By Pini Jason
THE most direct statement President Obasanjo has made about his life presidency agenda, that is since he confessed in Germany that some people were pressuring him to continue, was the recent one he made in the United States that the Third Term agenda is not on the cards for now (Emphasis mine). The President probably meant that as a denial of such ambition. He and his operatives are probably the only ones who believe that such statement fooled Nigerians. His previous taciturnity on the issues fooled no one. One only needs to look at his increasing desperation to know how driven he is on the agenda. This desperation has returned the nation to the inglorious Abacha days.
The pursuit of an agenda such as the one Obasanjo has embarked on is always attended by severe curtailment of civil liberties and obnoxious use of the security agencies. Obasanjo has thus eagerly queued behind the Babangidas and Abachas. Obasanjo days could someday be equally described as inglorious. What a poetic justice it will be! My teeth jarred last week as I read how security men prevented eminent Nigerians that included the Vice President and a former Head of State, Gen Buhari, Gov Orji Uzor Kanu, Gov Bola Tinubu and Chief Audu Ogbe from meeting at the Sheraton Hotel Abuja. Radio Freedom 99.5 FM, which broadcasts in 10 languages was shut down in March because it belonged to a member of an opposition party.
In the same month, the PDP chairman, Col Ahmadu Ali ordered PDP senators opposed to the tenure elongation project to quit the party. Only last week, an IBB-for-President rally was dispersed in Gombe by the police. And yet the President says he is a democrat. Perhaps he is. But isn’t it also his sworn duty to protect democracy and the democratic rights of Nigerian citizens? The President’’s brand of democracy, which does not tolerate opposition, must be a mutant from Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or from Burma! But the most disturbing signs of desperation yet was the molestation of the Vice President in Lagos last weekend by PDP thugs and area boys led by one Muyiwa Collins, who I understand, most unfortunately, used to be a journalist. As the story goes, hundreds of youths carrying posters of the PDP on Saturday 8 April 2006 stormed the Murtala Mohammed Airport, Lagos, raining abuses on the Vice President who on Wednesday, at a meeting of anti-Third Term senators, read the riot act for the President’s Third Term agenda and subsequently declared his interest to run for the presidency in 2007. The thugs reportedly came in about eight molue and two civilian buses. They overran the Presidential lounge and prevented the Vice President from gaining access to the lounge and his waiting official aircraft. It was also reported that the thugs had earlier stormed the Vice President’s private house in Lagos but were turned back by security men.
They then, held a rally at the Vice President’s official residence at Ikoyi Crescent, off Osborne Road. This was a classic re-enactment of the sacking of Anambra from 10 to 12 November 2004 during the Ngige entanglement with Chief Chris Uba and the lords of Aso Villa. Through out the three days of burning, destroying and looting of government property in Anambra, the Nigeria Police were just some fascinated onlookers. They did not arrest one person. Instead they provided cover for the mob. During the assault on the Vice President led by Muyiwa Collins, the police just stood by and did not arrest anybody. Not even the report that they threw sachets of pure water on the Lagos State Police Commissioner, Emmanuel Adebayo elicited an arrest. Now, note, I quite recognize the rights of Nigerians to freely associate, assemble and freely express their opinion. But that right is for all Nigerians, not only PDP thugs. The police insist that we must obtain permit before we can enjoy the fundamental rights enshrined in our constitution, and Chief Gani Fawehinmi has told us the judicial source of that abridgement. It was on that strength that the police barred the anti-Third Term group from meeting at the Sheraton, Abuja.
The thugs who molested the Vice President had no permit and Muyiwa Collins said they needed none! Yes, they needed none, once they were doing the President’s wish! That is the hypocrisy that this Third Term agenda has enthroned in Obasanjo’s administration. Ms Funke Adedoyin, Obasanjo’s former Minister of Youths Development and Atiku Abubakar’s former ADC are standing trial for allegedly belonging to an unlawful organization called Turaki Vanguard. But other such groups sympathetic to the President’s Third Term are not illegal. Yes Obasanjo Solidarity Forum is registered with the CAC, but would they register Turaki Vanguard? Was Muyiwa Collins’ mob registered with CAC? That is, perhaps, speculation. But what is probably not speculation is that there is such a valiant effort to trace an Atiku connection to every Nigerian arrested by EFCC or who joins an opposition party.
I wonder if the President is aware of the dangerous trend that he is letting off. How did Muyiwa Collins know every inch of the Vice President’s movement? Why were the molue buses allowed into the Presidential wing of the airport? Yellow taxis and such buses are not allowed to ply that route between the local and the international airport, and that is where the Presidential lounge is situated. Why did the police turn a blind eye on an illegal rally? Who instructed the police to allow them? These questions would be asked had anything happened to the Vice President. Whether he likes it or not, Atiku Abubakar is the Vice President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. He and Obasanjo came on the same ticket, how they “won” notwithstanding. Even if he resigns, he still deserves some respect. If a member of the National Assembly’s interruption of Obasanjo’s budget speech can be regarded as an “insult”, which it wasn’t, why would we permit street urchins to openly molest the Vice President, not at a campaign arena, but in his private resident, his official resident and at the VIP lounge of the airport? This, I think, is carrying desperation too far!
These undemocratic excesses can inexorably lead the country into civil strife coloured by religion and ethnicity. This omen is not what an after-the-fact telephone call to the Vice President can obliterate. Nigeria is today far less democratic than it was in 1998/99. On Tuesday 28 March 2006, I warned here that “the world, including his circle of international friends are watching how he is going about his perpetuation project, with coercive use of some state machineries like the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, the state Security services, SSS, etc, intimidation, sabotage and alleged subornation” (What 3rd Term Scammers Are Not Telling OBJ).
I think the world is no longer just watching. The world is documenting these rights abuses and will throw them on Obasanjo’s face whenever he steps out of this country from now on. It nearly cost him a handshake with George Bush. That he eventually saw Bush unleashed such unnecessary hubris from my in-law, Remi Oyo, as if that was the President’’s first visit to the United States! The alternative would be that the President would avoid foreign travels and become a hermit. That would mark his complete transmutation to a local tyrant. But he can avoid this diminution of his stature and call enough, enough! The truth is that Atiku has become a large bone lodged precariously in Obasanjo’s oesophagus.
He cannot swallow or disgorge Atiku without some potential for endangering his political health and that of the nation. For example, he is unwittingly mobilizing the opposition behind Atiku. In September 2005, during the crisis of confidence caused by Atiku’’s interview with Thisday and his remarks at The Week magazine Leadership Award on 16 September 2005, I made the following call: “ In this crisis, Nigerians are looking anxiously for anyone who can fight on their behalf. If you ask me, therefore, I would say to Atiku: forget this presidential ambition. It is all gone. You lost it in 2003. But now, fight for democracy! Fight for Nigerians! Back what you said on Friday 16 September at The Week Leadership award at NIIA with action. There is more to live for than being president. Seize the moral high ground and become the rallying voice for all true democrats!” (They Will Hear Us, 20 September 2005) I think that moment has come for Atiku. Obasanjo has unwittingly transformed him into the voice for democracy, whatever his shortcomings besides. And President Obasanjo should remember that the Nigerian people, from colonial time, have always defeated anti-democratic forces. No self-perpetuation design has succeeded in the history of this country. I doubt if this will succeed!
