Ayomide
When the history of Nigeria’s current political arrangement comes to be written, at the heart of it will be the way that “ President Obasanjo has perfected hostage politics. I had defined this phenomenon of hostage politics as the ultimate employment of blackmail to achieve the objectives of the President. It is a very simple issue really. The security apparatus keeps tabs of the illegalities that individuals have committed and these are in turn used by the Obasanjo clique to exert compliance, submission or surrender as the case might be. It is usual in the cloak-and-dagger world of politics for political actors to wield the twin instruments of carrot and the stick; but in the Nigerian setting of the past seven years, ‘hostage-taking’ has become a preferred instrument of policy. It seemed to have achieved remarkable results for President Obasanjo since the fear of humiliation through a manipulative use of security reports and agencies such as the EFCC have been at the base of the silence and acquiescence of many political actors in the illegalities that the Obasanjo clique is attempting to foist on our country with third term. Of course, I am not underrating the place of greed in the explosive mix. What has become obvious is that we might have underrated the intelligence of many a political actor in Nigeria, A lot of those masquerading as members of our political elite are weaklings without principles; very greedy and crude ambitious, yet unable to even fathom the essence of power and politicking beyond the mundane points of theft, banditry and an insolent self-aggrandisement. Obasanjo, the past master of stealth, cunning and ruthlessness, understands this much, and that explains why he can use his tactics of ‘hostage politics’ as devastatingly as we have seen over the past few years. But it didn’t have to be so, and as I will argue in this week’s column, it will come to an unfulfilling finale with the desperate agenda to achieve a third term. Let’s even look at it from the beginning. If the members of the political elite had been smart, with some sense of history, it should have dawned on them that President Obasanjo is the least qualified person to take people hostage, using stealth and blackmail. His own records in governance are especially controversial, steeped as he has always been with his “buccaneering approach to government business,” in the words of Chief Allison Ayida. I have been re-reading Chief Ayida’s April 1, 1990 piece in the GUARDIAN newspaper, titled AN OPEN CONFIDENTIAL MEMO TO GENERAL OBASANJO. It was a marvellous and well-written deconstruction of the man Obasanjo, with his self-centered and ruthless streak. Obasanjo, the “hostage-taker” of today’s politics, was actually very lucky, thanks to the intervention of people like Chief Sunday Awoniyi as we now know to have survived the corruption investigations of the Murtala Muhammed regime. Chief Ayida’s piece reminded of investigations authorised by the head of state into “the list of shares and assets acquired particularly under the indigenisation exercise” of the period, with Obasanjo’s name featuring “prominently as shareholder in several companies”. This almost earned Obasanjo a sack, because the Murtala regime “was committed to righting all the ‘wrongs’ of the past and punishing the ‘lapses’ of the present. It was the intervention of others that saved Obasanjo. The white paper on the Adeosun Indigenisation Panel report, “there were no-go areas on some of the panel’s recommendations which on (Obasanjo’s) specific instructions included ‘where a Nigerian had acquired the bulk of the shares in any enterprise outside Schedule I; the shares should be ‘confiscated’ and forfeited to the Federal Government and the names of the money-bags’ publicized’. “Apparently,” according to Ayida, Obasanjo “has not studied Volume III of the report where names of such shareholders were listed. When I draw your attention to the pages where your name (Obasanjo’s name) appeared, you readily agreed that the panel’s recommendation should be rejected. And you then directed that I should take another week to redraft the white paper. When eventually the council memorandum was circulated, we agreed that Volume II should not be circulated or published but that you should mention in council that any member interested in the particulars of those who “corned” the indigenisation shares should see the SFMG. Several members contacted me for the list but no member saw the list of names! The permanent secretary and I received a ‘big thank you ‘from you at the end of the exercise.” The extensive quotation from Allison Ayida, in my view, goes to the heart of the Obasanjo phenomenon: A self-serving, hypocritical persona; which manifests in several ways even today. The man closed Nigeria’s border with the Republic of Benin, because armed robbers attacked his daughter; he would direct policies to promote cassava or the poultry business, because he is a big-time investor in those areas. This propensity to exploit situations to fester personal advantage, so characteristic of the Obasanjo style, actually damages the moral ground he normally tires to occupy in his anti-corruption drives. This is why I say that leading elements of the political elite that he has intimidated must be so thoroughly rotten that Obasanjo resemble the proverbial one-eyed person in the land of the blind. The obverse of this is that we have overrated Nigeria’s political elite. But Obasanjo is so excessively self assured, or so it seems that he would pull through any wish or desire no matter how immoral, no matter the manipulative process which leads to the achievement of such an intention, no matter how offended the Nigerian people are with the entire act. What matters is the end which Obasanjo has set out for himself. It is this total disrespect for the Nigerian people that has led our country to the crisis associated with the third term agenda. This crisis has now arrived at a finale, with the decision last week by the PDP leadership, under the ‘Garrison Commander,’ Colonel Ahmadu Ali, to publicly declare that the third term agenda is now officially the party’s position. The gloves are off, the teeth are gritted and a war has been declared against the Nigerian people. The battle will now be fought out in the open arena of the National Assembly. Knowing how crucial the days ahead are, the PDP apparatchik has taken a decision to move into the gallery of the Assembly as an added step of intimidation to beat the legislators into line. The carrot and the stick remain very viable options. The offers of money, choice plots in Abuja and automatic return to the National Assembly are still very much on the table. The AD leader in the House, Honourable Wunmi Bewaji, also reported that they have been offered one million dollars each and he was even promised an oil bloc to betray the Nigerian people while kowtowing to Obasanjo’s agenda. But just in case some of the legislators would play smart by collecting money from the Obasanjo clique and yet go vote against the third term agenda, there is danger lurking ahead. In an interview published by the Guardian of April 15, 2006, Dr Usman Bugaje of the House of Representatives said that they “are getting reports that a member of the Board of Trustees of the PDP, who you all know have (sic), been warning those who collected their money to vote for the agenda or they will kill them. He simply told then that if you collect our money and you don’t vote, we are going to kill you. And you know they can kill, they have killed many people.” This quotation underlines the desperation that is the hallmark of the third term agenda. Obasanjo has become totally entrapped in his delusions and does not seem to have a way (missing texts here) Daily Trust, Thursday April 20, 2006
