From Benin To Minna: Obasanjo Back To His Usual Meddlesomeness

By Femi Orebe

Forever believing he is still in the office he kissed bye as far back as 2007 – some 17 years ago – and always seeing himself as the Father of the Nation, former President Olusegun Obasanjo this past week carried his bag of tricks all the way to Minna, the Niger state capital, to felicitate, as his spokesperson said , with a man he never ceased to traduce in, and out, of office. President Obasanjo never ceases to amaze; poignantly reminding one of ‘Ajala Travel All Over The World’ -to reference the scintillating travels of the late Olabisi Ajala (1934 -1999).

As is now very obvious to Nigerians, President Obasanjo apparently has never had enough peace of mind, post office, not to be tempted into wanting to remind us all that nobody loves Nigeria as much as he does.

All that in spite of his many sins against Nigeria: his do or die election of 2007, his ‘Fehin gbe pon’ intrusion into the Ekiti governorship election of the same year,

as well as in what horrible shape he left the country at his exit after the National Assembly put paid to his Life presidency gambit.

Here is a man whose eldest daughter, the cerebral Dr Iyabo Obasanjo, wrote to as follows in her letter of December 16, 2013 which was later made public:”This is my last communication with you, for life. I pray Nigeria survives your continual intervention in its affairs”.

If that is not a complete repudiation of a father by a daughter, I’d like to be told what it is.

Governor GeorgeAkume of Benue state, as he then was, also wrote about Nigeria’s longest serving Head of state.

He wrote in:’Obasanjo’s Grandstanding on Restructuring'(16 March, 2020):”I remember my discussion with him during his visit to Benue State, preparatory to the PDP Jos Convention of 1999 when I referred to what Ken Saro Wiwa wrote about him in his book ‘On a Darkling Plain’.

“… but this comment by Ken contradicted sharply with what Gen. James Oluleye said of him in his autobiography that he was a bundle of tricks”. When I brought that aspect of the book to his attention, he had a good laugh, and told me that Nigeria is a structurally complex, and socially pluralistic, country where no leader, WITHOUT TRICKS, can survive”.

Concerning Akume’s lament to him about PDP’s very poor showing in the South West, Ogun state in particular, Akume wrote:”He regretted that the Yorubas were making a costly mistake about secession. He would not be involved in such a tragic event. The Yorubas, he said, would be GOADED by the Igbos to make a tragic move with cataclysmic consequences. The Igbos would then DITCH them, join the North and DESTROY them in a REVENGE offensive”.

Now how many Igbos would ever believe that their friend, Peter Obi’s godfather, could ever describe them as being so treacherous?

But that is not all as my co – columnist on this stable, Idowu Akinlotan, has severally weighed in on our former President’s antics but the relevant one here is his comment of 8 January, 2023 on Obasanjo’s endorsement of Peter Obi for the 2023 Presidential election.

Akinlotan wrote:”Contrary to what many supporters of ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo think, those who chide him for his unusual and intemperate letter endorsing the presidential candidacy of Labour Party’s Peter Obi are not doing so because they regret his refusal to support their own candidates. He has the right and pleasure to support anyone he wishes, regardless of the bad choices he has made over decades. What the complainants quarrel with is the tone of the endorsement letter, its instigation rather than logical persuasion of the youths, and the former president’s unbelievable deployment of mediocre philosophy of leadership.

He is free to support anyone he likes, whether his critics like it or not, but it was expected that he would do it with the dignified poise of a leader, the decorum associated with great leadership, and with balanced, even-tempered and unassailable logic. He had all of 85 years to develop and hone that poise and maturity, and over 11 years as head of state and president to acquire the experience needed to set the right example for the nation. Now, all those years seem a horrible waste.

Somehow, as is customary of him, his letter of endorsement was full of hysteria: hysteria against his imaginary foes, hysteria against his successors in office, and hysteria against his compatriots and God whom he sometimes gives the impression is permanently at his beck and call.

Mr Obi, a sophist like no other, probably deserves Chief Obasanjo’s support. The two sophists are thus obsessed with specious reasoning, and roundly complement each other. For whatever the endorsement is worth, no one should begrudge the controversial former president from backing Mr Obi’s candidacy. It was perhaps too far-fetched for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, Atiku Abubakar, to expect Chief Obasanjo’s endorsement. Too much had soured in their relationship to realistically expect even a grin from the ex-president. Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) would have been unable to fathom any endorsement from Abeokuta. That left the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, Ahmed Bola Tinubu, and LP’s Mr Obi to vie for the bilious old man’s attention. It would have been incongruous for the APC, as the party knows very well, to receive the nod from their old and unforgiving antagonist and sparring partner.

All the leading candidates for the 2023 presidential election had visited Chief Obasanjo in Abeokuta, more as a courtesy than necessity; but it would be hard to gauge what value they would have attached to his endorsement had he deemed them worthy of the gesture. Even Mr Obi who finally got the nod has remained nonplussed. He is uncertain what to do with the endorsement, especially seeing that the repeated hurrahs he had got from the politicised churches of Nigeria had not given his candidacy the needed boost. The streetwise LP candidate knows by instinct that Chief Obasanjo is long past his expiry date. In fact, much more, he knows that all that is left of the phlegmatic old warhorse from Abeokuta is his nuisance value. But better not to draw the ire of the sleeping bear: if he cannot be for you, at least make him indifferent to you. That was why Alhaji Atiku and Asiwaju Tinubu visited him. Both men were too smart not to know where Chief Obasanjo leaned; but they thought they could lessen the pungency of his vitriol. Alas, the former president remains as incandescent and malignant as ever”

So why all this background history of ‘the Father of the nation’?

It is a well known fact that President Bola Tinubu has no political godfather, not Obasanjo, not Babangida nor is it Abdulsalam and none of them is being propitiated by the Villa like he were a god.

Naturally, therefore, he has earned their ire, and while the last two can bide their time, no, not Obasanjo, the Yoruba top gun, who considers himself the greatest thing to have happened to the Yoruba race since sliced bread, and who is, therefore, irredeemably angry that God allowed another Yoruba man to emerge President in his lifetime. Without a doubt, he will hold that angst to heart till his entire life.That exactly was why he raced all the way to Minna straight from Benin city.

Obasanjo is not one to let the present crises bedevelling the country, mainly economic and insecurity, not forgetting the high cost of living, pass without wanting to pay Tinubu back for the outlandish shellacking he and his candidate got at the elections in 2023. No, not when there are willing associates ensconced on the hills of Minna and an Atiku Abubakar that is never too far away, ever spewing nonsensical diatribes.

However, the former President has not been bold enough to tell Nigerians his mission to Minna, except to reach into that bag of tricks and tell us he went there to celebrate, mid – September, a man whose birthday was in August.

But he must try a little more to successfully spin this as Nigerians are no fools.

The Nigeria media too will not let him get away with this outright decoy. So snippets are already coming out of what the serpentine Minna meeting was all about.

Long story cut short, their meeting, to which General Aliyu Gusau was not, unexpectedly invited, was aimed at making a shortshrift of the Tinubu government, if not now, then in 2027, using the current economic hardship as cover.

But they must, indeed, be very poor students of history.

Not many could have forgotten Obasanjo’s spirited effort to abort the 2023 Presidential election long after voting has ended. He actually wrote one of his usual hate- filled letters to President Muhammadu Buhari, ferociously questioning the integrity of the election.

I invite interested readers to please Google: Obasanjo and Charlie Boy on the 2023 Presidential election to listen to the telephone discussion in which the former President told his ‘son’ to go and OCCUPY Nigeria so as to, unceremoniously, abort the election. How very quickly he forgot the history of elections under his watch; elections he called ‘do or die?

But if he forgot, Google never forgets. Below, therefore, is a portion of the UK Department for International Development’s (DFID) report on the 2007 Presidential election conducted under President Obasanjo, the result of which the chief beneficiary, President Umar Yar Adua, publicly condemned. It reads:”

The Nigerian elections of April 2007 were judged by most observers to fall a long way short of the standard for credible, free and fair elections and is considered the worst in Nigeria’s post-independence, electoral history”.

“The reports of domestic and international observers provide confirmation that all stages of the elections were fundamentally flawed”.

“Widespread malpractice occurred throughout all stages of the elections, with failures in the late delivery of voting materials, late commencement of polls in most of the states, ballot box stuffing, allocation of votes where voting did not take place, falsification of votes, deliberate denial of election materials to perceived strong-holds of the opposition, and other such actions”.

“Moreover, the current ruling party fixed the results in advance, even for local government, in all but a handful of states as part of an intra-elite deal, accidentally leaking (accurate) ‘results’ to the press a few days prior to the election. Some states, such as Rivers, Ogun,

Oyo, and Ekiti, saw vote totals far above the number of registered voters. 2007 broke from 2003 in going from ‘competitive rigging’ to a vote-allocation, or ‘direct capture”

“Elections were, as well, marked by extraordinarily high levels of political violence.

55 people died on the day of the election and unofficial estimates for the whole electoral period were 200 deaths nationwide”.

Above is a true picture of all the elections which took place during President Obasanjo’s administration just as the one that saw him to office in 1999 was no exception.

That is the man who wanted the 2023 Presidential election cancelled because of infractions but, in reality, because Peter Obi, his candidate, who placed third overall, did not win.

It is a crying shame to see President Obasanjo go this low given the fact that a time was when as a Nigerian, one was proud to see him being counted among world leaders.

Unfortunately, that was then.