I consider
it the mother of all false alarms: Buhari lacks motivation for such an action.
But
according to Obasanjo’s June 6 statement, which was signed by an aide, the plan
arises from “(Buhari’s) desperation to frustrate, intimidate and blackmail him
into abandoning his divine mandate to protect the rights of the people to
better life and living” because of Obasanjo’s indictment of his administration
in January.
Expressing
disgust with Buhari’s abysmal performance in office, Obasanjo had urged him not
to seek re-election. Ordinarily,
Obasanjo’s status as a statesman ought to be enough for him to speak out on
matters of national interest. But having
squandered that, he now mistakes his six-month old university diploma for God’s
very mandate.
But to be
clear: in a normal polity, the prosecution—not persecution—of Obasanjo should
have started on or right after May 29, 2007 following his loss of presidential
immunity, for a truckload of offences that are now well-known to
Nigerians. But he had carefully planned
his future, handpicking those who took over from him, thereby foreclosing the
option of justice when Umaru Yar’Adua took office in 2007.
Mr. Goodluck
Jonathan, who eventually assumed the presidency in 2010, ought never to have
been anywhere near that office, considering his abysmal record as governor of
Bayelsa.
Still,
Obasanjo shoehorned him onto the express path to the presidency, and when he
made a mess of it, accused his creation of being fake and ineffective.
But he was
fake and ineffective by design: Obasanjo’s.
But Obasanjo knew if he had made the patriotic choice and allowed the
emergence of a strong and popular president, he might have wound up in prison
rather than as a larger-than-life political deity forever trying to define
Nigeria in his image.
But the man
with a “divine mandate” (to protect Nigerians) has never apologised to
Nigerians for his chicanery in manipulating the political process for his own
purposes.
Now that in
Obasanjo’s eyes, Buhari has descended to the same political lower life
form—even if so in the eyes of many disappointed Nigerians—we must remind
ourselves not only of Obasanjo’s responsibility for our suffering, but also of
other crimes as president that he has yet to pay for.
Crimes that,
despite Obasanjo’s “alarm,” Buhari has no intention of making him pay for, nor
can make him pay for.
And then
there are those that he selfishly continues to commit. In the June 6 statement,
Obasanjo said, among others, “We are currently in a nation where the Number
Three citizen is being harangued and the Number Four citizen is facing similar
threat within the same government they serve.”
This
illustrates the double standards and arrant hypocrisy by which Obasanjo has
perennially divided and cheapened Nigeria.
Bukola
Saraki may have other issues with the executive branch, but at the heart of his
troubles are allegations of false declaration of assets from his governorships
of Kwara State. Lest we forget, in 2006
during Obasanjo’s second term, 15 governors, including Mr. Jonathan, were
indicted for similar offences by his Joint Task Force and recommended for
trial.
But Obasanjo
personally rubbished the report and instead, gave Mr. Jonathan the
vice-presidency. In that light, Obasanjo
is consistent: the only side he has ever been on is Obasanjo’s, not justice.
To hear
Obasanjo tell it, however, he is clean, and he was absolved by everyone,
particularly the EFCC. On that score,
here is how he attempted to handcuff Buhari in his statement: “The same EFCC
that had conducted a clinical investigation on the activities of Obasanjo in
and out of government…would now be made to stand down the existing report that
gave Chief Obasanjo a clean bill of health on the probes…”
Obasanjo
never says that it was his EFCC that “cleared” him while he supervised it. Or acknowledge that Nuhu Ribadu, who chaired
the commission at the time, subsequently declared publicly that his government
was more corrupt than Sani Abacha’s had been.
One more
example: in April 2010, a report of the United States confirmed that over 80
Nigerians had collected bribes, some of them in the millions of dollars, from
Halliburton. They included former heads
of states, notably Ibrahim Babangida, Abdusalam Abubakar…and Obasanjo!
That report,
and a local one two years earlier by the Mike Okiro panel set up by Yar’Adua,
reached the same conclusions that are well-known to Buhari. But no Nigerian leader, certainly not Buhari,
has had the courage to do anything about it.
That is
because Buhari is not interested in fighting corruption symptomatically. His corruption does not involve people who
are as “important” as Obasanjo. He also
appears to be working with the template that leaders don’t harass former
leaders, an EFCC official describing last year an arrangement under which
Buhari will not arrest Jonathan or his wife.
Note that
until Obasanjo shot Buhari’s re-election plans full of holes, Buhari never
expressed one negative thought about him.
Only then did Buhari dig up Obasanjo’s infamous expenditure of $16bn in the
power sector between 1999 and 2007.
But it is
the same Buhari who had always vowed to recover all the funds looted since
1999. “We want to have everything back – all that they took by force in 16
years,” he swore in November 2015.
And yet, in
the three years during which he has borrowed externally by the billions, he has
not set about recovering any part of that $16bn. Or any major accounts and scandals of real
magnitude.
In other
words, Obasanjo symbolises the duplicity and emptiness of Buhari’s mythical
onslaught on corruption. Obasanjo is
proof that Buhari’s war is not blind; to investigate Obasanjo would open
Pandora’s Box.
But now
there may also be another reason why Buhari appears to be playing with parallel
agendas: his own record. In “Petroleum
Trust Fraud,” last week, Ray Ekpu, one of Nigeria’s most accomplished
journalists, explored Buhari’s sordid tenure as Executive Chairman of the
Petroleum Trust Fund under Abacha. It is
not an insult to say it diminishes Buhari considerably.
The irony of
the power-play between Obasanjo and Buhari is that, in the end, a man without a
conscience wants to be the conscience of a people. Had Obasanjo Nigeria at
heart, he had eight full years to serve Nigerians with distinction.
He didn’t
grasp the opportunity: the same test Buhari is failing as we speak.
Sonala
Olumhense
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