Mariam Mariam
A very important background for the understanding of General Olusegun Obasanjo, the outgoing lame duck despot of Nigeria, is to revisit the OPEN LETTER written to him by Chief Allison Ayida sometime, I think, in 1990. In that well-written piece, Obasanjo who laid bare for what he really is; a self-serving, vindictive individual who does to the rules, what Yuri Geller does to iron (bend them) when they suit him.
Obasanjo also comes across as one who never tires to point out the mole in other people’s eyes when he has a plank in his own. An example from the Allison Ayida piece will illustrate. The Supreme Military Council (SMC) of the Murtala Muhammed regime took a decision that not a single one of its members would purchase shares from companies that were being indigenised during the 1970s. Obasanjo broke the law, and secretly purchased those shares. Yet he had the temerity to call for a ridicule of whoever had flouted the decision of the Supreme Military Council.
When he was told that his name was on top of the list, the “anticorruption crusader quickly beat a retreat, requested that the list should not be tabled before the SMC and some convenient story be told to explain away the effort to “name and shame” those who dared to go against the military ruling council.
Obasanjo is a master of duplicity. He says all the right things and does the opposite. It is incredible to listen to Obasanjo call for democracy while he takes practical steps to undermine the flowering of democracy; he talks of the importance of the party process, but emasculates the party system; he talks of constitutionality but serial-rapes the nation’s constitutional order. We can go on and on about this incredibly contradictory persona that Obasanjo possesses. If these contradictions are in the realm of his personal life as a private individual, we might not be too bothered, but they become extremely important because they affect us all, for good or bad, but preponderantly, badly.
It was THISDAY newspaper of Wednesday, August 9, 2006, which revealed that President Obasanjo owned 200 million shares in the so called Transnational Corporation, Pic (Transcorp), they hurriedly cobbled together octopus that has systematically been buying up our national patrimony. The ‘revelation’ that Obasanjo owns those shares President Olusegun Obasanjo only gives an imprimatur to what most Nigerians have long felt must be the reason why the Obasanjo regime is offloading public institutions into the hands of a company that someone in the media termed as “a pyramid scheme.”
But Obasanjo always attempts to be clever by half if the THISDAY story is to be believed that the said shares were being held in “blind trust” on his behalf. If he kept his shares in “blind trust”, he should know that Nigerians are neither stupid nor blind. We see a pattern of corrupt use of state power by Obasanjo to fester his own nest, while in the same breath, he pontificates about anti-corruption. As I noted at the beginning of this piece, it is comme d ‘habitude, as the French say, for Obasanjo to exploit the advantages of state power for his own personal interest. Can we forget the illegal collection of money to build a so-called Presidential Library or what about the closure of the border with the Republic of Benin just because armed robbers attacked his daughter’s convoy?
Well, the desperate effort to sell NITEL, including the inability of Transcorp to meet the time limit for the purchase speak volumes about how important the so-called Transcorp has become to the Obasanjo regime. It is also instructive that one of the main arguments for privatisation was exposed for the fraud that it always is; the argument that new investments will come into the economy. Well, Obasanjo sold our strategic national institution in telecommunication, NITEL, to himself and his cronies, but they have not brought in any new investments. They have been mobilising funds within the nation’s banking system to be able to pay for the ‘purchase’ of NITEL. But what law did IIL L flout in the earlier effort to sell NITEL that Transcorp did not also flout, yet the government of Obasanjo waived all of them to ensure that NITEL is taken away from the Nigerian people into the private domain of the likes of Ndi Okereke-Onyuike, Bernard Ojeifo, Fola Adeola, Nicholas Okoye, Aliko Dangote, Jim Ovia, Jacobs Moyo Ajekigbe, Femi Otedola, Tony Ezenna, Sayyu Dantata, and others, including one Olusegun Obasanjo (even ifheld blindly), since a miracle will happen and the man will recover from blindness after 2007 to begin to cream off what he has taken away from the Nigerian people.
Nigerians seem to have resigned ourselves to the leVel of crimes that the Obasanjo clique has committed against our country in the realm of our economic life. Maybe the political crimes are more graphic and easier to grapple with, but politics is actually a concentrated expression of economies. Obasanjo has been desperately manipulating the political terrain because he wants the unpatriotic decisions he took in the realm of our economy to become irreversible.
The Transcorp deal is likely to become the albatross that Obasanjo cannot wish away. It is a group that the Nigerian people detest because it is the worst expression of crony capitalism that Nigeria has ever witnessed. It represents the depth that Obasanjo was willing to go in taking advantage of his exalted position, and it helps to recall that this has always been in the character of the man, as Chief Allison Ayida’s write-up said so many years ago.
So when Obasanjo talks about anti-corruption, Nigerians ought to remember his 200 million shares in Transcorp, the company that hE sold NITEL to; when he talks about democracy, we should quickly recall that the man massively rigged the 2003 elections and does not havo legitimacy; when he mouths platitudes about the constitution and good governance, we should be reminded that he is the worst person in the area of constitutional actions.
It is imperative to also point out that the last has not been heard of this Transcorp business and Obasanjo’s shares in the company. An incoming government will be obliged by the sordid nature of Obasanjo’s actions around the privatisation of NITEL, to take the patriotic decision to revisit those unpatriotic decisions. Obasanjo is scared stiff of any process that will de-mystify him, reducing him to just a typical African despot who took advantage of his position. It is this fear of retribution that fuelled the third term agenda, the call for an interim government and all such steps meant to keep him afloat as some superhuman and president. But after 2007, Obasanjo would HAVE to be demystified.
Obasanjo and the Babangida (Jnr) arrest
I am not going into the merits or demerits of the reasons given for the recent arrest of the polo-playing son of General Ibrahim Babangida by the operatives of the EFCC. But it seems that the relationship between Obasanjo and Babangida has reached its lowest level. It not been clear to all discerning observers that Obasanjo was likely to hit out against Babangida, because of the role he had played in scuttling the third term agenda. This is the same way that he has moved against Vice President Atiku Abubakar.
The basic law of warfare is that a General should minimise thepossibility of fighting on many fronts. But Obasanjo is turning this military dictum on its head by opening a new front against Babangida It promises to be a bruising campaign for all concerned; and in a sense, Obasanjo is living true to character as a man who always repays good with evil. He has fallen out with practically everybody who was instrumental to his rise to the top: people like Chief Sunday Awoniyi and General T.Y. Danjuma By going for Babangida’s son, he has thrown down the gauntlet, and the days ahead are going to be very interesting indeed. I ’ve said this because there is also the manoeuvring going on within the circle of the young Turks around Obasanjo who are determined to use the despot to fight their own fight. They want Obasanjo to destroy every potentially powerful aspirant for the Presidency so that they can remain the last men standing. They then hope that they would be able to inherit power to consolidate the anti-people, pro-imperialist, neo-liberal reforms. These characters are the worst enemies of the Nigerian people, and we must be ready to battle those agents of imperialism to a standstill.
Fidel Castro at 80: Triumph of an idea
This week, Fidel Castro, the leader of the Cuban Revolution celebrated his eightieth birthday on a hospital bed where he is recuperating from an intestinal operation. Progressive people around the world have been expressing solidarity with the Cuban people on Fidel’s birthday, while in Cuba the mass of the people have been rededicating themselves to the ideals of the 1959 Revolution. Cuba’s Revolution was one of the great events of the twentieth century, because on the small island less than 100 miles from the United States, the working people made a revolution, which liberated Cuba from its status as a haven from American mafia gangsters and as a playground for the American bourgeoisie, to a country that gave free education, very high standards of healthcare and other social services to the working people and the poor.
Cuba’s experience inspired the oppressed people around the world. For us in Africa we must remember Cuba’s very heroic contributions to the struggles of our people against colonial rule and the neo-colonial plunder Of our countries. Cuba fought with Algeria Congo, Angola Ethiopia; it assists Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, Mozambique. It was Cuba’s ^rrpy that broke the back of the apartheid forces at the battle of Cuito CuanLvBe, a battle that hastened the implementation of UN Revolution 435 for Namibia’s independence and the eventual defeat of apartheid.
Today, all manners of dubious ‘experts’ from the imperialist countries come and go in African countries; those were the same countries that did everything to slow the progress of de-colonisation, which Cuba helped us to achieve. Fidel Castro’s life has been an exemplary one of commitment to the building of a free and independent country, which works for the working people, not a country that is massively exploited by the imperialist transnational companies. That is why the imperialist politicians hate him and it’s the same reason he is a hero for freedomloving people around the world. As the Cubans themselves say: HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE, COMMANDANTE FIDEL!
