08 Nov 2008 |
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Obasanjo On Obama: two-faces and a forked tongue Every Nigerian ought to read “Obama’s election and the needed change” in The Guardian of October 6, 2008. It is painful to read, but it was Aristotle, remember, who taught that “We cannot learn without pain.” The article was penned by Olusegun Obasanjo. This is a man that had two chances to serve his country, two chances to institutionalize lasting reforms, two chances to set the best of Nigeria to work for Nigeria, two chances to be a respected statesman. Two chances, 20 years apart. What did he do? He served himself, violated human and political rights, and left his country poorer. In the end, his biggest achievement was not in setting Nigeria alight with change, but in superintending duplicity in government and unscrupulousness in politics. This week, he watched a 47-year old black American win a historic election in the United States. How did he react? He drafted a rambling, self-serving sermon for a newspaper. For a man who claims not to read Nigerian newspapers, he deprived himself of any rest in order to get his words into a Nigerian newspaper. “The feeling of change that Senator Obama engendered through his campaign for the White House represents a significant theme of change we have all aspired and fought for in different areas, regions, cultures and historical times,” he said, pompously. “The desire for change has never been the question nor has it ever been in question. It is the extent, the range, the tone, the quantity, the quantum and the sustenance of change that has always been the question.” I beg your pardon? Obasanjo is the antithesis of change. He hates to see younger people, particularly if they disagree with him. He hates to see women, if they are not doing his bidding. He hates to hear an idea that is different from his. He hates to see Nigeria move forward. He hates to see change, if, by that word, we mean something that is different from what he wants. Notice how he says that “It is the extent, the range, the tone, the quantity, the quantum and the sustenance of change that has always been the question.” It is of this kind of obfuscation that Obasanjo is made. Change is for the better. He came into office in 1999 through widely-rigged elections. In 2003, as he swore that the Peoples’ Democratic Party would rule for ages, he brought rigging out of smoke-filled rooms into the open and attempted to make it respectable. That is change? For the better? In 2007, having failed to manipulate the law to enable him remain in office, he sabotaged even his own party and handpicked the presidential candidate of his party. How is that change? In office, the entire world saw Obasanjo as he ruled, not like a democrat, but like a tyrant. Everybody knows about his disdain for the rule of law: remember how he gladly accepted illegal donations to the 2003 elections donations and the Obasanjo Presidential Library. Andy Uba, the presidential aide, used the presidential jet to launder money; Obasanjo accepted gifts from the proceeds. Change? In office, Obasanjo found no conflicts setting up private institutions to compete with those of the federal government. He put his Bells University over the University of Ibadan, and his private secondary schools ahead of his government’s. Change? At Transcorp, he helped himself to millions of shares. In his cabinet, he was his own Minister for Petroleum, and he treated the Petroleum Trust Development Fund (PTDF) as though it was his private trust fund for the benefit of his favored. From PTDF accounts at Equatorial Trust Bank and Trans-International Bank (TIB), this man who wants Obama to remember him bought expensive cars for women, and buses for his private school. Change? While Obasanjo was in office, Nigeria was able to recover billions of US dollars that had been looted by his jailor, Sani Abacha. But Obasanjo never accounted for a penny. He claimed a war against corruption but he personally took the menace of graft to new highs. Under him, in his own party, men like James Ibori and Peter Odili and Lucky Igbinedion flourished not only as the new faces of conspicuous corruption, but because they were having so much fun they never remembered to govern. Like Obasanjo, their hero, it was power without accountability. Obasanjo ran the PDP as though the mission was to ruin Nigeria. Reform? In 2004, and with great fanfare, Obasanjo launched a phantom economic reform programme he called the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS). This one-pill cure, he said, would reform the government and its institutions; develop the private sector; implement a social charter for the people; and re-orientate the people with an enduring African value system. He boasted that NEEDS would create one million jobs within nine months, and a total of seven million by the time he left office in 2007. It would raise Nigeria's Gross Domestic Product from 4.6 percent in 2003 to 7 percent in 2007; lower inflation from 11 per cent in 2003 to 9 percent in 2007, and raise electricity generation from 4000 megawatts in 2004 to 10,000 in 2007. The NEEDS cheap trick disappeared within months and Obasanjo never mentioned it again. Before our eyes, it became the most spectacular economic policy bust Nigeria had ever seen. And while Obasanjo enriched himself, poverty and unemployment grew, and grew and grew. It got so embarrassing that he asked the civil service for a re-definition of poverty; he did not want to hear that “nonsense” about 70 per cent of Nigerians living on less than one dollar per day. He said he did not know any family that did not know what it would eat. Change? If Obama’s mantra was “Yes We Can,” Obasanjo’s was “Yes You’re Nothing.” He was the only wise animal in the jungle. For him, you were doubly stupid if you happened to be younger. Even Chinua Achebe, Nigeria’s internationally-revered writer, was insulted by Obasanjo in 2004 when he objected to the offer of a National Award. Spokesman Femi Fani-Kayode had a few choice words for Prof. Achebe from the president: "If you feel that your country does not deserve to honour you, then we believe you certainly do not deserve your country.” In Nigeria, Obama would never have made it past the eye of the needle of Temperance Farms. This does not mean there are no younger people known to Obasanjo. But they have to be people willing to prostrate 24 hours a day, shut their mouths, and run errands. They have to be people without an independent thought in their heads; if they were men, they also had to lack life in their loins. Obasanjo is speaking of change? This is a man whose hero was the late Lamidi Adedibu, a man who had ballot boxes in his Ibadan home weeks before the 2003 election. Instead of ensuring prosecution, Obasanjo told the nation to leave the man alone. This explains why he speaks about “the extent, the range, the tone, the quantity, the quantum…of change.] Little wonder Obasanjo’s annual list of National Honorees was loaded with the Adedibus of Nigeria. Obasanjo’s was not a Nigeria capable of acknowledging talent, let alone genius. His response to excellence was to destroy it because of his deep-seated complex. A people cannot thrive under a temperamental, arrogant and self-centred leadership, and Obasanjo is proof. A people cannot thrive in a desert of standards or scruples or principles. A people cannot rise when they are offered double standards, two faces and forked tongues. What Obasanjo should have penned is an apology to a nation that he has denied truth, oxygen and manure for an entire generation while he enthroned mediocrity. And if Obasanjo wants to know who Obama really is, Obama is Obasanjo on trial. But if Obasanjo wants forgiveness, he will not find it in Chicago or in Washington DC. His reputation traveled too far ahead of history, and the presidential jet.
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