A former Nigerian leader just blundered onto the Chinua Achebe Leadership Forum, at Yale University, USA, squealing state capture and screaming insane governance!
He wasn’t Gen. Yakubu Gowon, “the nation’s poster face of probity in public life”, by Catholic Bishop Matthew Kukah’s estimation.
Neither was he former President Muhammadu Buhari (PMB), who the northern street had long canonized “Mai Gaskiya” — the Honest One — even while still alive.
It’s rather the ever-noisome Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, ex-head of state and two-term elected president, who loves to row, thinking his eternal screeching would bury his rot!
General Yakubu Gowon (90), General Olusegun Obasanjo, GOO, (87) and Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, GMB, (81) were all former military heads of state.
GOO postures as the holy Pope of this best forgotten military era of sheer venality. Yet, he stands out, like a sore and rotten thumb, for gaming the state for self-benefits.
His regime’s Operation Feed the Nation (OFN) morphed into his post-military power honeypot: Obasanjo Farms Nigeria (OFN) — with a fulsome harvest of choice lands, all over the country!
Ay, the same Land Use Decree, forged to drive his regime’s OFN, also came in handy to drive his personal OFN!
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Gowon and Buhari sit on a moral crest, though military rule was rotten — rare drivers on Army rule’s straight and narrow way. Still, they grate at no one.
Yet, Obasanjo galloped into the Chinua Achebe USA show, wearing his OFN medal, screaming “state capture!” A global self-trial was never more severe! But the irony was totally lost on him!
Clearly, Obasanjo has learnt nothing, in decorum or modesty or humility or probity — either from Gowon, his senior, or from Buhari, his junior.
But he wants to teach everyone the ABC of honest leadership. Did Fela, the immortal Abami Eda himself, just growl from the grave: Tisa, no teach me nonsense?
Gowon’s bid to be elected president sank with General Ibrahim Babangida’s transition to nowhere, with the ever-flippant Obasanjo even mocking the doomed run of his old commander-in-chief.
But the hypocrisy in GOO bobbed up with the panicky Army Arrangement that thrust him forward for President in 1999. He didn’t ask his sponsors what he had asked Gowon: what did Gowon forget in Dodan Barracks to go pick up? But dived into a self- serving cant: how many presidents would you make out of me? Sheer humbug!
In contrast, GMB’s unassailable probity, even among wild military-era thieves, paved his way to becoming PMB, like Obasanjo, for two terms. In 2015, Nigerians craved an upright superman to help clean up the Obasanjo-led PDP-era mess.
Again, to boot: while Obasanjo exited power in 2007, clutching another illicit medal — the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library and Resort — PMB bequeathed the Lagos-Ibadan medium-gauge rail, with its Wole Soyinka Abeokuta Station virtually facing off, in stern rebuke, Obasanjo’s private gold mine of OOPL!
Between quiet but honest public service and loud but rotten self-service, nothing could be starker! After PMB and Obasanjo are long gone, the WS station and OOPL, would scream, for posterity, the real state captor — and a ruthless one at that!
But beyond OOPL and WS Train Station, Obasanjo comes up short, against PMB, on many fronts. Yet, PMB is as taciturn as Obasanjo is garrulous — the one over golden traits, the other over vice packaged as virtue.
After two terms as president, Obasanjo craved an illicit third. At a similar juncture, PMB declared he couldn’t wait to get as far away from Abuja as possible!
After the great third term crash — which he denies till this day — the Ebora Owu’s response was an election he bragged would be “do or die”; and indeed, it was do or die: very gory, in every material particular: in hewn limbs, bashed skulls, lost lives!
Contrast that to PMB’s declared loyalty to his party, but telling people to freely vote their choice; and to the security agencies to guarantee the vote.
As president, PMB delivered far much more in infrastructure (even with a parched pocket), and gave agriculture a rebirth, away from the reckless food imports of the Obasanjo years — an APC-era legacy President Tinubu has followed and reinforced.
Contrast that with Obasanjo paying US$ 12 billion, in crude windfall, to buy “debt forgiveness”, while critical road arteries — Lagos-Ibadan expressway, Second Niger Bridge, etc; not to mention modernized rail — wailed for attention.
As outgoing President, Obasanjo told the INEC chair, the best forgotten Prof. Maurice Iwu, to help deliver his “do or die” polls — a chilling nightmare for the opposition.
PMB’s call, at a similar juncture, was on INEC chair, Prof. Mahmoud Yakubu, to push technology — the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BIVAS), which asserts genuine voters, by reading the permanent voter card (PVC) with its in-built computer chip; and the INEC Result-viewing (IReV) portal — to achieve better elections.
That delivered the closest election in Nigerian political history. But it also triggered wild but empty bad-mouthing from the loser camps, well represented by Peter Obi and co, at the Achebe Yale University show.
That explained Obasanjo’s open traducement of Prof. Yakubu; and his reckless call for the sack of the INEC chair. If Yakubu is fired for delivering 2023, what then would have befallen Obasanjo’s Iwu, for his eternal disgrace of 2007? Banished for life?
It’s clear: despite his constant huffing and puffing; and empty pontifications, Obasanjo has little sense of fairness; talk less of justice. But God is great! As he opens his mouth to judge others, he condemns himself even more!
And, yes: post-power, Obasanjo pulls down everyone. PMB supports his successors.
So, if the Ebora Owu came so venomously after “Baba-go-slow” (PMB) and “Emilokan” (President Bola Tinubu), it’s again his patented opportunism to milk people’s pains to hawk counterfeit empathy.
By Olakunle Abimbola @TheNation
