Ayomide
I have felt very happy this past week, because of the developments on the national political firmament. Happy, because for the first time in a long while, the patriotic section of the nation’s political elite has been stirred into action in the positive direction of confronting, or at least making the intention clear, to confront the looming danger on our horizon. So confident and bold have members of the Obasanjo clique become, with the undisguised effort to manipulate the constitution of our country to achieve a third term for President Obasanjo. My reading of the nation’s political landscape was that the situation at hand called for the building of a grand coalition of patriots to stop the Obasanjo clique’s agenda, and also use the new platform to posit a new agenda for Nigeria’s future after we might have been rid of the incompetent regime in 2007. It was therefore a most welcome development for our nation when last Wednesday, despite the massive mobilisation of the security goons by the government, members of the patriotic sections of the Nigerian political elite pulled through the spectacular coup de going of meeting to consolidate the anti-third term platform. I was very delighted that these patriots could bring members of Afenifere; Ohanaeze; the members of the National Assembly determined to stand by the Nigerian people; General Buhari; leading elements of the new ACD party; Governors Bola Tinubu, Boni Haruna, and other political tendencies under one roof; all were united by a determination to ensure that Obasanjo and his clique are unable to succeed in their desperate bid to subvert us as a people. Adagbo Onoja has always argued that the Nigerian political elite knows how to negotiate a nation-saving consensus; he uses the formation of the People Democratic Party (PDP) and the emergence of the Obasanjo candidacy in 1999 as an example of the political dexterity of the nation’s political elite. I believe that Adagbo and other patriots would have been quite excited about what transpired last Wednesday night at the Niger State governor’s residence in Abuja. It was for me a vindication of the argument that I have canvassed on this page over the last two years. Many commentators have underlined the superb political acumen of Vice President Atiku Abubakar, and the well-timed manner of his intervention in the political situation in the country. This was the perspective of Professors Tam David-West, Ben Nwabueze, the Secretary of Afenifere and several other patriots. There were those who also refuse to see the depth of the crises that the Obasanjo clique’s desperate desire to achieve a third term could plunge the country into, choosing instead to question Atiku’s wealth, as if that was the issue at hand or as if Obasanjo the “incorruptible,” does not have questions to answer about the source of the money he is using to build a university amongst other projects tied to his name. This is not the time for these interrogations though. It is basic politics that at every point in a political process, we must learn to discern what the main contradictions are and what the minor ones are. Today, as Senator Dansadau rightly argued in his most recent interview with the media, “Every Nigerian must take position on third term;” this is because it is the main issue of the day in our country. What the Obasanjo clique had assumed I believe was that they have sufficiently taken everybody hostage; had deepened the division of the country along ethnic, regional and religious lines and have accumulated enough money to bribe their way through the constitutional review process. They seem to have forgotten or discounted the determination of the patriotic sections of the Nigerian people to stand up to them, to stop the subversion of our nation’s political order. Let us be clear about the facts of our situation. The Obasanjo clique is very desperate; they will do EVERYTHING to subvert our constitutional order, because Obasanjo’s exit strategy does not go beyond remaining in power after 2007. The clique cannot fathom life outside the ambit of the elongation of the tenure of Obasanjo. It is this reason, going by a report in Daily Independent of Tuesday, April 11th, 2006, that members of the Federal Executive Council “have been given the marching order to canvass support for President Olusegun Obasanjo’s third term in their various constituencies or get fired.” In my first column of 2006, I had argued that the National Assembly would be the terrain of one of the fiercest struggles in the recent political history of Nigeria. This is simply because it is there that the fate of the nation’s constitutional order will be determined. It is therefore important that a powerful movement the Agenda 2007 came alive in that very important institution. Vice President Atiku Abubakar got it very right in my view when he urged that “let us step up this campaign, let us step up this lobby among other members of the National Assembly. Believe me, they keep counting the numbers, as long as they realise that they don’t have the number, they will never bring the bill. So, let us not relent, let’s keep on persuading.” This task of persuasion should be taken up by all of us who feel concerned about the future of democracy in Nigeria. Let us make it clear to our Representatives and Senators that we have elected them to do our bidding, not to collect blood money from Obasanjo to subvert our national interest. We should shoot down all the promises of money, land and automatic return (via rigging) to the National Assembly for whoever supports the third term agenda. We must become more militant in asserting our rights as citizens of a democratising country. We should refuse to be conquered by Obasanjo and his clique. There must also be an extra-parliamentary element to the content of the new coalition that is building up against the Obasanjo clique. This coalition should take in groups in civil society, ranging from the labour movement, the religious organisations and the activist civil society groups. It was for this reason that I have been holding a discussion with Issa Aremu, one of the leading ideologues of the labour movement today. I feel very uncomfortable about the fact that there has not been a coalescence of activities between those who work on the political track and the civil society groups. The labour movement has not been proactively involved in the anti third term agenda; this means that the political elite have not sought to build a mass base for the effort to defeat the Obasanjo clique. This is very unfortunate, because history has taught that political actions achieve greater success only when they find the mass base that the labour movement can provide. This was how the anti-colonial movement became the mass wave that imperialism could not ignore from the 1940s, when Imoudu led the workers to provide the muscle for Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, the NCNC and the nationalists. The same experience was repeated after the annulment of the June 12 elections when NUPENG and PENGASSAN became the mass base of the struggle against military rule in the 1990s. It makes sense now in fact for the labour movement to be at the heart of the emergent anti-dictatorship coalition, so that we can negotiate the hegemony of the political elite through e+nsuring that the post-Obasanjo agenda for the political economy of Nigeria sufficiently provides a social democratic content that will be in the interest of the Nigerian people, especially the working people. The labour movement has the historical opportunity, along with other mass democratic organisations, to be at the heart of the anti-third term (in actual fact anti-dictatorship) movement and on the other hand, to use its central place to interrogate what the political elite hopes to make a post-Obasanjo Nigeria. If it is to continue to implement the inhuman, unpatriotic and corrupt neo-liberal policies of dubious privatisation; selling our national assets to cronies as Obasanjo has done; spending money without appropriation; massive retrenchment of workers; non[1]investment in the productive sectors of the economy; deliberate rundown of national institutions such as NITEL to be able to sell them cheap, etc., then we must be prepared for a long struggle, not only the Obasanjo clique but those positioning to take over from him. This is why Atiku’s recent statement that the National Assembly should pass laws to make it impossible for future governments to overturn the policies of Obasanjo, is unacceptable. Dear Vice President, you must know that the main platform of hatred for Obasanjo by the Nigerian people is located in his inhuman, dubious and unpatriotic economic policies and Insha’Allah, we shall OVERTURN them! But again, this belongs in the future. The present moment is one that calls for the construction of a nationwide platform of resistance to the third term agenda of the Obasanjo clique. We must defeat the constitutional manipulation process that is being implemented through Ibrahim Mantu at the National Assembly as a first step in the process to reclaim the democratic project for the Nigerian people. This first step should lead us to ask several questions related to the effort to deepen the content of democracy on an incremental basis. What is the nature of the electoral process? Can INEC as it is presently constituted ever able to midwife a credible election in 2007? Why is the political process so authoritarian in form and content? Can we nudge it in a more open, transparent and more democratic direction? How do we build genuinely democratic parties, with real inner party democracy as against the monstrosity that the PDP became contrary to the idealistic vision of its founding fathers? Can politics become a more responsible process given to the pursuit of the best interests of the Nigerian people? Why did the political elite refuse to draw vital lessons from the failures of the past political processes in the country and why do they tend to repeat the worst mistakes of the past? Why is it easier to copy the authoritarian styles of the period of military dictatorship than to stick to the best practices of a democratic society? How can the people actually possess the democratic process and be at the heart o f its practice? So many questions indeed and these are just a few of them. The past seven years of the Obasanjo regime have shown clearly that we cannot take anything for granted in terms of what the elite does with power, especially when it is as irresponsibly wielded as we have seen in these years. The people’s interest were not at the heart of the process of governance; the policies implemented were anti-people and so intoxicated with power did the President become, as well as lower down with governors and local government chairmen, that the people became totally disillusioned with the political elite. In 2003, Obasanjo so massively rigged the elections that it became obvious that the people do not matter anymore in the political calculations of the ruling elite. The fact that the people did not go into the streets to denounce the grand electoral fraud upon which Obasanjo returned to power went on to embolden the Obasanjo clique that there is no crime that they cannot get away with in Nigeria. This is the political context within which they found the guts to attempt a third term agenda. But Obasanjo has struck the rock of the people’s will this time. He will be defeated totally and the third term agenda might become his vehicle into the dustbin of history. It is very liberating that patriots from across the country have recognised the need to build a platform to derail this illegal, immoral and unacceptable process of constitutional manipulation. But let us please broaden this platform into a huge people’s wave to sweep away the Obasanjo clique by May 29th, 2007. In the meantime, we must expect the heightening of intolerance of the opposition – the employment of strong arm tactics and the arrest of people. The meetings of opposition groups will be clamped down; the security forces will become more visible and the Obasanjo clique will fight really dirty. Already, they have issued instructions to major oil companies to stop advertising in Daily Trust, Punch and ThisDay newspapers for being at the forefront of opposition to the third term agenda. Individuals in the political arena will face a greater level of harassment than hitherto, but what is important is to stay the course. The third term agenda will be defeated no matter the level of desperacy of the Obasanjo clique.
