Mariam Mariam
In January 2006, I held a meeting with Chief Tony Anenih in his residence at Asokoro. The meeting had been brokered by the Director-General of the National Orientation Agency (NOA), Alhaji Idi Farouk. We had been visiting in London at the same time, had dinner at a Chinese restaurant when I pointed out that I will someday like to write about Chief Tony Anenih’s imposing stature within the intrigues-filled recesses of the PDP.
Ever the conciliator, Idi Farouk told me that he knew that I had very negative impressions of Chief Anenih, but he felt that whatever I was going to write about the man and his politics would be enriched if I held at least one meeting with him. He took the next step of volunteering to facilitate the meeting when we returned to Nigeria. I did not think very much about the event except that Malam ldi Farouk did not forget the promise he except that Malam ldi Farouk did not forget the promise he. I was strolling on my street one of these evenings when a call came from him that Chief Tony Anenih had consented to a meeting that evening a vehicle was on the way to pick me. Chief Anenih’s house was a typically opulent setting, befitting of a top leader of the nation’s ruling political party and he was at the height of his mythology as Obasanjo’s very close confidant, the man who beats party members into line, as ‘Mister Fix-it’. Chief Anenih really looked the part, but I am jumping ahead on myself somewhat. The house had a ‘platoon’ of mobile policemen guarding this very important man, and as we was entered the first living room/reception area, there was a group of party people waiting to be received in audience by the Chief.
Fortunately, this was not where we were kept to wait our turn to be announced to his presence. We went into a bigger living room that was demarcated into two parts. We sat in the first part from where we could see Mister Fix-it holding court in the second section of the living room. A motley crowd of ministers, senators (including one from one of the southwest states who prostrated flat on his belly to greet the chief much later during our meeting with the chief), party men and a few prominent men. Even Doctor Olusole Saraki dropped in to see Chief Anenih, while we waited for our turn to be received in audience by the frail-looking old man whose reputation as a genuine master of Nigerian political intrigues looms large on the nation’s political firmament.
After about fifty minutes of waiting, I finally got the opportunity to sit close to Chief Anenih. I remember thinking to myself, given the warm manner he received me, and the mini-charm offensive that he launched, charm offensive that he launched, that there was nobody on earth who liked to be seen as a bad person. Chief Anenih took his time (and he spoke with me for two hours and forty-nine minutes)to talk about some of the more controversial issues associated with his name: the role he played in the events of June 12; the Abacha years; the money he was said to have collected to fix Nigerian roads as minister of works (he assured me that he received far less than the 300 billion naira he is alleged to have expended on roads that Obasanjo said shamed him); the infamous “no vacancy” statement; his role in the third term agenda (he told me that there was nothing like third term) and the unfolding bitter dispute between Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar (be said that Atiku should level up with “his master”, in his words and boasted that if Obasanjo told him that Atiku was the candidate of his choice for presidency, Atiku “can go to sleep”, because it would be delivered to him; but he must level up with “his master”).
Chief Anenih was a good study in the basic elements of politics in a neo-colonial society, which was described in the Nigerian setting as ‘prebendal politics’ of the worst variety. Within the .entrails of prebendalism, party barons control the levers of power because it is the access to lucre, to influence, and the direct route from nothingness to the heights of fortune. The chief lived the part because, within the near three hours that I sat through this explanations, he received telephone calls from governors and ministers and was expecting that day to receive the leaders of the National Assembly, while he also told a governor on phone to ensure that his entourage to visit with him included the deputy governor and the party leader of the state. I could not decipher which state it was.
If there was a motif which ran through the interaction with Chief Tony Anenih that evening, it was loyalty to Obasanjo and the sense that he is playing whatever role within the PDP and by extension the nation’s political landscape, because that ‘was in the best interest of Obasanjo. I came away from the meeting with Chief Anenih understanding the mutually reinforcing content of the relationship between these two individuals, who frankly, were reviled by the majority of the Nigerian people because of the again roles they have played in the underdevelopment of Nigeria.
I have done this narration today because the meeting with Chief Anenih came to my mind when I was informed by Lanre Arogundade of the and International Press Centre, Lagos, in Accra, Ghana, that Obasanjo had organised a coup against Anenih and had removed the chief as the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the PDP. When I read the Nigerian papers later in the day, it became clear to me that an operation had been conducted by Obasanjo with military precision to destroy the political base of his erstwhile enforcer. It is a clear testimony of the expediency which lies within the entrails of the cloak-and-dagger world of politics. It was Eric Osagie of THE SUN newspaper who had said that a the monster which lies at the heart of Obasanjo’s politics would eventually turn round to devour its own, with Chief Anenih being the most for significant scalp so claimed to date.
However, those who know about these things also saw that a number of issues were building up to a denouement in the relationship between Obasanjo and Anenih. When Obasanjo forced through a constitutional amendment within the PDP to make him the only person fit to be chairman of the Board of Trustees, it was clear that Anenih was being handed a one-way ticket for a trip into the wilderness of Nigerian politics. Anenih’s original sin was said to have been his inability to achieve the third term agenda in the first place. He was also said to have built a new alliance to stop Obasanjo’s plan to foist a leadership on the National Assembly. Anenih’s group lost, and Obasanjo was said to have described Anenih as not better than a coup-plotter. A man who never forgives a slight, Obasanjo took over the Board of Trustees in a flanking operation which was meant to teach the ex-policeman a lesson of his political life that coups are better suited to people from military background.
Obasanjo was aware that if the plan by the Anenih team to the change the permutations at the level of the National Assembly leadership had succeeded, it might be the beginning of the process of his own demystification. Because what would stop those able to avert the installation of Obasanjo’s men as National Assembly leaders from beginning to ask for other changes within the party hierarchy and within the government and the most dreaded one of them all, from Obasanjo’s perspective, the probe of decisions, he took during his eight years in power? This was why Obasanjo pulled all stops, dragged Malam Umar Yar’ Adua into the hall where the coup was executed without respect for the statutes of PDP itself.
For, Obasanjo, the overthrow of Chief Tony Anenih was another indicator of a desperate urge to keep a step ahead of everybody; keep firm control of the levers of power and never give a space to enemies who might go for the jugular of exposure of the eight years of his most corrupt regime.
Tony Anenih had become expendable and he had to go to, but more than just being removed, he must be routed and uprooted. It was not only about Chief Anenih alone, but about whoever chose to sing from a different hymn book other than what has been sanctioned by the kleptocratic despot himself. It was in fact one of the reasons why Kashim Imam, “who Obasanjo used to call his “adopted son”, was denied a ministerial appointment by Obasanjo. He was embittered by the treachery of his “father” in the wake of the governorship elections in Borno, told Obasanjo to his face and began to work with the aggrieved tendency within the PDP. For that crime, Obasanjo insisted that Yar’ Adua should drop him from the ministerial list, and in his stead, Sanusi Daggash was anointed; Sanusi, after all, has served Obasanjo’s interests from his days in the ‘ House of Representatives, running with the hare of Na’Abba group while hunting with Obasanjo’s at the same time. Such is the-nature of the Nigeria’s politics and one of the reasons that it cannot deliver for the Nigerian people.
If it is living by the principles or being dedicated to high ideals of life, do not look within the political space of Nigeria, because as the lumpen politician say in Kano,”siyasa ba adini bane”, therefore there is no reason to expect other than treachery, lack of principles, deceit and just taking care of the stomach of the individual politician. If you doubt this assessment, where will you locate the decisions of the so-called opposition parties to enter the unity government with the PDP regime of President Umar Yar ‘Adua? The governors of the (ANPP) made it clear that they would join the unity government despite the subsisting cases in Nigerian courts against the fraud perpetrated during the April elections. Even when the governor of Borno spoke on their behalf that “the party (ANPP)also has a collective responsibility to decide what is in the best interest of our followership and the nation, ”It is obviously debatable whether the choice made represents the true feelings of the fellowship or the best interest of the nation.
The assumption that a unity at the top amongst members of the political elite to share: political offices represents the “best interest of the nation” is the grand n delusion which underscores the country’s politics and has been responsible for the tragic inability to move the political process to the height from which it can genuinely be driven by the interest of the Nigerian people. The opposition parties ANPP and PPA is choosing to enter into a unity government by accepting a token of a few ministers and other positions in government would then be participating in the closure of the space to interrogate the fraud perpetrated during the 2007 elections, it means that we face a prospect that the future of the endeavour of democracy has been compromised forever in Nigeria. This is implicit in the choice made by sections of the opposition to join the unity government. It is a contraption which will give a few jobs to some elements within opposition, but which seems unlikely to ship off the huge deficit of illegitimacy within which the regime itself has been constructed.
We must continue to interrogate the choices which the nation’s po1itical elite makes in its husbandry of our country. These choices affect our lives and lay the ground work of future which our children will inherit. It is clear daylight that no lasting edifice can be built on nothingness and neither can an enduring political culture, the type which places the Nigerian people at its heart, be built on a fraudulent electoral process which produces regimes deficient in Legitimacy but being shored by an equally flawed alliance regime. This current of fraud, illegitimacy, opportunistic alliances and disdain for the people has run through the history of Nigeria’s political practices over the past four decades of a much fractured nationhood, It is the duty of the patriotic detachment within the political elite, no matter how numerically disadvantaged at the moment, to galvanize politics based on constructive rendering of service of the Nigerian people, when the Action congress (AC) chose to stay out of the panic-induced and legitimacy-challenged call for a unity government, the decision spoke for the preservation of a party system that is plural as well as offering an alternative programme platform. But how far even the AC is willing to go as an alternative platform remains to be seen given the reported schisms within its ranks and the alleged divided between those who want to hold out on the side of principles. It’s a matter of time, just as it is with everything related to Nigeria’s politics.
The grounds of politics may be likened to a quicksand where one runs the risk of sinking or just being sucked in. Alliances are built with dizzying speeds as much as they are broken with the speed of supersonic jet airliners. It is a world of expediency and promises often come out more like point-of-coitus assurances never meant to be kept. The professional political elite revels in their treacherous ways, especially if they can benefit there from, never minding the lives the ruined especially amongst the people.
We commenced this piece about the present travails of Chief Anenih in the hands of Olusegun Obasanjo, the landlord, sole owner, law-giver and maximum leader and enforcer within the ruling party, the PDP, Chief Anenih has been a leading participant in the cloak-and- dagger life that has reigned within the PDP in the last eight years. He revelled in the mythical Place that he occupied within the party and government. He cut down every challenge to whatever his boss wanted; helped to foist an increasingly authoritarian pall on the party and beyond that on the nation.
The truth is that neither Chief Tony Anenih nor Olusegun Obasanjo believed in a democratic and open space within a party or nation where tendencies and ideas freely contend for supremacy for the betterment of the country and the people. The two individuals feel more at home in the darkened, smoke- filled, claustrophobic world of intrigues, where the one quickest to draw his dagger cuts down the antagonist brutally and without mercy. This is the type of world were the antecedents prepared them for , and the profited handsomely there from; one as president of the country, who festered his economic nest to become stupendously rich and whose need to hide the truth of his bending the rule to favour himself has kept him actively engage in political intrigues; the other; Chief Anenih built a myth around himself, knocked people into line like the old policeman that he is even when he proved hopelessly inefficient in the public service duty of fixing the Nigeria roads when he got the opportunity to make a difference as a minister of works.
There is a lesson to learn in the Anenih Obasanjo duality. It is that people whose consciousness has not crossed the gulf that separate their world and modernity have for too long held the Nigerian’s public space to the ransom of their own inadequacies. They live within the certainties of their delusions, believing that society cannot progress without them. But the truth is that they cause far more harm to society‘s health, as we have noticed in the last eight years , when the Tony Anenih and Olusegun Obasanjo worked together to protect the supremacy they enjoyed within the cloak –and- dagger world of the Nigerian politics. Together, they took over the PDP, and in their hands it turned into a monster set lose to destroy Nigeria’s democratic experiment. Their parting of ways can only be the beginning of what is good for Nigeria and its democratic development. When they negate each other, we shall arrive at the negation of the negation, as the old dialecticians used to say. Who says Nigeria might not profit from its politics in the long run? If we wait long enough that is.
A word for Adukwu
During the 1980s, I use to visit Kaduna very regularly, because my cousin, Abubakar K. Belgore had just begun work in the architectural firm known as ARCHON, headed by Architect Gabriel Adukwu. I was always impressed by the gentle approach of the man and the painstaking manner that he tried to help the younger architects in his firm grow. These young architects came from a different parts of Northern Nigeria and I recollected over hearing him once admonish a young architect to work well because our country would develop only if the younger generation of professionals work with a lot of discipline, I have never spoken with him on telephone and I have not even seen since him since the 1980s so I cannot talk about his politics. However, I HAVE seen an orchestrated campaign against him by the section of the media since he was nominated as a ministerial candidate from Kogi State. I also do not want to be drawn into the peculiar landscape of Kogi politics either, but leaning on what I know of Architect Gabriel Adukwu from the 1980s, I think he is a decent man and a genuine patriot who should be given the opportunity to serve as minister.
