Between Obasanjo, Ribadu and The President

DIALOGUE WITH NIGERIA BY AKIN OSUNTOKUN

In the event of a random sampling of n the event of a random sampling of Nigerian public opinion leaders, the probability is that former President Olusegun Obasanjo will be judged the best of all those who have had the privilege of holding the office of President (or as Obasanjo naysayers would say) the one eyed man in the land of the blind. It is also fair to say that, more than his colleagues, he has benefited from a better education and training in the school of Nigerian leadership. some of them, inadvertently. It is a platitude to call him a man of destiny. None has had a more fulsome harvest of providential interventions. He typifies the saying that opportunity plus preparedness is equal to luck (Opportunity+Preparedness =Luck)

An early pointer to his charmed life trajectory was the prophetic foresight of the then Military Governor of the Northern Region, Colonel Hassan Usman Katsina. In the thick of the July 1966 crisis, Obasanjo had to leave Kaduna in a hurry – there was the fear that the safety of military officers of Southern origin was no longer guaranteed. Katsina then assigned two armoured vehicles to secure his journey to the airport and warned that Obasanjo must come to no harm because Nigeria was going to need him in the future. Four years later he was on hand to receive the surrender of the secessionist Biafra army at the end of the civil war in January 1970 (as General Officer Commander of the victorious Third Marine Commando).

He and the late General Murtala Mohammed were the nationalist godfathers of the July 1975 coup that ousted General Yakubu Gowon. Obasanjo thereafter became the deputy to Mohammed in his capacity as military head of state. After the accident of the abortive February 13th 1976 coup in which Mohammed was killed, he was a shoeing into the vacuum created by the assassination of his principal. He was ordained to barely escape getting killed in the coup by fortuitous circumstances. It so happened that on the same day, he had altered his daily routine to accommodate the christening of General Olu Bajowa’s baby to whom he was godfather. Furthermore, General Dumuje was mistaken for him and was accordingly rained with bullets but he survived.

All along in his career, he deliberately cultivated the trust and confidence of the dominant conservative wing of the Northern political establishment.There were rumours to the effect that he was the godfather of the best known Northern elite pressure group, Kaduna mafia. In the subsequent coup of December 1983, the leading conspirators had requested him to pick up the baton he left behind in October 1979 but he declined. You will recall the Mohammed Buhari junta routinely self identified as an offshoot of the Murtala-Obasanjo regime.

As head of state, Obasanjo burnished his lustre and appeal with the successful implementation of a military disengagement from power and transition of political power to civil democratic rule programme. He thereafter commenced another life stream as a burgeoning World statesman.Today, he is the chairman of the committee of former Presidents. Not to talk of the martyrdom effect of the adversity he endured at the murderous caprice of the rogue military dictator, General Sani Abacha. For that matter what used to be the dark spot of his political career, the third term gambit, appears to have transmuted into a missed opportunity in the popular imagination.

It is a reflection of his productive and disciplined life that he went on to acquire a doctorate degree in theology, immediately after his eight years presidency. Exasperated at the repeated failures of his successors, he had pointedly asked me to propose a way out of the mess Nigeria has found itself. He enjoyed utilising me as proxy for the Obafemi Awolowo political school of thought with which he was often at cross purposes. He enjoined me to speak freely without regard to his well known stump speeches.

Obasanjo belongs to a category of Nigerian leaders especially those of military background who are generally disdainful of ‘restructuring’ as reflected in his dismissive refrain that what Nigeria needs is a “restructuring of the mind”. This attitude is typical of the status quo stalwarts who are instinctively suspicious of any suggestion of decentralisation as the only realistic response to the lapse of Nigeria into interminable political and governance abyss. As probable panacea for what ails Nigeria my default position essentially boils down to an advocacy for the restoration of federalism as against reducing the political problem of Nigeria to the absence of ‘good leadership’.

So how do we conjure this good leadership? If we had been searching for this elusive good leadership for the better part of post-independence Nigeria, shouldn’t we get realistic and retrace our footsteps from where we sprayed into the wrong turn. If we were lucky enough to get good leadership occasionally, how do we ensure that the magic does not depart our shores again?.

The emergence of good leaders or bad leaders is random and not predictable unlike the permanence and certainty of the mediation of impersonal constitutional structure. Properly understood, the constitution is the product of our collective wisdom, whose applicability is the irreducible minimum of our coexistence. Moreso for a country that is prone to dysfunction. The futility of predicating the viability of Nigeria on the hope for good leadership has been the sad story of the fourth republic.

Democracy is particularly notorious in its blindness to virtue and optimal outcome of elections. Otherwise Donald Trump would not have been elected American president seven years ago. And no truth has been better said than the quip of Obasanjo that “the best candidate may not win the election” in the 1979 presidential election. Winston Churchill once said that: “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”

What is within our capacity to determine is the constitutional structure that is responsive to our foundational challenges. A viable constitutional order anticipates the worst case scenario of a destructive leadership, hence its inherent imposition of limitations and constraints on the capacity of bad leadership to damage society. It is analogous to taking out an insurance cover for your properties. Science proceeds from the assumption of worst case scenario not the wishful thinking of anticipating good leadership. It is in the assumption of this scientific logic that federalism was formulated as response to Nigeria’s peculiarities and vision. The most debilitating source of Nigeria’s political instability and crisis since 1966 was the military rule enabled over centralisation of powers hence the self prescription of decentralisation.

Nowhere is it truer than Nigeria that federalism is tragedy ‘as it is intended as a response mechanism to political conflict not an optimal strategy. It is a suboptimal compromise in the effort to defuse real and potential situations of conflict and ensure that such situations do not degenerate into less attractive possibilities’¹ The optimal strategy would have been for Nigeria not to be amalgamated in the first place.These were my ruminations and I suspect I might have moved a needle in his disposition towards devolution and decentralisation of powers.

Within the cosmopolitan ambience of the Obasanjo Presidential court would be found the constellation of Nuhu Ribadu and peers from across the nooks and crannies of Nigeria. We worked and lived like a political family of happy warriors. Ribadu was particularly close to Obasanjo. And in the post-Obasanjo era, we endure different degrees of withdrawal syndrome but who would have thought Nigeria would equally suffer a withdrawal syndrome to the extent of wishing that the third term bid had succeeded. His all encompassing role as the National Security Adviser has weighed heavily on him in an important respect-serving to bridge the gap between his principal, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Obasanjo. Understandably, he was not happy that Obasanjo did not attend the last council of state meeting in Abuja. We more or less spent the last Christmas break in Lagos to set in motion the process of thawing the frosty relationship between both of them.

So far as I know, the only encounter between the former President and the incumbent was the occasion of the inauguration ceremony of the ‘reelected’ Governor of Imo state, Hope Uzordinma. In a buoyant mood Tinubu had warmed up to Obasanjo and said aloud he was coming to see the former President. Obasanjo said that what he most appreciated was the waiver of the protocol that no flight takes off when the president is waiting to board his flight. Surprisingly, the camaraderie was blacked out in newspaper reports the following day. If you add two plus two, it is easy to conclude that some people (in Tinubu’s caucus) have a vested interest in the perpetuation of the cold war between the two.

Inevitably, the absence of Obasanjo at the council of state meeting was the kernel of our discussion the last time I saw Nuhu. He found it unacceptable that the former President would generously give of his time and energy to help distressed countries and ignore Nigeria. My position is that a newly elected President should have honoured his predecessors with at least a courtesy telephone call once he resumes office. This is good etiquette, moreso in the Yoruba culture especially if the incumbent is the younger party. I was surprised to see that an acclaimed master of political pragmatism could not transcend personal reservation in such a situation of realpolitik.

I issued a press statement on the itinerary of Obasanjo on Sunday which consisted of his ceremonial visits to Benin to felicitate with Chief Gabriel Igbinedion on his 90th birthday and from there went to Minna on a compensatory retroactive birthday felicitations. He was not in Nigeria on the actual birthday of President Ibrahim Babangida on August 17th. The statement was intended to put the itinerary in its true perspective as against the insinuation of ulterior motive

couched in reports such as this “it was further learnt that, at the residence of General Babangida (rtd), another former Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar (rtd), and former National Security Adviser (NSA), General Aliyu Gusau (rtd), were also waiting for Former President Obasanjo”.

By now, it is common knowledge that Abdulsalami and Babangida are close neighbours and close friends in the retirement residence in Minna. And both of them are personally close to Obasanjo including General Aliyu Gusau. All of whom were his mentees.The news would have been that these friends stayed away when Obasanjo came calling.