The Oracle from Otta has spoken
Ititled last week’s column “Nigerian bloodletting - the oracles begin to speak”, as I reviewed former President Ibrahim Babangida’s public lament on the State of the Nation. I wrote “In Nigeria, Babangida belongs to a group of oracles who when they speak, it behoves us to look beyond the horizon and see or imagine gathering storms that may have informed their breaking of silence. Others in this class include former President Olusegun Obasanjo, and the General of few words, TY Danjuma, all three on the same pedestal with current President Muhammadu Buhari, having fought in the war to save Nigeria from disintegrating earlier than now, and have a sacred commitment to doing so even today. Indeed whenever they express concerns publicly on any issue, it behoves us to look beyond the horizon and see or imagine gathering storms that may have informed their breaking of silence.”
Yesterday, former President Olusegun Obasanjo issued a Special Press Statement that vindicated this column on issues of national concern over the last three weeks. In what looked like a thesis on the Muhammadu Buhari tenure, Obasanjo enumerated three shortcomings of the Buhari Presidency.
Obasanjo listed “nepotic deployment bordering on clannishness and inability to bring discipline to bear on errant members of his nepotic court. This has grave consequences on performance of his government to the detriment of the nation”.
“The second is his (Buhari’s) poor understanding of the dynamics of internal politics. This has led to wittingly or unwittingly making the nation more divided and inequality has widened and become more pronounced. It also has effect on general national security.
The third according to Obasanjo is “passing the buck … and blaming past governments …not accepting one’s own responsibility.”
Declared Obasanjo, “our Constitution is very clear, one of the cardinal responsibilities of the President is the management of the economy of which the value of the naira forms an integral part. Kinship and friendship that place responsibility for governance in the hands of the unelected can only be deleterious to good government and to the nation”.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has been a regular letter writer to past Presidents. When he did not write letters, he made brutally frank views public on national matters, often like a chess player, at a checkmate time when the king is caged at his lowest national esteem. President Obasanjo’s national address had been expected and stands out more glaringly today against the backdrop of clear derailment of the Muhammadu Buhari government given its inability to put a stop to massive communal killings in Zamfara, Benue, Taraba, and Adamawa State.
Indeed former President Obasanjo touched on the herders farmer clashes when he noted in his statement that “the herdsmen/crop farmers issue is being wittingly or unwittingly allowed to turn sour and messy. It is no credit to the Federal Government that the herdsmen rampage continues with careless abandon and without finding an effective solution to it. .. The issue of herdsmen/crop farmers’ dichotomy should not be left on the political platform of blame game; the Federal Government must take the lead in bringing about solution that protects life and properties of herdsmen and crop farmers alike and for them to live amicably in the same community.”
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s statement is a sharp contrast to President Buhari’s widely reported recent lament that he was being locked up at the Presidential Villa and against the myriad of despicable ills facing the nation that clearly required urgent Federal Government attention. The President had said as if proudly, that he was in no hurry to take decisions given his military dictatorial background. Sadly this was at the height of mass killings in Benue, Taraba, Kaduna, and Adamawa States, when the country expected some form of desperate Federal intervention, even one that only brought umbrella associations of the farmers and the pastoralists to a negotiating table. A bewildered and perplexed nation is meanwhile being told that members of ISIS and ISWAP had invaded the country and were responsible for the killings in much of the land.
Whereas the inciting report that ongoing killings are by members of ISIS, ISWAP, appear as a ploy to exonerate clear culprits of the mayhem in farmer/herder conflict, tentative conclusions can be deduced on which Government must act to obtain a return to normalcy.
It is not possible to predict how Aso Rock or APC the ruling party will respond to former President Obasanjo’s call on President Muhammadu Buhari to willfully terminate his tenure in 2019 and go down in history as the accomplished leader that he is. Those desperate to shove him to power bid for 2019 may engage spin doctors to vilify Obasanjo and put the blame of shortcomings on the past regime and the sabotage of the opposition. But Obasanjo’s salient truth is solid as rock. It will give more force to the inclination to have President Buhari take a decent bow in 2019. The masses are not smiling!
President Obasanjo titled his statement, THE WAY OUT: A CLARION CALL FOR COALITION FOR NIGERIA MOVEMENT. He has defended his mooted idea of a Coalition for Nigeria Movement. To me, the idea dies on arrival. Nigeria should do the right thing to register only two political parties, allowing for independent candidature. This would enable us attain all objectives of a coalition. Our challenge is really more that of finding a presidential candidate imbibed with understanding of the dynamics of power as identified by Obasanjo, to take Nigeria to the next level from 2019.