By Igboeli Arinze
I, like a number of other Nigerians woke up on New Year’s Day to read the letterman’s (President Olusegun Obasanjo as christened by Musikilu Mojeed) new year missive in which he officially endorsed a presidential candidate as well as attempted to paint a gory picture of the present state of Nigeria.
True to his abrasive nature, the ex president now turned chicken farmer embarked on his saintly admonition in an “ajoro jara joro” manner , showing no concern for the diplomacy that a former leader of any nation should exhibit or possess. Not even the outgoing administration of Muhammadu Buhari would escape his vitriolic prose, Obasanjo wrote the letter like as if he was writing to an enemy or set of enemies. Well, the presidency and a number of other interested parties , notably the All Progressives Congress, APC and the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP did respond in kind, rubbishing whatever set of narratives the new year letter had sought to pass on too millions of Nigerians.
My grouse with such a letter stems from Obasanjo’s condemnation of Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s deployment of “Emilokan” an anaphoric exclamation made while the presidential candidate of the APC addressed party delegates on reasons why he felt that the job of being president was his to fill up.
Obasanjo had in his dreary letter, condemned
Tinubu’s Emilokan declaration as the wrong attitude and mentality for the nation’s leadership and that such claims could not form the same pedestal to reinvent and to reinvest in new Nigeria.
He ended by saying that no individual could claim that he had the absolute solutions to the nation’s problems, stating that “the solution should be in ‘we’ and ‘us’ and not in ‘me’ and ‘I’.”
Hold the phone! This is the same Obasanjo who since times after the civil war has always adapted a messianic persona when it comes to matters affecting the nation.
This is the same Obasanjo who had in 1999 campaigned under the theme, “ I have done it before and I will do it again”. Obasanjo had also in 2007 told Nigerians that the election to bring in a new president from his party was a “Do or Die affair”.
What is if I may ask wrong with what many may describe as an ecstatic declaration such as Emilokan? How different is it from Obasanjo’s own slogan in 1999 or even Martin Luther King’s “ I have a Dream” speech, since the solution according to Obasanjo should be in either “we” or “us”.
Everyone knows that electoral contests, particularly in democracies such as ours come with a number of flavors; cultural, philosophical and lastly some form of individuality which when combined help portray a candidate in a particular light before the electorate. Tinubu’s declaration of Emilokan isn’t a messianic complex of any sort, neither does it transmute Tinubu into a Louis XIV nor is Emilokan similar to the declaration L’État, c’est moi (I am the state”).
In my research before writing this piece I had stumbled upon a number of campaign slogans , many corralled from the bastion of what we now have as a presidential democracy, the United States of America. Declarations or slogans such as
“Who but Hoover? “ “Happy Days Are Here Again”
“Pour it on ’em, Harry!” , “The Buck stops here” ,
“Nixon’s the One” and even Obasanjo’s friend, the Baptist Pastor Jimmy Carter’s “ I am Jimmy Carter and I am running for President “ all connote some sort of individuality, even as we all can agree that it still does not transcend into any of these persons professing to possess alone the solutions to the nation’s problems at that particular point in time.
Dotting the lines, Nigerians conversant with our political history will agree that even in our own sphere here will reveal the same trend. Our political culture is rife with such rugged individuality: Azikiwe, Awo and Kano used such , it was littered in their speeches, writings and discussions, even a number of Second, Third and Fourth Republic politicians exhibited such characteristics. Should we then translate such statements to bouts of megalomania or messianic tendencies on behalf of these persons mentioned who were selfless statesmen in their very right?
It is even correct to say that Emilokan is simply the declaration of ambition, was it not Mark Antony who in Shakespeare’s Caesar stated that “Ambition ought to be made of sterner stuff” At the time of the Emilokan declaration, Tinubu was in the ring for the APC presidential ticket, perhaps “Emilokan” was a message loaded with the sterner stuff called ambition!
When then did it become a crime for one to be ambitious? Or to declare such ambition , even in the Church we are told to declare into our lives that which we want to be or see, how then is “Emilokan” different?
Like always, Olusegun Obasanjo has always generated some form of envy unto every Yoruba man that aspires to the leadership of this country. In 1979, just days to the 1979 election he did broadcast to the chagrin of the nation that the best man (Obafemi Awolowo) may not win the election. When Abiola was outrightly denied the presidency even after the results had declared him a comfortable winner, the same Obasanjo in attempting to deflate Abiola’s quest for justice told the world that “Abiola was no Messiah”. By 1999, with Obasanjo becoming president, a presidency much erected on the grave of Abiola and the struggle for democracy, Obasanjo paid no heed to Abiola or his sacrifice and not until the emergence of President Muhammadu Buhari did we attempt to placate the ghost of June 12.
Today, it is Tinubu’s “Emilokan” declaration that is giving him sleepless nights, and in attempting to fuss over nothing, the same Obasanjo who had always taunted every Nigerian with his own pseudo messianic complex is like a fury fussing over one man’s declaration, masquerading under the cloak of patriotism and statesmanship.
For me “Emilokan” has much come to stay, we shall queue behind it come February 25th, 2023!
Culled from The Nation
