“(Politics is) the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.” – Winston Churchill
Celebrated World War II British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, listing the qualifications for the office of the politician, exposed, with much perceptiveness and wit, the sheer humbug that politics often becomes in the hands of many of its practitioners. In Nigeria where public office is a licence for sure-footed deceit, where truth is an unwelcome orphan, Churchill could not have found better followers of the debauched politics he so ably caricatured. Some years ago, President Olusegun Obasanjo himself showed with much skilful honesty how ingeniously has mastered this wonderful game of distant half-truth, one of lips-watching and a consummate rendering of a hot 4 o’clock afternoon as a good morning. And when he was trough, Churchill, in his grave, could have been shocked as the tribe of wind-vane politicians of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), then did acclaim him a great statesman and democrat.
The occasion was an emergency meeting in Abuja called by the then National Executive Committee of the PDP. Obasanjo praised the defeat of his third-term ambition at the National Assembly variously as the “beauty of democracy” and “democracy at work.” And in conformity with the Churchillian rule, the third-term agenda that was hatched over three years, launched with military ambuscades and strategies, and pursued and executed under a regime of carrots, sticks and obscene corruption, suddenly became a game of helmsman never supported let alone dignified with the slightest desire to participate in.
All these may be lies or, to again borrow from Churchill, a case of “terminological in-exactitude”. But for Obasanjo, this was astute statesmanship. And he may well be right, at least in the incestuous reasoning that is our contemporary politics. And how? His denial of a third-term agenda gave him an opportunity to calm the polity then, which he and his term-extension campaigners had thrown into a heated, horrible giddiness. He may also claim, as he had had, that all that happened, all the witch-hunting of “enemies”, and all the gratification of the alleluyah-crowning boys and (and girls?), were part of a well-considered desire to give democracy a full, natural run.
Unfortunate, Obasanjo’s statesmanship is a flawed and even misdirected brinksmanship. Why nearly ruin the system just only give yourself the opportunity to prove that you are the redeemer? Why divide the country only for you to pose as the only man who could heal and unify it? Like the bad, deceitful politician Churchill so aptly sketched, Obasanjo then, was simply finding his way out as well as gaining from the mess he has created in the first place. And to make matters worse, he seemed to have been urging the nation to rise up in one voice and give him a standing ovation for such a jolly, good fellow!
Again unfortunately, Obasanjo, in all this, seemed very much to have missed the point just as much as he did his cherished focus. As everybody knew, that focus was staying in power for, at least one more term of four years after 2007. And the reason for this is a self-professed patriotism to save Nigeria. His bona fides for this herculean task are, on the face of it, more than modest, if not out-rightly extraordinary. He is a civil war hero to whom the rebel forces of Biafra surrendered to in 1970. He would later become military head of State, continuing with the brief but very popular junta of assassinated General Murtala Muhammed, a position under which he did the hitherto unprecedented: handing power over to civilians in 1979.
When mother luck brought him back to power 20 years later, after imprisonment under General Sani Abacha for his alleged role in a false coup plan, he was again lucky. High oil prices, then about $70 a barrel as against the $9 to $11 a barrel under General Abdulsalami Abubakar, ensured a pilling up of over $35 billion in external reserves, another $8 billion in excess crude reserves, besides obtaining a write-off of $18 billion of our external debt of over $30 billion then. The balance, over $12 billion, was also paid off, giving Nigeria then a largely debt-free status. But more remarkable is Obasanjo’s war against corruption, the nation’s greatest disease. Sacred cows were brought down in disgrace and some jailed for corruption.
All these were great credentials for which Obasanjo, who also had bravely been standing up for democracy in Africa, was respected at home and abroad. But he wanted power in the manner of a man who demands respect rather than command it. Thus, in a way that is heart-breaking for those who genuinely saw in him some hope for Nigeria and Africa, Obasanjo had come down to being driven by the quaint logic that there is probably no finer, no more superbly profound, way of cleansing a rotten, corrupt society than by infusing it with state corruption, one that is sanctified by good motives and intentions. That is why the nightmare of propitiating lawmakers with billions of naira for their endorsement of the third-term agenda stared the nation so devastatingly in the face even till this day. That is why, today, electoral landslides, including Obasanjo’s, come along in Nigeria with the holiness and respectability which only successful 419-ers can muster.
For Obasanjo, the losses and pains are great. Even as he continues to put a brave face to this third term debacle. It is only too certain that he is now a man without a face. He has in other words become the beautiful would-be bride who lost her chastity. Locally and internationally, this squandering of goodwill rendered his administration a moral lame duck. He may have had 10 new corruption-fighting EFCCs that were better and even more effective. He may continue to talk democracy with the heart of the Pope and the conviction of one who exchanges GSM numbers with God. But when he calls on Nigeria, saying, “This is the way”, who will, in all sincerity and trust, listen, let alone follow? That is the tragedy – for self and for nation.
Having said all these, even other leaders after Obasanjo have also squared the goodwill of Nigerians in their own different ways.
The All Progressives Congress (APC), which has been criticising the PDP of misrule and mismanagement of the economy now took over the ruins of government from the disastrous PDP government. One would have thought that with all the noise and criticisms by the APC, its government would have made a difference to bring improvement on the lives of the Nigerian people and the economy. Unfortunately, the case is not so. The APC which is a lame dock, has joined the PDP in further impoverishing the country and its citizens. The country is now in standstill under the APC leadership showing that the party has nothing to offer. All they have for the country is criminalities like the PDP.
