Mariam Mariam
“Let us expect a govt o f the oligarchs, for the oligarchs and by the oligarchs (and their clients). Yar ‘Adua for President….appointed by OBJ, Dangote, el-Rufai, Transcorp, Ribadu, et al. for themselves” — text message. “We now have Yar’Adua. We need Yar’Adua !!!” — text message.
These two text messages are representative of the many that I have received over the past two weeks against the backdrop of the permutations by the Obasanjo clique of the PDP to ensure the ‘coronation’ of Governor Umar Yar’Adua as the Presidential candidate of the PDP for the April 2007 election. It was obvious that a lot of hire wire politics was taking place as last weekend drew nearer for the party’s convention. If you recall, I had mentioned ‘the small matter’ of Andy Uba’s position after the 2007 transition. Of course, we had long known that Obasanjo was very desperate to ensure that Andy Uba got the constitutional protection of immunity, and his being awarded the governorship candidacy of the PDP in his state was geared towards securing that immunity.
But it seemed that we underrated the level of Obasanjo’s desperation about the impending fate of his man Friday post-May 2007. I guess that he had calculated that even a governor of a state can still be picked up in the same manner that he went for Alamieyeseigha, Fayose, Ladoja and Dariye. So what stops a determined president, bowing to popular pressure in future, from going for Andy Uba? This was why up till Saturday morning, Obasanjo was said to be insisting that he wanted Andy Uba as the vice presidential candidate for Governor Umar Yar’Adua.
The PDP governors, spineless and cowardly as they generally have been in their dealings with Obasanjo, were also said to have resisted the imposition of Andy Uba. I agree with Mahmud Jega that a President Yar’Adua might not end up the puppet on a string that Obasanjo hopes for once he gets to office; after all, didn’t a set of people bring Obasanjo to power with the misplaced assumption that he was going to do their biddings, and as events have turned out, they must have rued the day they all decided to back Obasanjo as president: he became a monster they could not tame, quite apart from eventually becoming the most incompetent ruler Nigeria has ever had, a vindictive despot who felt happiest when inflicting pain on the people that he rules.
So if Alhaji Umar Yar’Adua eventually comes to be an independent-minded president, he would still have to reckon with the fact that Obasanjo’s intention is to play the puppeteer in relation to him. To underscore Obasanjo’s determination, he railroaded through an amendment of Section 12 (77) of the PDP constitution, with a new rule that only a former president produced by the party can chair its Board of Trustees. Of course, this is intended to give Obasanjo a direct platform to fiddle with policies and programmes of the government of the day, including even personnel choices. The monster which the PDP gave birth to has finally come full circle; we now have the absurdity of a President Obasanjo who in nearly eight years treated the party with disdain, installed and removed party leaders at will. NEVER implemented party manifesto nor obeyed party statutes now positioning after power to remain the most powerful individual in the garrison camp called the PDP. He is after all ‘the leader, founder and father’.
For members of the Obasanjo clique (an amalgam of Obasanjo, his political associates and his billionaire cronies), the emergence of a pliant Alhaji Umar Yar’Adua is actually third term by other means. The duty that such a president is called upon to do is to provide protection for Obasanjo, so that his crimes against the Nigerian people (new ones were exposed early this week at the Senate hearing on PTDF by Vice President Atiku Abubakar) will not return him to his old cell at the Yola prison, as well as defend the theft of Nigerian people’s patrimony, which was effected through the dubious privatization policy during which Obasanjo sold NITEL to himself and his cronies.
The Holy Qur’an said that ‘and they plotted and Allah plans and Allah is the best of planners ’. This is very apt in the circumstance, because recent African history is littered with examples of puppets installed into power, but who needed to find legitimacy with the people and have been obliged by the circumstance to go after their masters: this happened between Ahmadou Ahidjo and Paul Biya in Cameroun, Chiluba and Munawasa in Zambia and it is happening to Bakili Muluzi and his successor in Malawi. The Obasanjo clique assumes that it is the cleverest group in Nigeria, but most Nigerians suspect that they are a bunch of opportunists who have used state power to enrich themselves at the detriment of the Nigerian people at the same time that their principal, Obasanjo postures as an anticorruption crusader or a thief catcher. The facts of the past seven years just do not add up about his supposedly ‘clean’ image. Obasanjo is far too compromised in the years since he has been in power, and he knows that people know. He is also aware that the Nigerian people do not believe him; they do not trust him and are patiently waiting for him to vacate the precincts of Aso Villa in order for all of us to shout at the top of our voices that the despotic ex-convict has been a naked emperor all the while.
Of course, the fate that awaits him terrifies Obasanjo, and that is why he has taken Nigeria through the tortuous path of self-induced crises, a hidden agenda to manipulate the constitution, overheating the political space, habitually and when all of these failed to secure him a constitutional amendment to stay in power forever, he settled for the option of playing a puppeteer as well as amending the party constitution to become Chairman of the Board of Trustees. It is from that position that he hopes to be breathing down the neck of the president. But Obasanjo might discover that he is mistaken about the candidate he is about to rig into power. After all, didn’t he also refuse to be anybody’s puppet when they rigged him into power, so why should it be different with Yar’Adua?
But I think that no matter how good and decent Umar Yar’Adua himself might be, the Nigerian people should still reject the PDP in the next election, because it is a party sworn to the continuation of the unconstitutional economic policies of the unpatriotic Obasanjo regime. The total surrender to the diktat of neo-liberal capitalism has seen a systematic assault on the social and economic rights of the Nigerian people over the last seven years: the loss of thousands of jobs, the sale of our national assets to Obasanjo himself and his cronies; a lawless regime that flouts the constitution and willfully disobeys lawful court judgements and a regime of monumental incompetence that could not fix our roads despite huge appropriations, has presided over the insecurity of lives of lives and properties and a regime that has deepened fear and alienation in the country. No, such a party should not be allowed to continue in power, rigging and all, notwithstanding. In the words of the late Dr Chuba Okadigbo: VOTE THEM OUT!
It is on this basis that I find very politically savvy the decision taken the other day by the ANPP and AC to build an alliance to be able! to throw out the PDP from power next year. It has become imperative for the various opposition parties to build a credible platform of a patriotic alliance to deal with the monster | called the PDP, especially at the centre. This alliance must be built for the patriotic purpose of a national salvation political and economic programme, which will begin a project of restitution of Nigeria’s infrastructure and the re-nationalize of assets that Obasanjo sold to himself and his cronies. This is the basic minimum that must be met along with a public trial of Obasanjo so that he can get his one way ticket back to prison. That is the catharsis for eight years of an insensitive, despotic and cruel regime, a president who ruled like the head of an occupation army in a conquered country.
The news of the ANPP/AC alliance had not even finished sinking in when the ANPP announced General Muhammadu Buhari as its candidate for the 2007 elections. It is striking that there are people in that party who really think and know the ABC of politics. The emergence of Buhari has thrown the Obasanjo clique into a panic, because one of the permutations of the past few months was that Buhari was going to be denied the ANPP ticket, so that whoever was then presented by the ANPP would be steamrolled by the PDP juggernaut. It will no longer be that way and the Obasanjo clique must re-plot their strategies to confront Buhari.
Today, Buhari is even better prepared than he was in 2003, his visibility nationally as a harbinger of an alternative vision of national development, and this is especially so in the South. It will no longer connect with people to describe Buhari as a Muslim fundamentalist, because Nigerians who might have bought into that have now experienced the mismanagement of our country by the exconvict who called himself a ‘born-again’ Christian, but gleefully imposed suffering on Christians and Muslims alike.
The Obasanjo clique is also aware that after the massive rigging of 2003, and the charade of a very lengthy court process, Nigerians are determined to protect their votes and are willing to resort to people power to protect the genuine mandate they will freely give. The emergence of General Buhari also means that the Obasanjo clique has to work harder to sell their very colourless presidential candidate and his equally nondescript running mate. So whichever way we look at it, Obasanjo’s desperation to evade justice, his paralysing fear of being exposed and demystified led him to the elaborate manipulations which led to the emergence of Umar Yar’Adua as the PDP candidate.
It is looking increasingly as if Obasanjo has boxed himself into a comer, because so many people are aggrieved in the PDP by the entire charade that brought Yar’Adua. These individuals and groups will react as they did during the third term agenda; they will make the right noise about supporting the candidate but will work underground to undermine and sabotage him. By the time they understand that, the damage would have been done.
Obasanjo will be left high and dry eventually to carry his own can, because the truth is that he has few genuine loyalists anyway. Those who make a show of support for him do so out of fear, because they know his vindictiveness and wickedness and his propensity to inflict pain and hurt on people. Those around him know that he does not have a sense of loyalty to others or a sense of gratitude, believing that he alone deserves loyalty and gratitude. They work for him but are paralysed with fear that he can sacrifice them anytime as he has done with many of his benefactors in the past. This is why he never really trusts people, and why his politics is undemocratic and authoritarian. But in the next few weeks, he will discover that he cannot manipulate the political process forever. We are in for a lot of drama in the weeks ahead and Obasanjo is likely to be the main loser in the unfolding scenario.
