Adamu Adamu
21 November 2008
opinion
While it is not difficult to see how those who make peaceful democratic change impossible have in fact made a violent one inevitable, it proved truly difficult to see or stop the former president as he pulled the wool over the practice of democracy and good governance in Nigeria.
He succeeded in deceiving all of the people all of the time. Obasanjo led everybody into believing he was a committed democrat; and by the time they found out the bitter truth, there was little the party or anyone could do, if, indeed, anyone really wanted to do anything. It was too late because each and everyone-the party, the opposition, the National Assembly and the nation-was taken by surprise. When military-style ambush, gangland-style assassinations and stick-and-carrot politicking are combined with Ghana-Must-Go-laden incumbency powers, there was no stopping the determined executive intent on exterminating internal and external democracy. Both were doomed.
The reality was succinctly captured by the late Chief Sunday Awoniyi in his address at the Northern Senators' Conference in Bauchi in April 2005: "Right from the swearing-in of President Olusegun Obasanjo in May 1999, he gradually started to unfold a grand plan, which had been hatched soon after the PDP Presidential election victory, to take over the various organs of the party," the chief said. "The party manifesto which the party presented to Nigerians as the broad action plan for future governance was abandoned. Indeed, so thoroughly did they bury the party manifesto that some political analysts assert that the party had no manifesto and no ideology. The purity of intention with which the PDP was founded as a party that would work for the internal cohesion of all our peoples and for good governance regardless of religion, ethnicity or gender, was jettisoned.
"With its co-conspirators, Aso Rock factionalised the party, and in a most cynical and patently corrupt way, imposed a party leadership that they could manipulate and blackmail to do their bidding. The Founding Fathers looked on helplessly as the Aso Rock Candidates List became the norm for producing the leadership of the party."
The result, Awoniyi showed, was that within a period of only six years there had been five Senate Presidents-Evans Enwerem, Chuba Okadigbo, Pius Anyim, Adolphus Wabara and Ken Nnamani-and four party chairmen-Solomon LAr, Barnabas Gemade, Audu Ogbeh and Amadu Ali. And there would have been many more if Obasanjo had wanted. "Little wonder therefore that the PDP designed to be an all-inclusive party of brotherhood and friendship, has become what I once described as 'a basket of scorpions stinging themselves to death.' Or, as one political minstrel rendered it-shegiyar uwa, mai kasha 'ya'yanta PDP-a bastard, illegitimate single mother cannibalizing on its offspring.
The PDP has been described as a collective cobbled together in haste merely to capture power. Probable and plausible though this sounded, it couldn't have been true of the motives of all its Founding Fathers; but, whatever their motives were, the Founding Fathers soon found their way out of the party-and much of what remained behind could with accuracy be seen that way. It was just as if Obasanjo wanted to be its Sole Founder; and even if he didn't succeed, he at least acted as its Sole Administrator for the entirety of his presidency.
From what I personally know about some of the initially separate behind-the-scene activities, if I were to credit individuals with founding the People's Democratic Party, and, I'll wager Professor Jerry Gana, Chief Sunday Awoniyi and Dr. Suleimanu Kumo. But these three represented only two of the three tendencies that existed within the PDP. And both these two tendencies were in large measure off-shoots of the All Nigeria Congress, ANC, which Awoniyi led and which provided the political heavyweights, the technocrats and the conscience of the PDP.
The first tendency was that of the idealists whose chief exponent was Dr. Kumo and others like Alhaji Isiaku Ibrahim, whose days in the party were numbered from the very beginning.
The second tendency is that of the the realist-pragmatist camp, represented by the circle of Chief Awoniyi and Professor Gana. Awoniyi was himself only a more practical idealist who was more patient, more accommodating and blessed with greater readiness to forgive and forget than the unreformed idealists. Only in his opposition to the naked evil he saw in the party was the late chief utterly uncompromising; on other issues, he lived and let live.
Today, both Awoniyi and Kumo are dead. The former never fully recovered from the suspicious nocturnal visitors he received, and he thereafter met an accident; the latter died with inexplicable suddenness. One could be tempted to link their death, in part, to the opposition they gave Obasanjo within the PDP; but, then, this is a nation of non-investigators.
Of the three, only Gana remained close to Obasanjo for any appreciable length of time. Indeed, at one time, it could have with justice been said that, if Obasanjo had a kitchen cabinet, there was no doubt that Gana was the chef. Later, like the other two, Gana eventually fell out with him. Why Awoniyi left and Gana stayed might give a clue to the difference between the two, and the fate of their bids-the latter for the presidency; the former for the chairmanship of the party.
Critics of Obasanjo were not normally made chairmen of the PDP; they most often had nocturnal visitors. Those who fell out with him didn't become presidents that easily; they might have been better off picking the chalk for geography lessons.
But with the support extended to Gana's presidential bid by General TY Danjuma, nothing could have stopped the professor from beating any Obasanjo nominee but the fact that while Obasanjo ruled, Gana was identified with Obasanjo's cynical attempt to exploit religion, something that Awoniyi adamantly and publicly opposed with messianic relentlessness-with the result that Gana came to be seen not just as a devout Christian, but a potential, closet anti-Muslim politician. This might have been an unfair but it was certainly not an uncommon assessment; and if Gana didn't support Obasanjo, he was not seen to have opposed him. An academic of great abilities and promise, Gana would next time need to do a lot to reassure skeptics. In the end, of course, Obasanjo's born-again Christianity proved to be all sanctimonious hogwash.
The third tendency within the PDP is that of the commercial politicians with their coterie of business investors and associated political bunkerers, who supported Obasanjo to the hilt and were ready to do anything for him if he would sell the country to them-and he did.
But to be fair to him, Obasanjo didn't destroy the PDP all alone. He had by his side-and at his beck and call-leading politicians, seasoned bureaucrats, technocrats and the business privilegentsia, including many who were to suffer later at his hands.
A notable casualty of PDP's lack of internal and external democracy is, of course, Atiku Abubakar. This promoted governor catapulted to the vice-presidency ought naturally to have been the leader and rallying point for the North during Obasanjo's first term, if only to guarantee himself a solid political base. But he needlessly misplayed his cards trying to be the good deputy to a bad president. And because he spent all his time fighting Obasanjo's many ethno-religiophobic battles, hoping, in the process, to succeed him, there was no time left for him to build up a personal political legacy; and because Obasanjo didn't have a political philosophy, Atiku himself ended up having no political philosophy that could be ascribed to him.
Though he would later come to play such a leading oppositional role in the closing days of Obasanjo's misrule, it would be difficult for him to escape blame for his part in helping to midwife the democratic atrocities of its opening days.
Later, of course, he deployed all the resources at his disposal-the rump of the People's Democratic Movement that went with him into the Action Congress, AC, his enormous wealth which some people have questioned, his fiercely loyal and often highly effective subordinates like Alhaji Lai Mohammed, Dr. Usman Bugaje and Alhaji Garba Shehu-and, along with others, he ensured that the third term died a deserved death. But to many people, it was not immediately clear whether Atiku was fighting for democracy or for survival; but, for him, it really didn't matter because the two had become one and the same thing-and he soldiered on.
Luckily for him, because he prosecuted the battle against Obasanjo's myriad anti-democratic antics, especially the third term agenda, with such fire and determination, most people were ready to forget that it was Atiku's arrival in town and not the votes cast that determined the winner in the gubernatorial election in Gombe in 2003, for instance; and his word did the same in Ilorin and perhaps other places.
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