The Olusegun Obasanjo conundrum

PERMIT the immodesty of a very small fry like me drawing comparison with a man whose fate, to a large extent, since about 1969, has inextricably twined with the fate of modern Nigeria: I seldom travel in the same train coach with former President Olusegun Obasanjo, view-wise. Indeed, we are the proverbial walnuts in a single pod. Initially, I presumed that this was informed by a herd hatred for him among us his Yoruba people, pre-1999. But I am more bothered about why Obasanjo is the singularly most hated Nigerian in the country today. Do I need statistical backing? And the hatred is frightening.

Before 1999, it was not possible to be a Yoruba man and like Obasanjo. Not only does he bury his person and character in an inexplicable absurdity, a shawl of strange acts blankets his persona, making him high up in military epaulettes but abysmally low in kin and national respect. Is it the tale of his penchant for collecting women like an art collector and its sans border, even incestuous ones? Or the tale of how he bundled a police Inspector into the boot of his car for daring to ask him to identify himself at a police check-point, years ago? Or the episode of January 14, 1970 when the conqueror Obasanjo, on the way to Lagos for Biafra’s formal surrender, in company with Biafra’s Head of State, Philip Effiong, its Chief Justice, Sir Louis Mbanefo, Inspector General, Patrick Okeke, Chief M. T. Mbu and others, ordered instantly shot a Nigerian soldier who sexually assaulted a woman? By 1975 when Murtala Muhammed was Head of State, according to Allison Ayida’s book, Nigeria’s Quintessential public servant, the late Head of State had been inundated with frightening marital malaises against Obasanjo from his divorced wife, Remi.

I have read virtually all books written by or on Olusegun Obasanjo. As much as most of them tried to deodorize his personality, the real persona of a man who is seized by an uncharitable temper, scant regard for others and love of self above others jut out. But our knowledge of these fatal frailties of Obasanjo is over 30 years; why its resurgence all of a sudden now in the media?

Even those who laurelled him to power in 1999 – the Ibrahim Babangidas, SM Afolabis, Atiku Abubakar and allied selfish Nigerian leaders – could not claim that they had no understanding of Obasanjo’s fatal human flaws. However, to make him Nigeria’s civilian president was urgent and important because it was a game of self and Nigeria was at the basement of considerations. By the 1980s, Obasanjo had gone full circle in the exhibition of all the calamitous character traits that he is today being accused of. He had given the Bola Iges, the Wole Soyinkas and many who attributed some qualities to him proofs that he was not trustworthy; in the story of his liaisons, he had demonstrated a frightening libido that knew no border; to Obafemi Awolowo, he had exhibited a self-conceited desire to swap position and be conferred the numero uno Yoruba leader and as such, have the Yoruba’s recent ancestor – apology to Dr. Wale Adebanwi – destroyed; and so on and so forth.

Those who know him very well will tell anyone who cares to listen that, that a person of Obasanjo’s moral credential could become this country’s head twice is a reflection of the total collapse of the credentials to Nigerian leadership. One quality for which Yoruba, and invariably humanity, preens itself, is in the acknowledgement of good. Indeed, Yoruba over-appreciate good and are the butt of badinage among other ethnic stocks for appreciating the good of even months’ old. This quality is sparse in our subject. I have spoken with countless people who know him and have done him good at one time or the other. None had any good story about his capacity for recompense. For him, the great Confucius’s moral maxim of, forget injuries, never forget kindness, is absolute balderdash.

You must have heard about the man called SM Afolabi, senior to Obasanjo at the secondary school and one of those who risked being fed with the Aristotelian hemlock for re-foisting the reprobatic character on society. SM died heartbroken over a sin he allegedly committed that pales into insignificance when placed side by side the ring of malfeasances currently woven round Obasanjo and his daughter’s necks. At a later media interview, Obasanjo had disparaged SM callously. “One of them is dead now,” he said glibly and insouciantly, hoisting the dead SM as one of the emblems of his anti-corruption war. Sunday Awoniyi was one of those who rescued the young Owu officer at a time when his life was threatened in the 1966 coup. According to Awoniyi while alive, ever since, Obasanjo had, as the typical Yoruba wise-crack goes, pierced the eyes of his benefactor with stick. The story of Atiku Abubakar, who rescued the pre-1999 bankrupt Obasanjo with millions of Naira, you know. But for his mother’s spirit, Atiku would by now have been cavorting with convicts in the penitentiary. Otunba Fasawe’s story, you have heard; one of Obasanjo’s spiritual advisors and benefactors. Today, but for luck, tact and weakness of the Nigerian law, Fasawe would by now have had manacles jangling by his ankles, no thanks to his erstwhile friend and accomplice. A Classique magazine story about the time Obasanjo sought to become the UN Secretary General had, sometime in the 90s, quoted Prof Wole Soyinka as saying that MKO Abiola dobale-ed on all fours to him to plead that, if only for the sake of their common Lisabi ancestry, the bard ceased hostility against Obasanjo’s life-time ambition. Today, Obasanjo spits on MKO’s grave.

Have you bothered to ask yourself why there are seldom people who would want to raise a finger to help Obasanjo today? Why did Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Pastor’s wife, Oby Ezekwezeli and others unabashedly give evidences against Olusegun Obasanjo at the current power probe at the House of Representatives?

Obasanjo is the owner of a persona that migrates friends from his fold. He deflates virtually all his benefactors of their humanity, turning against them in malicious witch-hunt that could only be located in self-conceit and envy. But he was able to sustain this cache of cancerous human relations because he has overtime been viewed as a statesman. I would not be surprised if psycho-analysts find out that most of Obasanjo’s weird rebellious kicks against the norms of person-to-person relationship could be located in a defiance at and protest against the other person. Or at society in general. This could explain his hatred for his Yoruba people and seeming embrace of the other stocks.

Someone even propounded a metaphysical thesis: Obasanjo, he said he had found out, is like or indeed is a witch. You endanger your life if you do the witch a favour, for its recompense, to him, is greater evil. You needed to douse his face with scalding hot metals. That was why Bola Tinubu and Orji Uzor Kalu, his nemeses, have proven to be champions.

Having said all these, I am seriously bothered about the resurgence of the Obasanjo-bashing mantra in the media today. I am convinced that this cacophony of mucks daily splashed on the Ota farmer are primed and profiled for a purpose, the ultimate, I smell, is a designed calamitous epilogue for Obasanjo. We owe it a duty not to allow the political and security powers-that-be use our minds as a fecund ground for the germination of their vendetta ploy against him. The stratum-by-stratum tar-brushing of the former president cannot be co-incidental. From the PDP BOT Chairmanship denigration of Obasanjo, to the story of his incestuous defiling of his daughter (-in-law), down to the power sector probe where Obasanjo is alleged to have frittered away $16 billion to dud companies, I smell the usual macabre design of the political class, in cahoots with some forces.

Solomon Lar, Theophilus Danjuma, Atiku Abubakar, Jeremiah Useni, Abubakar Umar and allied latter-day Obasanjo-bashers only began shouting from the roof-top when Obasanjo turned a disaster of their design. Some of them live personal lives that are worse than Obasanjo‘s. Isnt it in this clime that we are told that our leaders are homo and bisexuals? And because the commodity in question is a thoroughly detested and detestable piece of earthenware, we all become willing recruits of this mind war. I understand Bola Tinubu and Atiku’s frustration in this regard. The only people who could stricture Obasanjo and I would take seriously today are, Gani Fawehinmi, Ayo Adebanjo and some Afenifere leaders who have always maintained that Obasanjo is everything but that Yoruba leadership the West of Nigeria had always wanted to give a federal Nigeria. That he turned out a disaster is a manifestation of their prophetic predictions.

I have a feeling that, because they hate Obasanjo so much, these profilers are weaving a tapestry of his liquidation. That is why, when Obasanjo himself said he does not bother about his consistent profiling in the media, I am bothered for him and I think he is too intelligent not to know that the way he profiled many people’s downfall is how he is being profiled for Hades. Part of the surreptitious calculations, I guess, was what Useni let out of the bag recently. Even Sani Abacha was better than Obasanjo, he had said. Haba! If this is a melody in remembrance of the Indian, sorry, late Nigerian General, it could be understandable. Obasanjo has a thousand and one leadership and personal flaws which we know and acknowledge. It is certainly not for him to be compared with our Hastings Kamuzu Banda.

Bamaiyi and Solomon

SO the former Chief of Staff, Lt. General Ishaya Bamaiyi, is a free man, after nine years in detention? I am happy for the Zuru, Kebbi State soldier. If you look at the General, you would discover that the triad of power, strength and glory have departed him. His health has even headed for the canvass.

That is why when I see men who hold the reins of power revel in the puddle of power and allow it hover above the world, to the crowd’s ululation, I pity their ignorance. Money is even more enduring than power for when the former exeunts – apology to Shakespeare – you could see the cicatrices of its former majesty. But when power leaves like a vapour that it is, it leaves its holder dry, transfixed and spent. Holders of power should indeed be pitied.

No wonder the biblical Solomon said that, having tasted everything, he found out that it is all vanity.

In the time of the butcherbird

THE Yoruba have a very powerful proverb that admonishes the oppressed to withhold the last pint of his resistance and keep at it, in spite of biting cudgels of the oppressor.

It enjoins the harangued by the Egungun masquerade to keep hope alive as, a similar wary thread runs through the experiences of both the oppressed and the oppressor. The Zimbabwean experience, with old man Robert Mugabe as the hero in the historic theatre, bears similitude with this Yoruba saying.

While Mugabe, who has ruled his people for decades, inflicts personal rule on Zimbabwe, he abhors global calls for reform and change and resisted every call for him to exit Government House at over 80, while remaining the father of the nation which he is, having helped his country win independence.

But a time comes when providence decides that the protesting blood shed as propitiations, as well as the tears of anguish of the oppressed have reached a dripping crescendo. No one should shed tears when Mugabe descends the dark alley of the butcherbirds.

The Grange dance

I hope President Umaru Yar’Adua’s spindoctors haven’t begun to head for the discotheque to dance away the ‘victory’ of the forced resignation of the erstwhile Minister of Health, Adenike Grange, her Minister of State, and their cronies in the graft triumvirate? I hope they don’t cite it as one of the laurels of the present administration? I hope to God they haven’t.

By now, we need to have left that spot of the past where this public example was seen as equal to the fight against corruption. There are a thousand and one Granges in every ensemble of Nigerian private and public lives and their heads are lionized daily like a hydra’s because the very fundament of resistance against corruption – strengthening of values and norms that bind the family and society – are still weak.

I bet that when those that are made public example get home, they will be hoisted up like heroes. (I hope to talk about why next week.) The cabals of sleaze in other ministries and elsewhere would only fine-tune strategies to ensure that Yar’Adua seldom gets his periodic spoils to take home to the shrine of the god of anti-corruption.

Amandla! to the assassin

IT is no longer news that Mr. Calus Enoma , the Edo State Commissioner for Information, was murdered in his Benin hotel room last week. Nor is it news that his assailants have not, and may never be apprehended. Nigeria is aiming for that laurel among the comity of nations.

The heart of man – be it white or black – says the holy writ, is brackish and full of foul oozes. But in America and other civilized countries, criminals like those that set the sun of the commissioner, know that it may take long, the long arm of the law will apprehend them.

In Nigeria, criminals make barbecue of their victims, knowing how short the arm of the law is; that is, if our law is not an amputee! Soon, we would revert to that dark period in apartheid South Africa when felling fellow men – setting them alight through the notorious township necklace (a tyre to the neck and petrol, as comeuppance for betrayal)—was the norm. Perhaps, when we get there, we would sing our own Amandla!