Before Obasanjo Erases History

25^th January, 2018

By: Amir Abdulazeez

W

hile writing on certain things is sometimes a complete waste of time, not doing so is sometimes a complete disservice. After all, there’s virtually no single socio-political problem in Nigeria you will comment on without repeating yourself or recycling the same solutions you offered before. This sadly signifies the little or no progress we are making towards national development. Many people had rightly advocated for the ‘take the message and leave the messenger’ formula whenever Chief Obasanjo speaks. The truth however is, the issue is far much more beyond that, for if allowed, Obasanjo will erase and rewrite history before our very eyes.

Every leader who came after Obasanjo had his doing and undoing, but fundamentally speaking, all our contemporary problems can be traced back to his own undoing. I once thought that Obasanjo had carefully designed his exit from power in such a way that Nigeria and Nigerians will dearly pay for denying him a third term in office. He apparently engineered it in such a way that any other situation apart from his tenure will, with the passage of time, look inferior; and then he would have a point to prove over and over. All what I thought is now coming into play. 

Lest we forget, many of the problems we are witnessing today are the systematic invention of Obasanjo’s regime and its subsequent influence. This is without prejudice to the numerous successes recorded during his time which he himself boasts of. While he is trying hard to not only absolve himself of blame, but also pretending to proffer solutions out of them; the irony is that the true answers to our problems lies in permanently relegating Obasanjo and his likes to the distant background.

In 1999, Nigeria had the opportunity to start afresh and get away from its past. Unfortunately, Obasanjo navigated us into some of the same old critical problems we have been facing; division, corruption and underdevelopment. He may be given credit for marginal progress recorded in specific but isolated areas, but as a whole, the Otta Chief didn’t move Nigeria to the next level or significantly farther away from where he met it. In some specific areas, he even moved us backwards. That he constantly accuses his successors of not doing same is not only an attempt to absolve himself of the bigger responsibility of doing same as their predecessor, but to bury his own shortcomings in that regard.

Apart from vengeance, Obasanjo’s first and major action when he came to power was destroying democracy, the very process that rode him back to relevance and prominence. There was never a time in our democratic history when our legislature and judiciary were abused and bullied by the executive like during his time. National Assembly presiding officers were handpicked and removed at will. All these set a bad precedent for many of the things we are seeing today.

He made a monster out of the Ruling Party and then destroyed opposition with impunity. It was during his time that our electoral process became the worst in the world, a process which returned more than 100% voter turnout including dead people. It was during his time that a state governor can be abducted and the seat of an elected Vice President was unilaterally declared vacant. No matter how bad his successors were, none of them attempted anything close to this.

Rampant political assassinations and the unilateral withholding of Lagos State Local Governments’ allocation by the Federal Government against the Supreme Court order are still fresh in our memories. The very successors that Obasanjo is criticizing are those who restored the democratic process and the rule of law. ‘Yar’adua initiated it, Jonathan actualized it and Buhari is now consolidating it. It took more than 10 years of Obasanjo-less leadership to restore democracy back to its normal senses in Nigeria. He blamed Abacha and other predecessors, but he doesn’t want to be blamed.

Obasanjo is been credited with revamping the economy. How revamped is an economy which billions of dollars were invested without power supply? In fact, his regime left power supply worse than it met it. It took the decent efforts of the same Jonathan and Buhari he is criticizing for us to now have significant improvements in power supply. He may have raised our foreign reserves, but our economy didn’t move to the next level under Obasanjo, for he still left a crude oil-dependent economy. Despite Jonathan’s government been seen as the most corrupt in the history of Nigeria, but never in his time have we seen money-containing ‘Ghana Must go’ bags openly shared to remove a serving speaker. Many of us only knew of Transparency International during Obasanjo.

Ok, Obasanjo is patriot and nationalist, right? That was why he installed a dying incompetent ticket whose failure he is trying hard to distant himself from. He even tore his PDP card because of his self-acclaimed non-partisan patriotism. One thing we have not forgotten though is how he divided Nigeria along ethnic and religious lines because he wanted a second term in 2003. Never in our history have we seen such a skewed, manipulated and rigged election. He was once a patriot but many of his actions between 1999 to 2007 are completely unbefitting of a true patriot.

It was in 2003 that Obasanjo and PDP sowed the seed of electoral hatred watered by ethno-religious sentiments. It is the fruits of such seeds that we continue to reap today.  His government and that of his successors didn’t reform our security architecture well enough to be better than what we have today, neither was it repositioned to tackle the past and contemporary challenges he is complaining about. That he is the one dictating to us how or what our future should look like is because we haven’t really moved forward from where he left us. And in case you don’t know where he left us, you just need a short lesson in history.

We have all agreed that we are not happy with the kind of Nigeria and Nigerians we have today as well as the efforts of those at the helm, and Obasanjo as a role model in different aspects of life other than democratic leadership definitely has a role to play in changing some of that, but that cannot be achieved through his apparently self-glorifying and blame-absolving criticisms.

Twitter: @AmirAbdulazeez 

A ‘Nation’ in Search of Nationhood

7^th January, 2018

By: Amir Abdulazeez

L

et’s discuss two groups of events, make some analysis and see whether something like them is likely to happen anywhere in the world other than in Nigeria, the Giant of Africa and the biggest black nation on earth. When Nigerians in South Africa were killed, maimed and harassed in the height of xenophobic attacks in 2008 and 2015, there was hardly any Nigerian back home that didn’t condemn the dastardly acts on the top of his voice. Similarly, revelations of trafficked and migrating Nigerians been sold as slaves in Libya late last year generated widespread and unanimous condemnation from fellow Nigerians. The most interesting thing was that, virtually nobody cared about the tribe or religion of those victims before showing concern. Moments like this make you actually think Nigeria is a nation. 

Let’s see the second group of events. Within the first four days of 2018, there were three major attacks which claimed the lives and livelihood of innocent Nigerians. First, was the New Year day massacre of eleven people in Rivers State by suspected cultist. This was immediately followed by a suicide bomb attack in a Borno State mosque which claimed more than eleven lives including the father of the suicide bomber and as well as several injury causalities. The third was the massacre of people in Benue State communities by Fulani Herdsmen which reportedly claimed over many lives and displaced hundreds.

These and other past related attacks and senseless killings of innocent Nigerians have as usual received less than unanimous condemnation from Nigerians. The worst part of it is that people condemn primarily base on their ethnic or religious and sometimes political affiliations to the victims and or perpetrators. Instances like these, no doubt reminds you that Nigeria is nowhere near true nationhood.

What makes one confused is how Nigerians behave sharply differently on issues that require the same treatment with strict consistency; issues that revolve around humanity. One cannot say Nigerians are generally inhuman to behave as such, but it is more than obvious that our demographic differences and the determination to remain divided appear to have irrationally superseded our humanity.

It is a very bitter pill to swallow at 57 years of independence, that Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s words are still as accurate as ever. “Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression. There are no ‘Nigerians’ in the same sense as there are ‘English,’ Welsh or ‘French.’ The word ‘Nigerian’ is merely a distinctive appellation to distinguish those who live within the boundaries of Nigeria and those who do not.” He wrote in his 1947 book, Path to Nigerian Freedom.

Now, it is needless to waste too much ink in trying to recall events which portray how Nigeria doesn’t fit into the definition of true nations as well as how past leaders have failed in that regard, neither are the lamentations worth our energies. The question we must not however stop asking is, what efforts are our present day leaders making in trying to make us develop into a true nation? Whether we accept it or not, any attempt at prosperity will woefully fail without fixing the fundamentals. Based on the current trend, there will never be any Nigerian leader who will get the required national support and cooperation to bring the desired progress to the country in the next 50 years.

Let us not be fooled by Nigeria seemingly functioning as a nation despite not being one. The only reason why it looks so by the way is because the elites basically function as a nation through the government, but not the citizens, which are most critical. To put this into perspective, think of some basic things a citizen require from his nation or state. A citizen wants to assuredly feel his life and properties as generally safe and secured by the state or at least to feel satisfied by its efforts in doing so. A citizen wants unrestricted access to basic justice when he is directly or indirectly wronged even by the state itself. A citizen wants hope of a better future by the state, which gives him reason to unite and work comfortably with his fellow countrymen irrespective of their social, economic and political differences. No visible foundation for the provision of any of these three in Nigeria presently.

Some two months ago, I heard the story of a Nigerian from the north whose home a team of armed robbers invaded in the middle of the night. After spending hours in embarrassing and dispossessing him and his family of all their valuables without any hitch or sign of succour from elsewhere, they asked him to put on his clothes and go with them, in a move to kidnap him. He vehemently resisted and engaged them in a physical battle; he was so brave in doing so that he never minded; they had deadly weapons and guns. They beat him to unconsciousness and left. This man risked his life to save his dignity because he probably thought that there was not much the state could do for him once he gets kidnapped, and such is what it sadly takes to be a Nigerian.

It is most unfortunate that after decades of military rule, we didn’t really get the fresh start to nationhood that we deserved from 1999. Rather, we got plunged into one destructive crisis after another. The only probable reason why Nigeria is still standing and appears to be working is because the elites are united by selfish interest which is well served.

It is very worrying that our national legislature, operating for close to twenty consecutive years, has grossly failed to put our nationhood into clear perspective with a bright future. They have virtually functioned as a gathering of people who passed budgets after budgets which are barely implemented, pass laws after laws which barely make impacts, debate contracts and self-serving constituency projects, engaging in endless investigations without meaningful results, drain our scarce resources which would’ve been mismanaged by the executive anyway. Successive national assemblies have failed to reform and revolutionize our political system through a holistic constitutional amendment process and exemplification of landmark representation.

Interest groups who have been staunch advocates of restructuring have done better than the National Assembly in this regard, with lack of a national supportive framework and prevalence of deep suspicion and misgivings for the project denying it success. But, as suspicious as people may be of it, it still represents the best practical advocacy of reforming our politico-economic system.

Politics is being played as if every year is an election year. The talk of 2019 began right in 2015 and some have even started talking of 2023. The political players aren’t collectively concerned with our current journey to nowhere. The few of them who do are apparently because they’ve lost out in the current political game or trying to get relevance in the next. From top to bottom, we need to really understand where we are going and whether this non-progressive journey is feasible. Are we sure, we are reading from the same book? If yes, are we on the same page? If not, what do we do?  

Our leaders do not need to be told or reminded that a society in the 21^st century which is still debating its nationhood without significant headway is still not ready for progress. To start with, we need to revolutionize our politics, for it is from it that leadership emerges. Let us make it simple, accessible, affordable and transparent. Let anybody, no matter how poor and lowly placed have equal or similar political opportunities with the rich and highly placed. By opening up the political space, people will have a stake on how Nigeria should be.

Let there be an integrated approach in revolutionizing our security architecture to produce a system that is basically capable of protecting lives, properties and our territory; then we can take it up from there. Our justice system has been bastardized over the years by our judiciary and the executive seems to care less.as far as people don’t see the state as the vehicle to justice, a society is doomed. Let the Federal and State Governments consider the possibility of reviewing all the court orders they disobeyed from 1999 and obey them. Thereafter, we can begin far reaching judicial reforms to make justice available, accessible, affordable, enforceable and timely.

Those who think we should give up on Nigerian Project and allow for disintegration may be seen as rebels despite having a valid argument. But every nation that will be carved out of Nigeria but retaining the Nigerian mentality and ethics of doing things, which is more than likely to be so, will never function properly as a nation. Besides, there is probably no reasonable society left in this century whose aspiration is to build a nation populated by people of the same ethnic group or religion only. People are now bonded by unity of purpose, which is to attain prosperity together and achieve greater heights in all aspects of life and against all odds. We shouldn’t aspire to be different.

Twitter: @AmirAbdulazeez