Over the past several years, especially during presidential election seasons, a war of words usually breaks out between former President Olusegun Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar, his vice-president. Obasanjo always fires the first salvo, presenting Atiku as the devil incarnate. But Atiku never shies away from responding in kind. The self-indulgent, long-running feud is frustratingly irritating because its genesis is clouded by a fog of deception. I take no sides, but, if truth be told, Obasanjo has a greater record of dissembling!
To be sure, Obasanjo’s place in Nigerian history is well established and settled, but utterly mixed. As a war commander, he played a critical role during the civil war, and as a military head of state, he kept a promise to hand power to a civilian government in 1979. Decades later, as a civilian president, Obasanjo was an outstanding public administrator who ran a truly effective government by leading some of Nigeria’s best and brightest technocrats to drive through and deliver real change: securing pivotal international debt relief, implementing major economic reforms and creating critical anti-graft agencies, such as the EFCC and the ICPC, although he sowed the seeds of their future failure by politicising them. So Obasanjo deserves credit for his roles in ending the civil war, in returning Nigeria to civil rule and, later as president, in sound economic management and institution building.
However, Obasanjo failed woefully in the realms of politics and democratic values, where he’s a terribly bad role model. Since leaving office in 2007, Obasanjo routinely preaches good political and democratic practices. Yet as a civilian president, he ran Nigeria like a dictator, forcing the removals of several senate presidents and state governors, not to mention his party’s national chairmen. The 2003 and 2007 general elections conducted under his administration were so massively rigged that foreign observers branded them an utter sham. Then Obasanjo attempted to change the Constitution to run for a third term and secure personal political longevity. Obasanjo has shown no contrition for these perversities. Rather, when he speaks, he feigns righteous indignation, takes the moral high ground and sounds so didactic everyone is expected to swallow his “oracular” words hook, line and sinker!
Well, not the international media. In 2009, the BBC interviewed Obasanjo on “HARDTalk”, its hard-hitting, utterly irreverent programme. Stephen Sackur, the interrogator, grilled Obasanjo the way no Nigerian journalist would ever do. “You have a great capacity for putting a very rosy tint on your record,” Sackur told Obasanjo. The former president rejected the proposition. Sackur hit harder: “Lest we forget, they (Obasanjo’s critics) said, the person who introduced corruption to this National Assembly is Chief Obasanjo.” Again, he pushed back: “They are talking rubbish!” Then Sackur went for the jugular: “Have you forgotten the sack of money that was displayed on the floor of the National Assembly, being used for bribe?” Livid, Obasanjo denied knowledge of the bag, telling Sackur: “You should ask the man who brought it on the table.” But the BBC interrogator didn’t back down: “I am quoting one of your accusers directly,” Sackur said, reading from a note, “‘You are the grandfather of corruption in Nigeria.'” Of course, Obasanjo flatly rejected the allegation.
Now, I rehashed the “HARDTalk” interview to show that the combative, no-holds-barred encounter ensued against the backdrop of the febrile political climate created by Obasanjo’s Third Term agenda, which sets the context, or part of the context, for the Obasanjo-Atiku protracted animus. I said “part of the context” because, in truth, the relationship between Obasanjo and Atiku started to go awry in their first term, long before the Third Term issue emerged in 2006 towards the end of their second term. Thus, while Atiku repeatedly blames the public feud on his opposition to Obasanjo’s Third Term aspiration, Obasanjo is right to link it to something with longer provenance. Yet here’s the question: what made Obasanjo so pained, so bitter and so unforgiving as to wish Atiku had never come into his political life? And how truly sincere, honest and credible are Obasanjo’s diatribes against Atiku?
Recently, at the public launch of his autobiography, Charles Oputa, popularly known as Charly Boy, asked Obasanjo to name his greatest mistake as president. He replied: “The man I picked as my running mate, my number two, if I had known him as I came to know him later, I would not have picked him.” Pressed on whether he was referring to Atiku, Obasanjo responded: “My vice-president. I don’t know what name you want to give him, but my vice-president, I meant that.” That must be the height of personal animosity. But it was also the height of incredulity because Obasanjo’s outburst defies belief. I cite three reasons.
First, it’s outrageous for Obasanjo to imply that picking Atiku as his running mate was a greater mistake than his Third Term agenda that, for months, left Nigeria transfixed and convulsed politically. Second, it’s disingenuous to suggest he picked Atiku as his running mate in 1998 out of sheer altruism and not because of what Atiku, by then a governor-elect, would bring to the ticket politically and electorally. Third, even assuming Obasanjo knew nothing about Atiku before making him his running mate in 1998, why did he retain him in 2002, despite what he then knew about him, including speculations that Atiku wanted to run against him for their party’s ticket for the 2003 presidential poll? A retired general and former military head of state would hardly be so naïve. The truth is Obasanjo picked Atiku for his first term based on his own political cost-benefit calculations and retained him for his second term because Atiku had become too powerful to be ditched. Thus, it was a little short of verbal disinhibition for Obasanjo to say that his greatest mistake as president was making Atiku his running mate. In the wider scheme of things, that insulted people’s intelligence.
Yet the gap between Obasanjo’s rhetoric and action became ridiculously wider. In his memoir, My Watch, published in 2014, Obasanjo said the worst possible things about Atiku. He referred to “his propensity to corruption” and “his readiness to sacrifice morality, integrity, propriety, truth and national interest for self and selfish interest.” Then, in August 2018, ahead of the 2019 presidential election, Obasanjo, who holds a PhD in Theology, said: “If I support Atiku for president, God will not forgive me.” But a few months later, Obasanjo did exactly that: he put his weight behind Atiku’s presidential ambition. I was aghast and wrote a piece titled “Obasanjo’s cynical volte face on Atiku” (Vanguard, November 29, 2018). I wondered why Obasanjo wanted someone he himself said had a “propensity to corruption,” someone he himself said had “readiness to sacrifice the national interest for selfish interest,” to be Nigeria’s president. And why would he so blatantly defy God?
But in truth, Obasanjo was motivated by personal agenda. He supported Atiku because he wanted to dislodge President Muhammadu Buhari from Aso Rock, just as he backed Buhari in 2015 to eject President Goodluck Jonathan from power. This puts into proper perspective Obasanjo’s impulsive outburst that picking Atiku as running mate was his greatest political mistake. It defies logic that, in 2019, Obasanjo actively campaigned for the same person to be president of Nigeria. Why? Well, put simply, it served Obasanjo’s purpose to support the “devil incarnate” for president in 2019, but not anymore: call it political schizophrenia!
Of course, to some extent Atiku played the same game. For political reasons, he used to praise Obasanjo to high heaven. Recently, on the Arise TV Prime Time programme, Atiku said: “Believe me, I don’t think I could have learnt if I were president what I learnt being vice president to President Obasanjo.” But after Obasanjo’s outbursts, the gloves are off. It’s back to name-calling. So who’s fooling who? Yet the Obasanjo-Atiku self-indulgent war of words diminishes politics. Instead of peddling mendacities and whitewashing their flawed pasts, they both need large doses of humility and contrition for their individual and collective political failures in power!
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