By Fred Edoreh

FROM time, I had never been excited about former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s personality and his letters. I am very conversant with the fact that besides training in handling of weapons, military Generals are deft contrivers of propaganda, decoy and deception with which they can win wars by simply confusing and creating disaffection among enemy lines before even firing a shot.

From the coups of Major Kaduna Nzeogwu through Generals Murtala Mohammed and Muhammadu Buhari to Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha, the sing-song that sustained them was the propaganda of corruption against the civilian class of leaders while in actual fact, the military leaders have been found to be most corrupt. If nothing else, we are still uncovering the Abacha loots even though Buhari told us he was not corrupt.

Through their propaganda and manipulations, they have had their way again and again and keep orchestrating ways to determine the political course of the nation just to serve their whims. It is no wonder that after they served as Head of State in the ’70s and ’80s, Generals Obasanjo and Buhari have been the only Presidents with complete eight years tenures in our Fourth Republic after the shenanigans with which the military truncated the First, Second and Third Republics.

After we voted in 1993, they annulled it between themselves. After Obasanjo has ruled from 1999 to 2007, he single-handedly selected President Umaru Yar’Adua for us even when we were asking questions about his health. He single-handedly imposed Goodluck Jonathan as his running mate and organised his continuation as President in 2011 after he had completed the two remaining years of Yar’Adua in disregard of the fact that it was actually the turn of the North at the time.

While we tried to settle with Jonathan, we are yet to recover from his letters against him. Besides various other unfounded allegations of corruption and Ijaw ethnic nationalism in the Presidency, he accused  him of putting 1000 political actors on a watch-list, organising a militia, “training snipers and other armed personnel secretly and clandestinely acquiring weapons to match for political purposes like Abacha and training them where Abacha trained his own killers.”

It was unfortunate that Obasanjo did not blink when he told these lies, but it was even more unfortunate that his orchestration brought Buhari into office in 2015 and the sufferings of the past seven years upon us. With his old soldier syndrome, Obasanjo has always tried to make himself the oracle of the nation, but beneath his unsolicited and meddlesome charade is the fact that has done the most damage to Nigerian democracy and governance by ensuring that it is constantly unstable.

When it mattered most, when the nation rose up in defence of the June 12, 1993 election and we looked to statesmen to stand with the people, Obasanjo returned from his foreign trip to declare that Chief MKO Abiola was not the messiah. That singular statement weakened the resolve of the people and emboldened the military to sustain the annulment. Despite the fact that Abacha, knowing full well that he could not trust him, imprisoned him, he maneouvered to present himself as the convergence of the military establishment and the civilian class in order to become President in 1999.

We saw, however, in his presidency a reckless disregard for the spirit and fineness of democracy. First, he ensured that his party, the PDP, and, by extension, the entire country were never stable or at peace. After Dr. Alex Ekwueme had midwifed the party to bring him in, his first charge was at the national leadership of the party. He ensured the resignation of Chief Solomon Lar who succeeded Ekwueme.

His offence was that he was supporting his Vice-President, Atiku Abubakar, to take over from him in the 2003 election. Next, he removed Chief Barnabas Gemade who he found a hard nut, and later Chief Audu Ogbe whom he also forced to resign both as National Chairman and Chairman of the BoT for disagreeing with him in his handling of the crisis in Anambra State.

What was the crisis? Some young friend of his, Chris Uba, had claimed that then-Governor Chris Ngige was indebted to him in emerging governor. He allegedly demanded that the governor continuously shared the State treasury with him. Suffocated by the demand, Ngige reneged at some point. The consequence was his abduction with the help of the police. 

All calls on the President to provide protection for the sitting governor and safeguard the dignity of the institution fell on deaf ears. Ogbe paid the price for daring to disagree with the arrangement and the suggestion of declaring a State of Emergency there. Having subdued the party by driving fear into its national leadership, he took his focus next on the National Assembly. The motive was not ordinary. He seemed to have determined from inception to manipulate the system to allow him to elongate his presidency beyond the provisions of the Constitution. 

The way to achieve that was to ensure a leadership of the National Assembly that will kowtow to him. This informed his mobilisation of opposition members behind Senator Evan(s) Enwerem to defeat Senator Chuba Okadigbo who was seen as a stronger and indomitable character for the position of Senate President. Enwerem was impeached shortly after for Okadigbo to succeed him for a more vibrant and independent Senate. Expectedly Obasanjo could not stomach that. He marshaled all forces at his command to pull him down in 2000, making way for Senator Pius Anyim. 

To his shocker, however, Anyim’s proposition that all who came in in 1999 should do a single term was a wide gulf from his intention for tenure elongation. Importantly, it was also suspected that Anyim’s position was to pave way for his Vice-President, Atiku Abubakar who was favoured by many of the PDP State Governors and Federal legislators, to emerge as the flag bearer in 2003, as the people yearned for a truly civilian leadership.

Anyim was surely not going to play ball but the Senate has had three Presidents, and his party has had three National Chairmen under just two years of his administration. He was just completing his first term and was heading for re-election for second term. So, he changed his strategy. Rather than remove Anyim as he did Okadigbo, he made concession for him to sail through before launching his attack. Part of it was to ensure Anyim did not get the party ticket to return to the Senate. 

He, however, gave him a foretaste of what was ahead with the demolition of his private home in Abuja. Anyim rode over the treatment and, interesting too, knew well not to bother to seek the ticket for re-election. Back in the Senate in 2003, OBJ settled for Adolphus Wabara as President. It was time for his third term agenda to get into the works in full throttle as Wabara conceived and led the process of constitutional amendment and Obasanjo allegedly slipped in the clause for tenure elongation, surreptitiously.