By Is’haq Modibbo Kawu
LAST week,  Olusegun Obasanjo, addressed the Board of Trustees of the ruling PDP and made the startling request that Speaker Aminu Tambuwal and other PDP principal officers in the House of Representatives, resign from office in two years “to allow the rectification of the party’s zoning policy truncated by the present set of officers.”

Obasanjo told the “shocked” BOT members, according to media reports in the days after the speech, that the violation of the zoning principle was a fundamental breach of the party’s constitution, which could destroy the party and other national values such as federal character, if not rectified.

What did they say about jingoism being the last refuge of a scoundrel? Well, party zoning principle, like an over-raped maiden in need of restitution, was suddenly re-invented by the former President who has suffered reversals of political fortune in recent months: the ACN political tsunami which swept away the houses of straw built upon a false foundation of rigging in the South West and the defeat of his minion in the contest for Speaker, the Hitler-like mustachioed Muraina, who had saved Obasanjo’s skin with a minority report, in the House Committee which probed contracts awards in the power sector, during his presidency.

Obasanjo, who a few months ago, was kicking a prostrate zoning policy openly in the teeth, during the bitter struggle to impose Jonathan as party candidate, now remembers that zoning was a “basic policy” of the PDP!

It is clear that he is still reeling from the defeat of a candidate he sets great store by, to become House Speaker, so he, Obasanjo, can control the legislature by proxy (note that his sidekick David Mark already controls the Senate). It was “disturbing”, according to him, that “the party’s chosen candidate scored less than 25 per cent of the votes in the PDP-controlled house”, a development which “demanded soul-searching”.

Why did Obasanjo choose the moment to speak? The despot provided the answer: “I, as the Chairman of the BOT decided to point the attention of the Party and the Government to this issue not because it affects the zone which by accident of birth I come from (Obasanjo is NOT defending his zone but his own personal agenda of survival and control!), but because it has great and grave implication for the future of the PDP as a political party, the PDP government and, by extension, for the country (it is characteristic to issue subtle threats like a spoilt brat whose loaf of bread has been forcibly taken from him!)”

To underline the seriousness of the situation, from the perspective of a wounded despot, Obasanjo added frighteningly, that “if the situation is left unattended and uncorrected, we may take it that the pillar on which PDP stands is mortally impaired. A bad precedent would have been created and, in due course more will follow and, before long, the edifice will collapse”.

The sermonizing went on and on, because he needed to build a semblance of “logic” for his absurd proposal.
Our despot even told some barefaced lies to underscore his new-found love for zoning; afterall, didn’t Winston Churchill remind politicians, that even the truth needs to be protected by a bodyguard of lies?  “Mr. President it is that policy (zoning) that brought me up as President in 1999, and brought President Yar’Adua up in 2007 and you up in 2011 (FA-FA-FA FOUL!, as Chief Zebrudaya would almost certainly have said!)”

Obasanjo lied! And this is the crux of the matter and source of the problem which led to the rebellion in the House of Representatives. Zoning was killed in a joint operation carried out by Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan. But aided by a self-serving, selective amnesia, Obasanjo suddenly re-discovered that zoning was the central philosophy around which the PDP was constructed, and by extension, Nigeria! So Tambuwal must step down in two years time, to breathe life back into zoning or PDP is doomed.

The 2002 expanded meeting of the PDP held in the Aso Villa residence of then President Obasanjo. As fate would have it, a certain Goodluck Jonathan, then Deputy Governor of Bayelsa State attended and signed on behalf of his governor, that power was to rotate between South and North. But Obasanjo had a different plan, in the shape of a third term agenda! To actualise that, he took Nigeria on a wild goose chase of a National Political Reform Conference which had as its main, if unstated objective, a tenure elongation project for Obasanjo.

He packed the Conference with sidekicks like Jerry Gana. An elaborate effort was made to manipulate the fault lines of Nigerian life: the ethno-religious and regional contradictions, to achieve the ambitions of the despot. In the end, the Conference threw out the third term agenda and despite hefty bribes, the agenda was finally buried in the National Assembly.

A wounded and vengeful Obasanjo imposed a terminally sick Umaru Yar’Adua as candidate of PDP and was rigged to power in a most obscene election in 2007.

Yar’Adua’s death opened a Pandora’s Box about zoning as a principle. Interestingly enough, two signatories of the 2002 agreement, which upheld the principle, became leaders of its subversion: Messieurs Obasanjo and Jonathan! Jonathan’s presidential ambition in April 2011, directly affronted the zoning policy and he was aided and abetted by Obasanjo. They subverted a well-honed policy; deepened bitterness and badly injured the relationships between the regions of the country.

“Zoning is dead”; “Jonathan is divine choice”, etc. EK Clarke threatened and abused everybody who opposed Jonathan’s candidacy or spoke for respect of zoning.

Deployment of threats

The deployment of threats without compunction, led to his emergence and victory at the elections. When their elaborate project of opportunism and subversion of zoning succeeded, Jonathan and Obasanjo suddenly “re-discovered” zoning as PDP’s policy. But it is too late in the day, to seek to return the Genie into the bottle!

Obasanjo’s BOT does not represent conscience in the PDP (the party unfortunately lost conscience a long time ago!). He is an interested but deluded party, whose house of cards was blown away, first by the Action Congress in the South West, and then the Tambuwal hurricane in the House of Representatives. Tambuwal will not resign in two years, because his emergence is riposte to the subversion of zoning in the first place by Obasanjo and Jonathan.

What Obasanjo needs is a potent and urgent curing of his political delusions!  He once urged Africans to use Juju to destroy apartheid in South Africa. This seems the relevant moment to ask babalawos, dibias and bokaye from around Nigeria, to prepare the most potent concoctions to rid Obasanjo of his worrisome political delusions.

Obasanjo has become a tragedy of Shakespearian proportions, because he is walking naked in the market square, deluded he is in a robe of gold! In truth, he has no home base, and has lost national influence. Obasanjo has expired politically, and we do not need NAFDAC to certify that fact!

Zaria’s harmony stores and memories of teenage years

I spent last weekend in Zaria.
I’ve always had an ambiguous relationship with that city, but the visit allowed me a wonderful stroll on the shores of hindsight. Most educated people of my generation in Northern Nigeria will remember Harmony Stores, in the Zaria of the 1970s.

It stocked the high-heeled shoes that were very much the rage of those years, and the shop had what seemed a permanent advertisement space in the New Nigerian newspaper. I went into the Government Secondary School Ilorin library practically each day, not only to read, but to also admire the different “platform” shoes which Harmony Stores advertised, hoping to purchase one, someday. The opportunity came soon after our WASC examination in 1976.

I travelled by train to Zaria and bought the flat, “three layers” that I had always longed for. I returned to Ilorin by the “Limited” train the same evening, literally walking on the moon! There was a tailor around the Saint Barnabas Church, Ilorin (along with Big Show), who seemed the “only” tailors in town; he had sewn for me a bell-bottomed, trouser in anticipation of the six-inch tall, platform shoes.

When I wore the new trousers on my shoes for the first time, I felt the trendiest individual on planet earth! Unfortunately, I was still very skinny and my mother took one long look at me on those “stilts” wondering how I expected to survive the bumpy roads I would walk with the shoes. In my mind, I pitied her inability to “understand fashion” which my new shoes expressed.

But in the next few weeks, I went through a twisted ankle here, a painful toe there and before long, I began to question the wisdom of those shoes. I cannot quite remember how I was eventually weaned off the platform shoes, but everytime I think of fashion items, I wonder when one trend comes to reign and then fades off.

Harmony Stores has long disappeared and the memories of its dominant place in the fashion history of Northern Nigeria have similarly faded.  Very few people in Zaria will even recall that there once was a store in their city which took advantage of the oil boom of the 1970s; the presence of a university in the city and its cosmopolitan composition and the accessibility offered by the railways to become arguably the most successful fashion store in Northern Nigeria, Harmony Stores. If we wait long enough, everything changes.