Skip to main content

Obasanjo’s Assets and Liabilities

July 9, 2007

Here is yet another reason Nigerians should not be at
ease about Umar Yar’Adua’s illegitimate occupancy of
Aso Rock: his job designation may well include
a commitment to shield Olusegun Obasanjo. There’s no
question that Obasanjo is the power behind Yar’Adua’s
throne. Obasanjo was, after all, the commander who
prosecuted the “do-or-die” affair that conquered
Nigeria for Yar’Adua. The former president battered
the popular will in an onslaught so mindless and cruel
that it shocked and bewildered African, American and
European diplomats and supporters of Nigeria and
Obasanjo.


A man doesn’t mangle and bruise his fellow citizens in
order to take a back seat. Or to go into snooze mode.
Obasanjo did his utmost to rig the April 2007
elections because he is scared to face public scrutiny
of his eight years in office. The same fear drove him
to squander billions of naira of public funds in
doomed pursuit of a third term. When Nigerians
delivered a resounding no to that facile contraption,
the man withdrew to his political laboratory. After
mixing a few concoctions in a test tube, another
monstrous idea levitated into view. It was the
do-or-die option.

Yar’Adua and the National Assembly as well as numerous
governors and members of state assemblies owe their
offices to that manifestation of one man’s desperation
to evade the public’s inquiring gaze. Thanks to
Obasanjo’s machinations, Nigeria is living a
democratic nightmare. It has a man who answers to the
name of president but who is so haunted by his own
illegitimacy that he has quit giving the impression of
running the show. It is, Yar’Adua recognizes, still
Obasanjo’s show. The vast majority of members of the
Senate as well as House of Representatives are warming
stolen seats. They can’t have a mind apart from that
of the man who selected them. They know the man who is
god, and they themselves are used to saying “god is in
control.”

In the last two or so years of his formal presidency,
Obasanjo’s hubristic temperament took on a depraved
note. He sent his acolytes to go around the land
teaching the news that Obasanjo was Nigeria and
Nigeria was Obasanjo, and that whosoever nursed the
ambition of becoming president was guilty of worse
than a capital crime. Since god had come down to the
Nigerian earth and deigned to govern us, the
constitution (which allowed only two four year terms)
needed to be amended. That sacred document had to be
aligned with the wisdom that Nigerians should not hire
mere mortals as president when a divine personage was
about.

Infidels and ungrateful heretics that they are,
Nigerians balked at the self-evident logic that their
man-god should be permitted to reign unto perpetuity.
On his part, the jilted farmer-god decided to unleash
his wrath on his idolatrous and rebellious devotees.
If they would not worship him, and him alone, then he
would give them stones when they pleaded for bread,
scorpions and snakes when they asked for fish and
meat. If they went out to vote, they would be waylaid
by machete-wielding thugs or gun-toting police. If
they made it to the polling stations, they’d discover
that the god’s armed agents had already removed the
ballot boxes to a more congenial location for frenzied
stuffing.

The result? According to local as well as foreign
observers, one of the worst elections in human
history. Period! It is a crime that can’t be expiated
by the conceit of “unity government.” It is a stain
that won’t be cleansed merely by greedy politicians
rallying around the much-abused, hollow doctrine of
“moving the nation forward.” For once, let the nation
be moved forward on the basis of truth, justice and
moral action. Let the custodians of stolen goods
return their loot—to move the nation forward. Let the
holders of wangled mandates hand them back to their
rightful owners, or submit to fresh elections, or else
face exposure, humiliation and divestiture by
courageous men and women of the judiciary—to move the
nation forward.

To move the nation forward, let us demand that
Obasanjo declare his assets and liabilities. Rather
than being permitted to strut the stage and remind
Nigerians of his execrable tenure, let Obasanjo face
Nigerians and give a full account of his eight years
at the helm. His apologists allege that Obasanjo
transformed Nigeria. What’s beyond question is his
self-transformation: from a man of (at best) modest
means at his assumption of office in 1999 to a man
who, visibly, swims in money.

For eight years, the man treated the rest of us to
hypocritical treatises on subjects as varied as
probity, transparency, good governance, democratic
deportment, and accountability. It is time he balanced
his own moral account. He has a lot to answer for.

How were Nigeria’s oil blocks sold during his watch?
Can he affirm that the nation’s largesse was never
conferred on foreign and local agents fronting for
him, his relatives or friends? Where did he afford the
huge cost of building his private university? How did
his farm, in a feeble financial state in 1999, turn
into a juggernaut and cash mint, making a reported
monthly profit of N30 million? How about the large
farmlands he acquired in other parts of the
country—how did the cash materialize?

There is the matter of Transcorp, a corporate colossus
created within the sanctum sanctorum of Obasanjo’s
former residence. Is the ex-president prepared to come
clean about his entanglement in the corporation’s
labyrinthine affairs? For starters, how does he
rationalize his enrichment of a company in which he
has a large personal stake? Has he never heard about
the principle of conflict of interest? How did he come
by the funds to buy two hundred million shares of
Transcorp? Beyond that, how does he justify his
executive decision to transfer profitable government
enterprises as well as to award oil blocs to a company
in which he is, by some accounts, the largest
shareholder?

In the dying hours of his regime, Obasanjo sold off
the nation’s refineries to investors known to be his
close friends and business associates. Then he
increased the price of fuel. The two decisions provoke
interesting conjectures. Did Obasanjo shamelessly rob
the nation to pay his friends—and, by extension,
himself? The Guardian of July 1, 2007 reported that
Obasanjo’s government invested $1.1 billion in the
maintenance of the Kaduna and Port Harcourt
refineries. Yet, these two strategic national assets
were auctioned off for a paltry $721 million dollars.
Nigerians deserve to hear Obasanjo explain that
arithmetical puzzle. Since leaving office, Obasanjo
has been jetting about in a Bombardier Challenger 300
jet. Who owns it?

Obasanjo is propped up by an electoral illegality.
Ever the arrogant usurper, he basks in the third term
power that Nigerians voted decisively to deny him. It
is an open secret that Obasanjo dictated Yar’Adua’s
proposed cabinet—a nondescript list about which the
less said, the better. The ex-president anointed the
principal officers of the national legislature, taking
care to emasculate that law-making body.

Two weeks ago, the House of Representatives said it
would not inquire into Obasanjo’s last-minute sale of
the nation’s refineries. The supremely supine Senate
is even less likely to arouse itself to the task. As
long as Yar’Adua remains content to play
stooge-in-chief, so long will Obasanjo be able to
defer the date when he must take to the dock to duck
questions. Even so, Obasanjo will, sooner or later,
answer for what he did for eight years with the power
and office with which he was entrusted.

Already, things are looking bleak in one aspect of his
life. Once upon a time, Obasanjo relished the company
of former European and American leaders and statesmen.
These retired foreign leaders used to flaunt Obasanjo
as a specimen of hope for Africa. They held him up as
a man of elegant moral taste and prudence, a veritable
counterpoint to the cult of power and
self-aggrandizement that was long the continent’s
bane. Then, Obasanjo came to power in 1999. His
erstwhile admirers watched him run, and ruin, Nigeria
with unflinching determination. They gaped in
disbelief as he choreographed two primed-to-fail
elections. They came to know the Obasanjo that
Nigerians had always known.

Now, that foreign posse is too embarrassed to be
caught in Obasanjo’s company. They have rusticated him
from their circles, and he now roams among the filthy
rich in Nigeria. From the grandiose perch of “founder
of modern Nigeria,” he has descended to the founder of
the rudest party in Abuja. Just as he did to Nigeria,
he is now re-making the party in his own terrible
image. He will enjoy his illusion of invincibility
until such a time as Yar’Adua grows some spine. Or the
courts unsettle the entire corrupt edifice he
contrived in April.


googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content1'); });

googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('comments'); });

googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content2'); });