OBJ and IBB: Spot The Difference!

I once nursed the ambition to be a soldier. I liked the power and authority they command. It wasn’t like I had so much of a choice anyway. I grew up seeing them prancing all over the place like the owned the entire universe. As a pupil, I wrote essays on military administrators of southeastern state. Boys and girls of my era grew up having soldiers as role models. They were the Head of State, the Governors, the Ministers, the Ambassadors and head of all important political offices. From the mid sixties to late nineties, except for the brief contrived civil interruptions of 1979-1983, the military ruled our lives. They determined how we thought and perceived live.

The British joined us in what some people prefer to call unholy matrimony but it took the soldier to put it asunder. Many of the older guys that experienced the independent civil rule still nurse a sense of nostalgia about that era. Given what we know now about that period, I sincerely doubt if there were much difference between the attitude of the politicians of that era and the once pretending to be running things now. This does not in any way, justify the rude intervention of those young idealistic officers that set the tone of successive military interventions in our polity. The pervading crises of identity created in the minds of adult Nigerians will surely take long to wear out. We sure have overdose of it. It is quite common to hear most Nigerians wish for strong leadership personalized by military styled leadership. To most of us, a strong leader is one who carries out policies spontaneously. One who issues orders with reckless abandon; works with a certain swagger and extreme aura of self-importance. They assume airs of self-allotted intelligence especially when armed with that military stick and well-starched khaki uniforms that make them look like men from the outer space.

They rode the best automobiles, dated and married the most beautiful women, lived in the most appointed homes in posh areas of town and their kids attended the best schools while they destroyed the once thriving public schools.

It must have been all these that formed the role model status that invariably invited me to think about joining the military in the early eighties. Which young man of my time with any sense of ambition would not nurse the ambition of joining the military? And guess what? This was the direct opposite of what obtained during the time OBJ and IBB joined the military. The first generations of military officers were largely what one would safely call factory rejects. They were not particularly brilliant. The civil service and the academia held the real promise then and were the envy of most parents. If you were not a medical Doctor, Engineer or lawyer, it was as though you did not exist. Military was at the very lowest of the ladder. It was so much so that no self-respecting parent wanted any of their kids to join the military.

This was the military OBJ and IBB joined. Anyone that joined a profession under similar circumstances would surely have a stone or two to grind with a taunting civil society. It turned out therefore that these were the guys that formed the first elite crop of officers that took political leadership in Nigeria by force. The Military happened on us like a thunderbolt. It was a pure case of the gateman taking over the master’s house and pushing the master to change position with him at the gatehouse. Imagine the despoliation, the vengeance and the retaliation that will follow such scenario. This, in large part informed the desecration that flowed from the military rule in Nigeria.

No one in search of answers as to why we had the worst kind of military intervention in the world need search anymore. What we got for leadership was an army of occupation. Given the low esteem, the society held them; they came for vengeance. They first destroyed the civil service in 1976 when in one swoop the sacked a generation of well-educated men and women that have put in their best and looking forward to a deserved retirement. They destroyed our educational system and erroneously thought that Command Schools where their own children attend will shield them from the impending doom they were unwittingly creating.

Today, many years after the monsters they created have come home to roost; two of the senior apostles of this ignoble era are in the market place dancing naked. Guess what their latest pastime is all about?  They are in a competition, exchanging notes in the public glare about who plundered the Nation the most. They are comparing notes about who was rudderless the most. They want us to know the extent their peculiar kind of vision contributed towards darkness in Nigeria. I have seen adults take pride over achievements of their children at old age but I have never seen parents celebrate openly the hopelessness of their own children at old age. At independence, these fellows met a striving and promising Nation. They took it and practically ruined it and have the audacity to celebrate that in the open.

At a time, Nations are calling leaders who plundered their collective patrimony to question; those who ruled and ruined our own Nation are busy reminding us of our own collective inertia. I mean, how audacious and insensitive could these men be to the extent of calling themselves “fools” at 70 {As if we were in doubt before now } at a time of grave economic and security challenges whose roots could easily be traced to their regimes. Why do they think Egypt, Libya and the rest of Arab world boiling and calling their Leaders to order are too far from Nigeria? It is obvious that some of the leaders in the troubled region had sterling performances yet their citizens are calling for blood. How they are too sure it can’t happen here?

Let us even examine briefly the so-called OBJ/IBB leadership triangle. OBJ came to power accidentally in 1976 at the demise of his immediate boss General Murtala Ramat Mohammed. He was reported to have ran away to Idi-Iroko border when he realized the reign of leadership was going to fall on his laps. He was persuaded to come back after he got the assurances of those he felt held the lever of power then. All through the three years, he was at the saddle, he ruled with extreme fear and deference to those that facilitated his ascent to power. I can’t remember any remarkable achievement that set that regime apart from the ones before it. He hurriedly handed over power to a contrived civilian government in1979 to Alhaji Shehu Shagari, who saw leadership more as a burden than a responsibility and perhaps felt relived after the goons shoved him aside in a 1983 coup de tat. IBB played a major role in setting aside that democratic dispensation which in-civilized climes could have fetched him a tidy life jail even after leaving power. He was rather allowed to stage another palace coup that brought him to power.
It followed therefore that for eight years IBB was on the thrown; he turned Nigeria into one hell of a political laboratory. All manner of economic, social and political experiments were conducted on Nigeria during this period, which culminated into the sudden coma the Nation slipped into and has never recovered ever since.

One undeniable fact that came out of IBB’s experiment is opening up a somewhat constricted economy at that time. But what came with that was corruption of unprecedented proportion. I guess that’s what people mean when they say IBB brought corruption in our body polity. That may not be entirely correct given that corruption was already assuming a hydra headed dimension even during the first republic. Again, it is hard, indeed very hard to place a finger at what IBB did during these eight years that would make him role out the drums at 70 to insult the sensibilities of Nigerians.
The second coming of OBJ completes the triangle of evil that is now being celebrated as a model in leadership. It is a self-evident truth that his partner IBB facilitated this second coming and all the things he appeared to have left undone in his first attempt were corrected mainly for his own benefit. OBJ took time to visit practically all the capitals of the world in his first term. He abandoned governance in the hands of his vice Atiku who of course used it to settle his friends and associates. By the time OBJ settled for his second term, he suddenly realized he had history staring him in the face. He tried to sum things up by pursuing several projects at the same time and when he realized the limited time available to achieve anything meaningful to address the harsh verdict of history, he resorted to seeking a third term which escorted him out of office and haunts him till this day. is that the legacy he wants to market?

One thing both leaders achieved in abundance was their stupendous wealth. While IBB set up a hilltop mansion in Minna, Niger State, his bossom partner replicated his in Abeokuta in Ogun State. No one has had the temerity to ask them the source of their wealth. In Nigeria, such question is considered dumb and un-informed and that explains why we have festering corruption here. What Obasanjo and Babaginda should really be celebrating is not how old they are but how much they have contributed in ruining Nigeria. The military sat on Nigeria for over thirty-five years of Nigeria’s fifty years after independence. The damage they caused in our psyche, physical infrastructure and social orientation pales into insignificance when placed side by side against the evils of colonization and slavery. Of the thirty-five years of military rule, OBJ and IBB account for more than half of those years. OBJ spent cumulatively eleven years to IBB’s eight and if you really interrogate the source of IBB’s well-advertised regrets in governance, it points to the fact that he has not been allowed to beat OBJ’s records. The blame for this squarely rest on OBJ’s shoulders because two times, IBB staged a come back and twice OBJ frustrated it not because of us though but because he doesn’t want IBB to beat his records. This two have always quarreled in coded language and the un-initiated have always taken the first value of their so-called purported quarrel. Those who are still interested  in chasing this vain glory ranting of two failed rulers should do well to award gold medal to the loudest noise maker. Nigeria is too much in hurry to clean up their mess!