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If anyone needed further proof that it’s
hard, if not impossible, to find a
better example of someone who hardly
ever practices what he preaches than our
dear ex-president, General Olusegun
Obasanjo, the man himself provided it
two weeks ago. This was on January 21 on
the occasion of the 7th Trust
Annual Dialogue which he chaired.
The theme this year was “The African
Woman and Politics.” To discuss it was a
very formidable line-up of four of
Africa’s leading women politicians,
namely South Africa’s Winnie Mandella.
Ghana’s Samia Nkrumah, and our own Kofo
Bucknor-Akerele and Naja’atu Mohammed.
With a line-up like this you would
expect the following day’s newspaper
headlines to be dominated by what the
panel had to say on the theme. Instead
it was the chairman’s rather unkind, but
predictable, cut against his erstwhile
protégé, the ailing and besieged
President Umaru Yar’adua, that grabbed
all the headlines.
The bedridden Yar’adua , he said in
response to what looked suspiciously
like a choreographed attack from the
audience against him for his role in
foisting a sick president on the country
in 2007, is honour as well as morally
bound to step aside.
“If,” he said, “you take up an
appointment, a job, elected, appointed
whatever it is and then your health
starts saying ‘I will not be able to
deliver’, to satisfy yourself and the
people that you are supposed to serve,
then there is the path of honour and the
path of morality. And if you don’t know
that then you don’t know anything.”
Then in apparent self-exculpation he, in
effect, swore to God that he never knew
Yar’adua was not healthy enough to
withstand the rigours of the highest job
in the land. “What I need to say,” he
said, “is that nobody picked Yar’adua so
that he will not perform. If I did that,
God will punish me.”
To which someone in the audience, a lady
I think, heckled “Who gave you the right
to impose any one on us?” or words to
that effect. It is highly instructive
that the former president chose to
ignore this more fundamental aspect of
the constitutional crisis which his
imposition of Yar’adua on the country in
2007 has plunged the country into.
The answer to this more pertinent
question is all too obvious; the man
gave himself the right. Nine days before
the famous - or infamous, depending on
which side you were on - Southern
Leaders Forum in Enugu on December 19
2005, a forum which had Obasanjo’s
imprimatur all over it and during which
all manner of abuses were heaped on the
North for its insistence on power shift
to the region in 2007, the man told the
ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP),
Convention that as its leader he should
be conceded the sole right to interpret
its policy of power shift.
“The party,” he said, “must resist
efforts by some individuals or groups to
use their pedestrian understanding of
power shift and power rotation to hold
the country to ransom...When the time
comes, they should accord me, as the
leader of the party, the opportunity to
interpret our policy and principle of
power shift to suit the occasion which
will definitely consider the seeming
agitation from the North of the
country.”
When the time eventually came following
the defeat, mercifully, of his Third
Term agenda, the man did not wait for
the party to concede the right to him.
He simply usurped it by imposing new
rules on the party which effectively
reserved the chairmanship of the party’s
Board of Trustees (BOT) to himself. He
also transferred virtually all the
powers of the party’s executive council
and congress to himself.
There was hardly a whimper of protest
from many of those who have since found
their voices in blaming the man for the
crisis Yar’adua’s illness has plunged
the country into.
But I digress, somewhat. The subject
this morning is not who gave the man the
sole right to choose who was to succeed
him, pertinent as it is. The subject is
the moral right he has to pontificate
about honour and morality. His dismal
record as a man whose word has hardly
ever been his bond – ask the group of
Northern leaders who thought they had a
deal with the man to be president for
only a term back in 1998, or
Afenifere, which thought it had a
deal with him to allow the incumbent
Alliance for Democracy governors in the
South-West a second term in return for
supporting his re-election in 2003, or
even members of the Yoruba Elders Forum
which he created to undermine
Afenifere but dumped as soon as it
had served its purpose - shows clearly
that it was rich, very rich, of him to
preach honour and morality to Yar’adua,
or in deed to anyone.
To begin with, it is dishonourable and
immoral for a leader to disown
responsibility for the consequences of
his actions, sometimes even for those of
his subordinates who take their cue from
his body language. Here the contrast
between him and former military
president, General Ibrahim Babangida,
his bete noire, couldn’t be
sharper; whereas Babangida has
consistently accepted full
responsibility for the controversial
“June 12”, Obasanjo has chosen to disown
his role in bringing about the Yar’adua
presidency.
As chief law enforcement officer of the
country, President Obasanjo had all the
intelligence information on all of the
country’s VIPs at his figure tip. By the
time Yar’adua became governor of Katsina
State in 1999 it was an open secret that
he had had a kidney transplant in 1986.
And as any medical student would tell
you, organ transplants have an average
span of 10 years, depending on the
organ. After that chances are it will
begin to malfunction.
In the case of Yar’adua, it was a
not-so-open secret that in his first
four years as governor he used to travel
to Kano weekly for dialysis. During his
second term, Borini Prono, a major
Italian road construction firm in the
state, offered to build a state of the
art dialysis centre in the main hospital
in the state capital. This was
eventually built by Julius Berger,
Nigeria’s most well-connected
construction firm.
As president, Obasanjo cannot say he did
not know all this. If he didn’t then he
was obviously not fit to be president.
It is not clear whether Yar’adua used
the facility but he had stopped his
regular trip to Kano long before its
construction. This could explain his
infirmity by the time Obasanjo, for
obviously cynical reasons, decided to
inflict a decidedly weak PDP
presidential ticket on the Nigerian
voters.
Not for the first time in his
military/political career the man has
tried to disown a script because it has
not worked out exactly as he had hoped.
The last time was, of course, his
infamous Third Term agenda which he
disowned no sooner than it collapsed
around his ears. “If,” he said at the
time, “I had wanted a third term, I
would have prayed for it...and God would
have given it to me. I know this because
there is nothing I wanted that God did
not give me.”
Before the Third Term debacle he had
called on God to judge between him and
his then estranged party chairman, Chief
Audu Ogbe, as to who had lied about the
crisis that was precipitated by an
attempt to forcibly remove Chris Ngige
as the PDP governor of Anambra State in
late 2004.
“I stand before God and man and my
conscience,” he said on that occasion,
“to defend every measure that I have
taken everywhere in Nigeria since I
became president and I will continue to
act without fear or favour or
inducement. And it does not matter what
is sponsored in the Nigerian media, in
particular the print media.”
This time, however, he did not stop at
merely calling on God to be a false
witness. He also invoked His wrath upon
himself if his motive in forcing
Yar’adua on Nigerians in 2007 was not
for their best interests.
Obasanjo is entitled to his
self-delusion that God dotes on his
every whim and caprice but as his
teacher as a recent divinity student of
the country’s Open University may have
told him, no one ever invokes God’s name
in vain.
Re: Jang, the
media and the genocide in Jos this time
Jang, the media and the genocide
on the Plateau this time
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