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Dotun Oyeniyi
 Author, Economist and Practicing Attorney
London, England

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In Nigeria’s contemporary history; do we still remember the comatose state of the nation the military left behind in 1999? When, against all rational logics, citizens of the world’s sixth largest producer of petroleum would have to endure sleepless nights at the petrol stations? Not because we worked as security guards at the fuel stations but because we needed to put fuel in our cars. With a chronic shortage of petroleum products in the nation, Nigerians appeared then like the children of a great cloth merchant who went about naked.

 

OBASANJO, ADEDIBU AND THE LEGACY OF THE PEOPLE’S DEMO-THUGGERY PARTY ((PDP)
 by Dotun Oyeniyi
 

Let us sweep under the carpet, if just for this once, for the sake of objectivity, the seemingly unrestrained vituperation, both verbal and written, which our immediate past president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo had consistently and ceaselessly been receiving since his departure from office. To whom honour is due, let us give please. Obasanjo did a lot of good things to Nigeria and for Nigerians. Or better still, he has such a remarkable providential benevolence of being the right man, put in the right place, at the right time to undertake the right role throughout the post independence Nigeria’s history. Even his most intractable adversaries know, if only in their innermost thoughts, that Obasanjo is a man who deserves the adulation, even reverence of us all in most respects.

Hate him or love him, Obasanjo is a man of astonishing achievements. He had trodden through both the military and political spheres with a majestic sense of mission. Like an elephant, his gait through both spheres had left indelible footprints and extraordinary feats which, for the avoidance of being labelled a pessimist, I would not say are unattainable, but certainly difficult to surpass by others. We do not need to flip too far backwards through the pages of our history book to discover this. If we however chose to, let us cast our glance back at 1979. When on October 1st, this lion of a man led a flock of military hyenas, then still mostly anonymous, back into the barracks – the first of its kind in the whole of Africa. The lion had hardly settled down in his Ota farm when the hyenas bolted from the barracks and one after the other, Buhari, Babangida and Abacha came to run Nigeria like a conquered territory.

Or should we go as far back as 1970, when after a three-year fratricidal hostilities between Nigeria and Biafra, the historic mandate of ending the war fell on Obasanjo again. It was to him, then as Brigadier Olusegun Obasanjo that Brigadier Effiong of the Biafran army surrendered after General Ojukwu had disappeared into thin air.

In Nigeria’s contemporary history; do we still remember the comatose state of the nation the military left behind in 1999? When, against all rational logics, citizens of the world’s sixth largest producer of petroleum would have to endure sleepless nights at the petrol stations? Not because we worked as security guards at the fuel stations but because we needed to put fuel in our cars. With a chronic shortage of petroleum products in the nation, Nigerians appeared then like the children of a great cloth merchant who went about naked.

Lest we forget how the military and their civilian cronies stole the nation’s wealth with what-can-you-do-to-us attitude. And with every facets of our national life taking a spiral, largely uninhibited fall into a position that was synonymous to hell, which all religions admonished us to safe our souls from; it was difficult to predict that Obasanjo could turn around this gloomy picture within eight years.

He has his own shortcomings as we all do, and there are a lot of areas in which he could have done much more better but let us give him the credit he deserves. In today’s Nigeria, some obstinate leaders are still stealing public funds but they now do it at the risk of coming back to face justice one day. The unseen but awe-inspiring image of Mr. Nuhu Ribadu, palpably and ubiquitously hanging over all government offices provides a perpetual threat to their kleptomaniac psyches. It is still too early to forget Mallam Nasir El-Rufai whose diminutive stature was never a clog in his way to instill corrections into the obdurate and arrogant minds of those big men who believe they can distort the Abuja Master Plan by building their mansions on lands reserved for prospective rail tracks, sewage routes and conservation areas with impunity? What of the iron lady, Prof Dora Akinyuli who threads with exuberant confidence where men dare not step their feet? And the lady who I like to refer to as a blessing to Nigeria – Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who virtually single-handedly lifted a debt burden of over 30 billion dollars off Nigeria’s shoulder. We must also remember the prolific banker, Prof Charles Soludo whose policies injected the much needed fresh air into the suffocating, even smothered Nigerian banking sector.

These men and a few others are the real brains behind Obasanjo’s modest achievements in office and does it surprise anyone that none of them is a professional politician. While these steadfast men and women were dissipating their energies and brains on trying to squeeze water out of stone, most politician members of Obasanjo’s cabinet were engulfed in intrigues planning; favour courting and the flaunting of their wardrobe richness as they gallivanted all over the world, creating more enemies for Obasanjo. One can only imagine how better he could have done if he had started his first term in office with the dominance of technocrats and non-politicians in his cabinet. Why then has Obasanjo appears not to have learnt his lessons yet and still continue, even after leaving office, to fraternise with and glorify ‘these animals called men?’

The Yoruba people, known for their superfluity with words, especially proverbs say if you wear a white garment, commonsense dictates that you should shun people who carry palm oil about. For an Obasanjo, with such an impeccable achievements and larger-than-life size both at home and in international community to now see Alhaji Lamidi adedibu as the ‘father of PDP’ and as a man who ‘we will continue to tap from his wealth of experience’ throws every man who cares for civility and modernity off balance.

So many atrocities have been allegedly laid at the doors of this self styled strongman of Ibadan politics and his army of thugs that it is only sensible that Obasanjo should not glorify him for any reason whatsoever and the PDP should look elsewhere for a father if it truly needs one or else it will have ostensibly adopt the name which I think the party deserves to be called these days – ‘People’s Demo-thuggery Party!’

If any living soul deserves to be made father of the PDP, I think it should be the affable, reserved and urbane Alex Ekwueme who was a leading figure of the G34 from where the PDP evolved. Ekwueme was almost certain to grab the PDP’s presidential ticket before Obasanjo was brought out of the blue to join the race. Those who brought in Obasanjo felt it was only under an Obasanjo’s presidency that the thoroughly politicised military could be kept at bay and several mutually exclusive, but highly combustible interests could be bottled up without resulting in a gigantic inferno. By and large, Alex Ekwueme was defeated at the primaries of the PDP. While still nursing the wound of that defeat, the campaign trail of Olu Falae of the rival party paid him an elaborate visit, some sort of dangling of a political bait. The grand old politician received them politely but insisted that his loyalty still remained with the PDP in spite of what happened at the primaries. That is the stuff of which father of a party is made not a wanton exhibition of thuggery.

Haven’t we all seen how Nigeria’s democracy had become a laughing stock to the whole world because of the multiplier effect of the injection of the Adedibu’s type of experience into the polity? Can we imagine, even in our most pessimistic imaginations that the hallowed legislative chamber of Nigeria, a place that should be meant for the most refined of men, being shamefully violated by our so called honourable men of the House of Representatives by throwing punches at each other?

But we don’t have to be an astrologer to be able to predict this. I guess that more may still come. Governors will soon wrestle each other to the floor within the fortress of Aso Rock and Mr. Yar’Adua will either watch helplessly as a ringside spectator or undertake the dangerous role of a trouble-shooter. If he settles for the latter, which I guess he will as a gentleman, it will be a miracle if they don’t deliver a vicious jab on his meek cheek. This is because we have sowed the wind in the last general elections; we can only expect to reap the whirlwind throughout the next four years until 2011.

Good people with enviable programmes were either chased away from contesting the last elections or robbed of their victories in the elections by blatant ballot stuffing by party thugs. Like a vicious tornado, these thugs moved about, crushing, maiming sweeping and battering opposition contestants and their supporters in a most callous and brutish way, and with impunity. The result was that gentlemen who joined the race believing it was an avenue to help the masses had no choice but to either scamper away or imbibe the Adedibu’s experience by joining the ‘People’s Demo-thuggery Party.’

All over the world, political rallies provide politicians the veritable avenue to present their programmes to the electorates. Not so in the last general elections in Nigeria, those rallies became an avenues for political thugs to flex their muscles by shooting sporadically into the air, and sometimes at supporters of rival candidates in an open but unabashed display of political camaraderie. Contestants took so much delight in going about with a retinue of well armed thugs, whom they used not so much as a shield for their own protection but more as an arrow to decisively crush rival contestants.

I was an eyewitness at the Awolowo roundabout in Ikeja, some few weeks before the elections when a Lagos State governorship aspirant passed amidst a retinue of countless political thugs. With lights at full beam even in the afternoon, to dazzle the eyes of any obdurate driver from the opposite direction, his convoy of assorted vehicles, laden on both sides like camels with innumerable political thugs drove with a wanton disregard to any known road traffic safety rules. Those thugs poked their heads out on both sides of their vehicles with sophisticated rifles held up and shot indiscriminately into the skies. Oro di boo lo o yaa mi as people who this aspirant was aspiring to serve scurried to safety, many sustaining injuries, minor and serious in the process. As the rampaging thugs were carrying out their despicable terrorism across the nation, Chief Obasanjo and other respectable party leaders looked elsewhere with incredible impassivity and ostensible connivance.

It appears that political hooliganism is a vital experience which the PDP expects its members to imbibe as a form of initiation. That explains why some political assaults which qualified to grab the headlines in other civilised societies were always swept under the carpet by the PDP as one of those esoteric family affairs. Isiaka Adeleke, a former governor and now a Senator was ambushed and narrowly escaped being killed by party thugs on his way to his Ede town and those who did it were not brought to book. Chief Lekan Balogun, one of the most well-cultured, urbane and liberal-minded politicians, with an impeccable family pedigree was assaulted by party thugs and nothing happened. The Ekerin Olubadan, High Chief Omowale Kuye was molested by suspected party thugs at the Eid praying ground and no one gave any fuss. And of late, one of the most important Yoruba monarchs, the Orangun of Ila was molested by suspected party thugs, not only in his palace but also at the PDP secretariat in Oshogbo and no one appeared to be startled by this sacrilege. All these are happening in a Yorubaland where gerontocratic tradition and atavistic subservience to elders used to be the norms.

So was democracy, the most civilised, least oppressive and most modern way of governance became desecrated in Nigeria and turned simply and squarely into an issue of the more thugs you have the more votes you score because of the Adedibu’s type of experience. The outcome is now staring us all in the face – a fight in the Legislative chambers.

Many desperate politicians were bamboozled into joining the PDP because of a conviction, not about the party ideologies, but of its ability to give them political mandate on a platter of political gangsterism. They were to discover, to their chagrin that they have been trapped in a place akin to a burning building without any safe exit. There is so much folly in riding on a tiger to attack one’s enemies. The tiger, after killing all the available enemies will throw down the rider himself to assuage its insatiable carnivorous penchant.

Democracy is about compromise; debates; ideas; freedom of choice; rules of law; due process; say of all including the minority but way of the majority and above all development of both human beings and their environment. Any democracy that can not offer all or most of these is not worth being called so; it is just the equivalent of the crudest form of prison management and that regrettably is what Nigeria democracy is becoming.

Thugs can only help parties in the short run; they do terminal damage to the soul of the party in the long run. The reason is so simple to grasp but remains obscured to both the benefactors and beneficiaries of political thuggery - those with mental capacity to generate the ideas, the programmes and the innovations needed to make a party appealing to the electorates will be swept aside by the dominance of thugs. The party then become completely bereft of the intellectual nourishment needed for it to survive and flourish. How on earth do we expect a guru like Chief Richard Akinjide, a complete gentleman like President Umar Yar’Adua or the amiable Alex Ekwueme to attend a political rally in which the only language spoken was the booming of guns by thugs? These men and a thousand others in the PDP are just good men in bad company. That unfortunately is the legacy left behind by Olusegun Obasanjo by his implicit approval of the Adedibu’s political style. The ‘People’s Demo-thuggery Party’ is doing a macabre dance at the back of a tiger, with their doors firmly locked, Nigerian people are watching from their windows, patiently awaiting the time when the hunter will become the hunted.

 

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