a handy alternative to  former PDP members who fell out with their party.

Several reasons can be identified for Obasanjo’s inability to hold on to the political fiefdom he acquired virtually by force of arms as president of Nigeria. He is generally seen in the South West as someone who ruled Nigeria without the zone having much to show for it. He made only a few multi-billionaires from the zone.

That was all. The federal roads and infrastructure were equally as poorly maintained as those of the other parts. The second reason has to do with his quarrelsome nature. It was this trait of quarrelling with everybody he ever worked with that led to the defeat of his daughter and the imminent disaster that stares all his candidates in the face.

Having lost most of his clout in the PDP, Obasanjo has no choice but to hang around the corridors of power keeping his newfound low profile.