Why he needed
a third term
By
Okey Ndibe (E-mail: okeyndibe@gmail.com)
Slightly more than two years ago, I wrote a column titled, Why Obasanjo needs
a third term. Two days ago, a friend who had just reread it, categorised it
prophetic. He told me he had looked again at the column in light of former president
Olusegun Obasanjo’s evolution into Nigeria’s villain-in-chief.
Prodded by my friend, I too stole a peek at the said column, which was originally
published in The Guardian of Thursday, March 2, 2006. Given that ours is a country
in which memory is often weak and fleeting, it seemed to me apt to begin today’s
reflections by sharing some of the insights from two years ago.
In the essay’s opening paragraph, I submitted: “It is now no longer
a secret that President Olusegun Obasanjo needs a third term, indeed a life
term, in office. Despite the disingenuous attempts at obfuscation by aides like
Onyema Ugochukwu and Femi Fani-Kayode, the truth is out, and it is rather bald.
Obasanjo needs a third term, and he needs it desperately. No sophist, however
gifted, can mask the fact that what is now termed third term agenda is real.
So the question: Why does the president need to prolong his stay in office?”
Here’s how I began to answer the question I posed: “You could say
that Obasanjo’s personal fortunes depend on his securing a new lease on
Aso Rock. Anybody with the president’s recent history won’t commit
the incaution of loosening his grasp on power. Not if he can help it. Obasanjo
can tell, I am sure, that his post-power days will prove tumultuous. Too much
is personally at stake for the man. And I stress, personally.”
Once out of office, the former president would “enter and operate in the
Nigerian society as Citizen Obasanjo.” He would be “divested of
much of the trappings and accoutrements of office, including his awesome army
guards. In a word, he’d come down from the Olympian heights of gods inhabited
by Nigerian presidents and governors and be compelled, literally, to rub shoulders
with mere mortals.
That’s a forbidding prospect for a former deity (sorry, president).”
Truth is, most psychologically well-adjusted men and women are able to manage
the transition from the zenith of power to the awesome ordinariness of citizenship.
But Obasanjo struck me then as a man fitted out with an inflated ego, a sort
of megalomaniacal freak. He behaved as if he were a god, nothing less. He came
across as that strange being that one of my professors had described as “a
self-created man in love with his creator.” Obasanjo mistook his vulgar
passions for the public good. It was no puzzle that such a man dreaded the prospect
of exiting from power. What’s worse, he had compounded his oversized ego
with grave, illicit acts during his two-term tenure that was a reign of criminality.
Given his self-created predicament, Obasanjo’s pursuit of a third term
agenda made (perverse) sense. As I wrote two years ago, “As soon as Nigerians
discover that a god had toppled from the spheres and landed in the dust, trust
them to begin to ask questions. And I mean hard, rude, searing questions. Some
would demand that the ex-president give full accounting of his stewardship of
Nigeria’s oil sector. They’d want to know how much of the revenue
earned by their nation in a season of skyrocketing oil prices was duly entered
in the books.
They’d sniff and snoop, asking if any chunk of their oil wealth had taken
on wings and flown away. If anything suspicious were found, they’d demand
answers. They’d ask the new god to empanel a commission to investigate
where their money went. A man like Obasanjo won't like to stomach this manner
of insolence. If his advisors and he can pull off a rape on the Constitution,
then he won’t ever have to worry. He will retain his address at Aso Rock
until death do them part, retaining his seat in the pantheon of gods.”
In pondering our emperor’s claim to indispensability, I stated: “Men
possessed of commonsense have the prudence not to question gods. And if godless
men like Wole Soyinka breach protocol and dare to ask questions of deities,
well, there is already an effective solution, thanks to the sheer sagacity of
the president’s ever-faithful amanuensis, Femi Fani-Kayode. A few weeks
ago, Mr. Fani-Kayode enunciated the government’s sound policy of not speaking
to Soyinka and other atheists. Firmly entrenched as godhead, Obasanjo would
be guaranteed at least a four-year deferral on rude questions. Rather than suffer
uncouth critics pointing fingers at him or putting his name and corruption in
the same sentence, he’d continue to enjoy his monopoly as the one who
issues certificates of damnation and wholesomeness.”
Obasanjo, I argued two years ago, “has no wish to be hounded with…irreverent
questions. A third term, or more, is the surest way of keeping himself inoculated
from such rudeness. Who in his right mind would willfully subject himself to
the vulgar questions of an ignorant mob?” As one foresaw it, the questions
would cover quite wide ground. “Why, Sir, many Nigerians would ask, were
several corrupt governors close to you shielded from exposure and embarrassment?
Where, Sir, did all the billions voted to ‘eradicate’ poverty go?
After squandering billions of naira on your technical board, tell us what became
of that presidential promise of ‘regular, uninterrupted power supply.’
How did your championing of Lamidi Adedibu’s rapacious designs in Oyo
advance your vaunted program of social, political and economic reforms?”
I predicted that “the questions will come fast and furious.”
Lest anybody accuse me of gloating about possession of prophetic insight, let
me quickly confess that I predicted several scenarios that have not come to
pass. My column was a mixed bag of good, bad and indifferent “predictions.”
I wrote: “The day Obasanjo leaves office, count on some troublesome ‘stake
holders’ from Anambra State dragging him to court. They may petition the
courts to compel the ex-president to tell all he knows about the hired hoodlums
who in late 2004 rampaged through their state, accompanied by hailing police
officers, to burn public buildings and cars. Trust many Nigerians to re-open
the issue of why a governor’s abductor was not tried for treason, but
was instead rewarded with an oil block and elevated to the highest chambers
of the president’s party. Trust the few survivors of the Odi massacres
to ask their own questions. They may want to know whether it was the ghosts
of their slain brethren that had arisen to give the president ninety-six percent
of votes cast in Bayelsa State in 2003. I’d be surprised if somebody didn’t
dust up the genocide that occurred in Zaki-Biam under the president’s
watch. The people of Oyo State may be emboldened to question how police under
Obasanjo's control were used to ransack Agodi and to throw out the duly elected
governor. The president’s kinsmen, especially Owu kingmakers, may have
a thing or two to say about their humiliation at the hands of a fallen god.”
One thing was clear to me two years ago: The third term agenda was driven by
a criminal impulse, a desperation on the part of Obasanjo and his closest associates
to put a curious, confounded citizenry with lots of questions on mute control.
The third term gambit had nothing whatsoever to do with sustaining Obasanjo’s
ostensible reforms. My concluding paragraph of that 2006 column bears reproduction
here. I wrote: “The president's handlers appear determined to stake everything
on an odious quest for a third term (which, if wangled, will be quickly turned
into an indefinite term). Why? The president, I suggest, is in no hurry to answer
the questions many Nigerians will ask, in parliament as well as in and out of
court. He desperately needs an indefinite postponement of reckoning, but Nigerians
strike me as equally determined in their pursuit of reckoning. Obasanjo may
angle all he wants for a life presidency, but his needs in this regard are at
odds with the nation's larger interests.”
Nigerians won the day the National Assembly sentenced the scam of third term
to the trashcan where it belonged. Since then, we have come to realize that
Obasanjo’s so-called economic reforms were a cloak for his, and his minions’,
gluttony, lawlessness, and rank hypocrisy. We now know that, while Obasanjo
and his ministers sang us to distraction with the lullaby of due process, they
contrived to waive the rules for their friends, fronts and cronies and to transfer
billions of dollars of the collective treasury into their private pockets.
Thanks to the vigilance and tenacity of Nigerians, Obasanjo’s efforts
to hoodwink the nation into a tragic third term adventure met with woeful failure.
With the same vigilance, tenacity and insistence, Nigerians—labour unions,
intellectuals, students, peasants, the bulging army of the unemployed, the famished
and the rendered-hopeless—must rise now and demand that the former president
be put on trial for investing eight years in his nation’s pauperization.
If he is found guilty, then he should get a richly deserved second term in jail.
For more on Okey Ndibe, please visit: www.okeyndibe.com