Olusegun Obasanjo: Ideas, Politics and the Love for Country III

Let me restate the objective of my unending search for the core of the heroism in the Nigerian narrative and my painstaking effort to celebrate and not to denigrate those who have impacted the Nigerian socio-political unfolding, no matter how unpopular they might be in popular imagination. Odia Ofeimun says my search is in “the spirit of an almost occult pursuit of Nigeria The Beautiful”. At the risk of a boring repetition, I took the challenge for this series from Claude Ake who in the foreword to my 1997 biography of Prof. Ojetunji Aboyade said that “the country has no heroes, acknowledges none, and it devalues and derails those who could be”. As is to be expected, I have received tons of comments on this series on OBJ, with some saying, in a manner of speaking, that the only way I would have retained my reputation as an objective and seminal public intellectual in this particular series would have been for me to take the position that affirms their ‘hatred’ for OBJ. I certainly won’t say ‘I don’t give a damn to such suggestion’. Rather, I would say that I belong to the core of those who see deep meaning that is worth unearthing and interrogating in what OBJ stands for even in all its complexity, and that is what I have utilized my being entitled to my opinion to give expression to in this 3-part serial.

That said, permit me to proceed by saying that, since independence in 1960, the Nigerian state has been implicitly searching for a leader, civilian or military, with the right proportion of heroism, steely character and patriotic commitment to direct the ship of state outside of the confines of colonial limitations. All plural states, and especially those that had the unfortunate experience of colonialism, are all saddled with this leadership imperative. Singapore found Lee Kwan Yew. South Africa found Nelson Mandela. India found Mahatma Gandhi. These states share with Nigeria a profound pluralism founded around a cramped national space housing different religions, ethnicities, cultures, nations and languages. Since plural states are combustible, it becomes imperative for them to have a leader with enough charisma and sufficient national perspicacity to hold the country together and lead it to development.

Nigeria has not been that lucky in the art of patriotic (re)engineering. The leadership redemption keeps getting mangled within the fissures of geo-national manoeuvrings. Clearly and indisputably, it was such manoeuvrings that frustrated the patriotic yearnings of the likes of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, often regrettably but unarguably referred to as “the best president Nigeria never had.” Awolowo had all the attributes of Lee Kwan Yew; a transformation disposition, charismatic aura and, most importantly, a framework for change founded on ideas, ideals, dynamics, strategies and processes. Awolowo understood governance and its politics. Yet it was that political configuration he aimed to refine for progress that constrained his presidential aspiration, among many other variables that have been documented in numerous narratives that bears no repeating. He died, as a wasted Nigerian asset of inestimable value, a tragic hero.

It is this same geo-national question of nationhood and integration that threw up Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. The emergence of OBJ into the Nigerian political firmament gives a new twist to the political saying that every state deserves its leaders. Nigeria deserves Obasanjo essentially because her political configuration throws up leaders who must, through the perceptive lens of political realism, explore and exploit all possible political means, negative and positive, to foist a vision of progress on the state. That is what Machiavelli counselled. It is in this sense that OBJ deserves the Machiavellian label. I made the essential point in the earlier parts of this series that no one who understands Nigeria can ever doubt the patriotic zeal of the Obasanjo. But patriotism, most time, makes a monster of those who get caught in its complexities. Call OBJ whatever you might; he was only respond- ing to the demands of realpolitik in the Nigerian state.

Take the third term agenda issue as an instance. There are so many things hidden on this issue that ordinary Nigerians may not know. I confess that I am also not privy to the confusing complex of political gamesmanship that made the issue a spectacle of the public sphere. But I can speculate. The third term agenda smacks of political messianic complex at first reading. This complex derives either from an acute awareness of one’s worth as a political leader or a delusion of grandeur, if you will. There is actually nothing wrong with patriotism transforming into a messianic complex, except that the constitution subverts it as a dangerous and anti-democratic tendency. Robert Mugabe always looms large in this regard. Yet, it was such kind of messianic ethos that Lee Kwan Yew latched onto; and it got Singapore out of the third world! It would constitute a good point of political revelation to know what OBJ thinks of LKY.

There is one fact that faults the third term agenda: Those who conceive it ought to have grasped the limit of patriotism.

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