By Arinze Igboeli
For those who don’t know, former President Olusegun Obasanjo is in every right a statesman and an accomplished figure, commanding respect both on home soil and abroad.
Obasanjo, indeed is a man of many firsts and I give it to him, a man known for his courage and his penchant for being blunt on matters of national discourse.
Yet, the same Obasanjo sometimes displays the pronounced possession of hamartia, the tragic flaw that wrecks every protagonist.
Such hamartia includes the attempt to play God in a number of circumstances, and the arrogating of saintly or messianic posturing to himself alone.
An example of such arrogance can be seen in his downplaying of the June 12, 1993 struggle, where he alluded that the late business mogul and winner of that ill-fated election, Chief Moshood Abiola was not the Messiah or when he single-handedly imposed the sick leadership of former President Umaru Musa Yar-Adua on the country in 2007.
Obasanjo’s second flaw is his profound ability to lapse into pulsating hypocrisy. On a number of occasions he has exhibited an over exaggerated sense of pietism: Everyone is bad, excepting him, everyone is a part of the duplicity, the fraud, the corruption and numerous ills of this nation save for him!
On a number of such occasions, Obasanjo has labelled all sorts of institutions within Nigeria as “this and that”, only for those institutions to respond back that he is the very author of such venality!
And so, the press statement issued on Tuesday by the former president, urging President Muhammadu Buhari not to seek a second term in office did not spring any surprises; a fact check will reveal that right from his days as a retired general, the former president has always loved to take swipes at successor administrations. Sadly, the same sins Obasanjo committed is what he has falsely accused Buhari of committing, all in the attempt to justify his letter!
Has Obasanjo blithely forgotten his misdeeds as a civilian head of state, where the prices of goods and services rose beyond the reach of the common man? I was a jambite then, but I will always recall that my father’s business took a downturn then owing to the introduction of a number of policies that were anti people. For example, the Naira lost its value compared to the Dollar by eighty percent under Obasanjo without any of the pressures faced by the Buhari administration today.
Obasanjo, in that letter trumpeted that Buhari had failed as poverty was rampaging the land. Yet he Obasanjo seems to have forgotten that it was under his eight years in office that the Nigerian middle class was finally wiped out through his reactionary policies.
Can Obasanjo tell the country what were the achievements of his Policy Alleviation Programmes. How many Nigerians were lifted out of poverty under his watch? Under his watch, the incidence of poverty rose to seventy percent while the United Nations Development Programme’s report then voted Nigeria 148th out of 173 in terms of abysmal living conditions.
Even at that, we are witnessing a Nigeria that is on the verge of a full diversification of the economy, where the nation is experiencing a boom in rice and wheat cultivation, saving the country the much needed foreign exchange that would have gone into the purchase of such commodities outside the shores of this country.
Again, thankfully, Nigeria exited a recession that failures of past administrations, Obansanjo’s inclusive contributed into plunging Nigeria into. Should the credit go to an Obasanjo or to Buhari who presided over such? If it is the latter then on what grounds can an Obasanjo accuse a Buhari of not having a grasp of the economy?
The herdsmen/Farmers crisis is indeed a big blow to the Buhari administration, yes, I agree, but it will be unfair of Obasanjo to accuse Buhari of doing little to stem it. First of all, the herdsmen/farmers clashes have been with us even before the emergence of Buhari. It did not start today and has only received such attention owing to the fact that a Fulani man is our president. Still, I think if an Obasanjo deems it befitting to deny Buhari his constitutional right to a second term owing to the herdsmen crisis then can we kindly remind him of what roles he played when soldiers rampaged Odi, Zaki Biam and the OPC/Hausa crisis in Lagos then. What about the murders of Bola Ige, Harry Marshall, Dikibo and Chuba Okadigbo?
Obasanjo’s barefaced hypocrisy is indeed remarkable. He claims that there is a “culture of condonation and turning blind eye will cover up rather than clean up. And going to justice must be with clean hands.” Wonderful!
Please, can an Obasanjo tell us what he did to his Mr. Fix it when it was proven that funds meant for the nation’s decaying infrastructure were fixed into foreign accounts? I cannot be quick to forget the scandal of the Petroleum Trust Development Fund, PTDF drama or the little or no success that came after fixing a whooping $16 billion in a power sector that did not add beyond a hundred megawatts?
