ABOUT a month ago, I wrote a two-parts serial titled: “A Tale of Two Puppets”. General Yakubu Gowon had just celebrated his 90th anniversary, and General Olusegun Obasanjo, who has always opposed him, made a rare appearance in solidarity with him.

It gave me an opportunity to comment on why I thought they were puppets during their times in power. Out of the two, I chose Obasanjo as the man because of his willingness to come out and speak truth to power, irrespective of the usual insults he gets from vermin in the payroll of presidents. One of my readers criticised me for apparently ignoring some of the evils that happened under Obasanjo, especially as an elected president. I was not talking about the good and bad of Gowon and Obasanjo per se. I was talking about their puppetry.

Thank God, Obasanjo is never far away from the news despite his advanced age. He was presented with another opportunity at the Chinua Achebe Leadership Forum, Yale University, New Haven in the United States of America on Sunday, November 17, 2024. He spoke on a rather juicy and provocative topic that dug directly at President Bola Tinubu’s politics and government, titled: “Leadership Failure and State Capture in Nigeria”.

Obasanjo said corruption has reached a stage where it is about to kill Nigeria. He called for Professor Mahmood Yakubu of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC’s, sack, because of his misconduct of the 2023 elections which enabled Tinubu to capture the Nigerian state.

“State capture” means that an individual or political group has succeeded in pocketing the people’s power through the systematic compromise of state institutions established to promote democratic practice, such as the electoral umpire, the judiciary, the legislature and the law enforcement systems.

For me, the call for the sack of Prof Yakubu can hardly address state capture. Obasanjo should know that even if Prof Yakubu is removed, Tinubu will still have the power to appoint his replacement (a power that Obasanjo himself enjoyed with relish). He can just pick from his agbado stable of loyalists, and the captured Senate will simply approve. The situation that faces us is irreparable. It actually calls for a new beginning, which is pregnant with meanings.

Come to think of it, Obasanjo also captured the state. He ended the North’s capacity to sponsor military coups with his retirement of 93 mostly Northern politically-exposed persons. There is no power that Tinubu has amassed that Obasanjo did not enjoy, sometimes even more. Tinubu is only 18 months in power, so we have not seen all of him.

Obasanjo became so dominant that he weeded people he did not like from his Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, of which he made himself the “life leader”. Obasanjo even tried to elongate his two-term tenure through a constitution amendment in 2006. Nigeria escaped that fate by sheer providence.

State capture is not new or strange in Nigeria. The only president who (largely) refrained from it was Goodluck Jonathan. He said he was not a lion, general or pharaoh. He appointed an INEC Chairman he did not know (Attahiru Jega) who allegedly colluded with opposition politicians to drive him out of power. He conceded when he lost his re-election bid, in deference to his mantra that his ambition was not worth the blood of any Nigerian.

Sadly, it was Jonathan’s reluctance to engage in a buccaneering state capture that his political opponents saw as a “weakness”, conspired with disgruntled elements in the PDP and flushed him out with the help of President Barack Obama of America. Till today, Jonathan is often insulted as a “weakling” for failing to engage in state capture.

Obasanjo’s presidency proved that state capture can be used for good and evil. During Obasanjo’s time, politics was bloody in a manner unmatched by any of his successors, except Tinubu as Lagos State Governor. There were so many unsolved assassinations of prominent political figures, including his own Justice Minister, Bola Ige.

A state governor, Chris Ngige, was abducted and nearly forced to resign. We have talked about tenure elongation and sack of PDP’s “unwanted” leaders from the party, which set the initial tone for its eventual downfall. Just like in his tenure as military leader, Obasanjo, the great anticorruption czar, again retired from power stupendously wealthy.

However, Obasanjo left a giant economic legacy. He paid off our Paris Club debt of $32bn. He created a booming economy with the best brains and most influential technocrats, not minding their ethnic origins. He honoured our diversity with inclusion. This is unlike Muhammadu Buhari and Tinubu who populated everywhere with their ethnic and personal loyalists of questionable qualifications. They swarm like rapacious parasites all over our commonwealth.

Obasanjo gave us GSM, built power stations, established the anti-corruption agencies, pacified the Niger Delta, rebuilt the middle class, saved billions of dollars in the Excess Crude Account, ECA, stabilised the banking system and published monthly revenue allocations to the federal, state and local governments.

Above all, Obasanjo is a true nationalist and superpatriot comparable only to Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, the doyen of Nigeria’s independence and national unity. APC megaphones like Lai Mohammed, Femi Adesina, Garba Shehu, and now ethnic profiler, Bayo Onanuga, are unimaginative propagandists who merely regurgitate the same lines they used to overwhelm Jonathan any time their flopping principals are called out.

They blame the very regimes that catapulted Nigeria to the highest GPD status in Africa for their failure while copying the templates they inherited but failing to achieve much, mainly because of extreme nepotism. The shoes Obasanjo left behind in Aso Rock are too big for Buhari or Tinubu. It is like putting “a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief” as William Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth.

What a classical Shakespearean contrast!