By Femi Orebe
“Democracy is not our problem, rather we have issues with those assigned to manage it. Any system that guarantees voting rights, regular and transparent elections, checks and balances in governance, independent judiciary and free press would ultimately deliver a better quality of life for the people, notwithstanding whether it originated from the North or South Pole”.
“Any system can be used to deliver improved economic conditions for the people where there is vision. The monarchs of the UAE conjured today’s Dubai out of what used to be a desert in fifty years. Although they were despots, South Korea’s Park Chung Hee and Indonesia’s Suharto transformed their countries. What was Obasanjo’s enduring vision for Nigeria or Africa?” –
An appropriate riposte to Obasanjo’s latest chimeric postulation, delivered by Festus Eriye – a man who was probably not yet in primary school when the military first thrust the megalomaniac on Black man’s greatest agglomeration; an opportunity the gods twice gifted him, but which he messed up grandly when he sought to transmute to a Life President – in his column: ‘Obasanjo At It Again’, The Nation, Wednesday, 22 November, 2023.
Obasanjo is now probably too far gone in duplicity, and chicanery, to profit from Eriye’s seminal words.
When former President Olusegun Obasanjo was busy writing his letter to Nigerian youths, selling the candidature of Peter Obi of the Labour party, ahead the 2023 presidential election, nary did he remember to say a word of his new talismanic ‘Afro crazy’, because all he wanted was whose presidential ears he would be pulling behind the veil. That exactly is the problem with those who believe they are wiser than King Solomon.
Iyabo, Obasanjo’s daughter, has warned us ahead when she wrote in a public letter to her father, which she promised would be her last communication with him, that whatever he cannot control, he attempts to destroy.
Now that Bola Ahmed Tinubu – a man he loathes to his innards – is President, Western Liberal democracy has suddenly become anathema that Nigeria, nay Africa, must immediately jettison. What is left of President Obasanjo if he cannot lecture us all on a daily basis is nothing.
That was why, this past week, having temporarily abandoned his love of letter writing after Nigerians had, on 25 February, 2023 shown him what they think of his self – promoting letters, he bellowed the following at a two-day event organised by the Africa Progress Group, which was held at his presidential library in Abeokuta, Ogun state:”The weakness and failure of liberal democracy as it is practised, its deliverability and its relevance today without reform as it is practised stem from its history, content, context and its practice”.”Once you move from all the people to representatives of the people, you start to encounter troubles and problems”.
“For those who define it as the rule of the majority, should the minority be ignored, neglected and excluded?
When exactly did Obasanjo know this; after Pitobi lost election?
He went on:
“In short, we have a system of government in which we have no hands to define and design and we continue with it, even when we know that it is not working for us.
“Those who brought it to us are now questioning the rightness of their invention, its deliverability and its relevance today without reform.”
Has Obasanjo ever doubted he was the greatest leader Nigeria ever had even though his second coming was supposedly under Liberal democracy even though he was at heart a dyed in the wool soldier, far worse than a liberal democrat; for as Professor Jide Osuntokun aptly put it in his column in our daily edition this past week:”the appearance of democracy from 1999 to the end of Buhari’s so – called democratic regime was a military mirage, not a democratic reality”. “Presidents like Obasanjo and Buhari remained essentially military men in democratic toga of agbada and babanriga, wielding almost total control of power and responsibility …”
Under what circumstances can such a militician then claim to be a populist as Obasanjo is faking here?
He is simply out to distract the Tinubu government because a man who tried all he could to ridicule Chief Obafemi Awolowo, claiming that he (Obasanjo) got on a platter, what Awo couldn’t all his life, never one day thought that another Yoruba man could be President of Nigeria in his life time. That simply is the reason he will like to fight Tinubu to the death. But he will more than meet his match in Ashiwaju. That much I can promise him.
I digress.
Is he asking Nigerians, and Africans in general – since nothing exites
him more than parading as an African leader – to revert to Athenian democracy of the fifth century B.C, or to simply change their mode of governance as some men change their women?
Yes, there is, indeed, an internal challenge to liberal democracy—a challenge from populists who seek to drive a wedge between democracy and liberalism, but in vain will Obasanjo present to any thinking people as a lover of the masses as nothing in his history, or antecedents in public office, point to him as such.
Nigerians already know how much value to attach to this hair brained nonsense like his other past theories that add nothing to knowledge besides self promotion which were intended to portray him as different from President Muhammadu Buhari, whose “provincialism, Fulanisation and Islamisation of Nigeria” – in Obasanjo’s garrulous words – he once sang panegyrics to.
In his garrulity, speaking to Nigerians, nay Africans, in that selfsame speach, about adopting a new model of government, as if addressing a harem, he said without blinking an eyelid:“we are here to stop being FOOLISH and STUPID”.
Is such crudity inevitable at a public event?
But Obasanjo must just show that he is Africa’s ‘numero uno’ statesman, at liberty to mess us up, if he so chooses.
Whatever good inheres in his latest proposal is completely vitiated by the fact that nothing he says, or does, is driven by altruism. There are far too many examples of that to delay us listing them.
So, rather than that sterile exercise, let me do a detour to his widely publicised letter to Nigerian youths by which he tried to, coyly, draw them into Peter Obi’s Labour party wasteland, ahead of the 25 February, 2023 Presidential election which I dealt with on these pages in the article:’2023 -President Obasanjo’s Decoys and Nigerian Youths’, of 15 January, 2023.
Therein I wrote inter alia:
“Obasanjo, who I suspect usually momentarily forgets about himself when writing about the presumed failings of others, became something of a teacher of morals in the letter, which he described as an appeal to Nigerians, especially the youth. Therein he painted a picture of Nigeria the country wasn’t under his presidency.
He also attempted to give the impression that he left power of his own volition, forgetting that the National Assembly had to rescue Nigeria from his Life Presidency gambit through an ingenious Third Term project, for which reason he dubiously convoked a National Political Reform Conference, (NPRC) in 2005 but which was angrily voted down by a diligent National Assembly.
It is apposite to state at the very beginning that Obasanjo has all the rights, human as well as legal, to endorse any presidential candidate of his choosing, but it is equally important that the Nigerian youths, to whom he specifically directed his appeal, should be adequately
informed that this is a man of incomparable hubris; a very brilliant man, who can easily sell a poke for a pig, and who, having cancelled the teaching of History in Nigerian schools has , a priori, denied the same youths, the knowledge of the past which they sorely needed in determining the truth, or falsity, of his preachment.
A past master in decoy, he had cleverly harangued the youths as follows:”My dear young men and women, you must come together and bring about a truly meaningful change in your lives. If you fail, you have no one else to blame. Your present and future are in your hands to make or to mar. The future of Nigeria is in the same manner in your hands and literally so. If for any reason you fail to redeem yourself and your country, you will have lost the opportunity for good, and you will have no one to blame but yourselves, and posterity will not forgive you. Get up, get together, get going and get us to where we should be. And you, the youth, it is your time and your turn. Eyin Lokan” (Your turn”).
Happily, the Nigerian youth know hypocrisy, and lies, when they see them, conjoined.
It is not surprising then that he has also recently taken on the judiciary, wondering as to how 3 persons, “calling themselves judges”, could overturn the votes of millions?
Nothing reveals a duplicitous Obasanjo more than that unfortunate statement, coming from a supposed statesman, except that for him, it is absolutely in character.
This is exactly what I mean about his sometimes suffering from momentary amnesia while criticising others. Otherwise, he would not have forgotten how many state governors he singularly used strong arm tactics to remove from office by deploying a minority of House members to accomplish, where the constitution prescribes two thirds majority.
Is that a man Nigerians are now expected to take seriously, seeing that the campaign season is already over, and the Labour party man he wanted, so seriously, to FEHIN GBE PON – (that is, carry on his back to victory as he once did in Ekiti state) has already accepted the Supreme court verdict?
What Nigerians should all join hands in doing is overlook his old age misdemeanours- they used to be far worse, even in morals – and pray that the good Lord grants him long enough life to make him experience a Pauline conversion before he breathes his last.