25th 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
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