Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo during his thanksgiving Service shortly after his release from prison
AFTER doing time in the so-called Abacha gulag, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo was thought to have earned the Yorubas’ basic prerequisite for national leadership. The hero’s welcome he received from Southwestern opinion makers when he was released from prison in June had given the impression that the Egba-born retired soldier was at last making peace with his immediate constituency. His handover of power “to the Northerners” in 1979 had offended his politically charged tribesmen.
That impression, eventually, has turned out to be misjudged. For, since his declaration to run for president a few weeks ago, Obasanjo has been finding it hard to have his voice heard above the din of criticism emanating notably from the Yorubas. The papers from Lagos and Ibadan are full of vitriol splashed on the person of the former head of state as commentators accuse him of all sorts of offences. A lot of their views are ethnically based, though. Obasanjo is accused of being a ‘Northern’ candidate, one that’s being sponsored by Gen. Babangida, a charge both men denied. This is a decampaigning salvo in an age when all traffic by Northern politicians aspiring to travel down the road to Aso Rock by May 29 is blocked by ethnic jingoists masquerading as democrats. Power shift, despite its merits, has been given a new meaning in our political lexicon. Some have even gone to the absurd extent of calling him unfit to practise democracy simply because he was once in the army. They ignore the fact that both American presidents George Washington (1789-1797) and William Henry Harrison (1841), among others, were former army generals who rose through the normal process, upon retirement, to emerge president. Ironically, the same fellows that supported the late Gen. Shehu Yar’Adua as likely president are those opposing Obasanjo today.
Obasanjo sees in Yar’Adua a role model. Both men had shared the destiny of ruling Nigeria together for three years and both were jailed by Gen. Abacha on questionable charges of coup-plotting. When Yar’Adua died in prison last December 8, it shook his former boss who, upon his release following Abacha’s own demise, paid a condolence visit to the family of the deceased and pointedly pledged to “continue with the philosophy, vision and mission that he (Yar’Adua) pursued while alive.” In my column on September 5, titled, “Obasanjo’s Kite,” I wondered whether Obasanjo’s feet could fit Yar’Adua’s oversized political shoes and if the former could tolerate the bashing his rock-hard credibility would receive in the shark-infested waters of Nigerian politics. Now that he is in the race, the heat is fully on. Last weekend, Dr. Tunji Braithwaite, leader of the periphery Democratic Advance Movement (DAM), announced that eight of the nine political parties had resolved to gang up against Obasanjo. Also, quite expectedly, maverick Lagos lawyer Gani Fawehinmi has rushed to court and sued the candidate. Their grouse was with the whopping N130 million Obasanjo tactlessly donated last week to his party, the PDP.
Nevertheless, the 62-year old chicken farmer is, willy-ninny, a Yoruba man from a core Yoruba state. A hero among his people until lately, he must have been bawled over by the cacophonous voices of rejection from his own neighbourhood. He appears as some new prophet with a message of peace but the people to whom he is sent do not want to listen. Why are they against him? The truth is that Gen. Obasanjo is one candidate who has the right profile, the domestic and foreign contacts, the resources, etc. — almost all it takes — to give any other Southerner a run for his money in the race for president. By not coming from the mainly Yoruba political party, the Alliance for Democracy (AD), he has committed an abomination. But he really has joined a political movement which has a far greater potential than the one the self-alienating Afenifere people would have wanted him to join.
In our complex political environment, the South-westerners spurning Obasanjo might be committing a grave mistake. They run the risk of completely alienating themselves the way they did when Chief Moshood Abiola emerged as a formidable presidential candidate. Had the 1993 election not been cancelled and Abiola lived to rule, the Bashorun would have had his own people as his greatest opponents. He would have had little option than to ally himself with the more politically astute northerners, thus leaving the UPN-drugged Yorubas in perpetual opposition. Now the June 12 episode appears to be reincarnating, with the same anti-Abiola elements rejecting a candidate they should have supported. This time, however, there would not be another election annulment and Obasanjo might form a government with his people outside its rim.
This is not saying he is the best person to become president. Others are coming up. He may not be as smooth an operator as Yar’Adua was, but he counts on the awe some political machinery of the late SDP kingpin to ride to power. In any case, Yar’Adua had demonstrated that even a retired general can aspire to be president and earn wide acceptance. And you can’t call that self-succession. Yet the brickwall of opposition falling from Obasanjo’s censorious tribesmen may not augur well for the future of democracy in this country simply because the man being so demonised could turn out to be a winner. Then what?
It can be difficult to stop Gen. Obasanjo through newspaper campaigns. For now he carries the shit-can of a man excluded from the mainstream of his tribe’s narrow perceptions, but this doesn’t disqualify him as a candidate. More than any other politician from the South-west, he suffers the fate of the folktale Ugly Duckling which was rejected by its brothers and even its mother because of its ugliness. But after a period of turmoil, it suddenly transformed into the most beautiful chic, one to which other ducklings returned to admire en masse.
Gen. Obasanjo the ugly duckling may, with tact and hard work, transmute into the bride of Nigerian politics. And tact in our kind of politics doesn’t involve announcing party donations running into millions in a period of general economic distress.
* Published in my column, Melting Pot, in the New Nigerian Weekly today
