Ademola Adeyemo
4 December 2008
Lagos — At a dinner recently organised to mark his 70th birthday, Senator Arthur Nzeribe announced that he would soon return to the familiar turf of active politics. He lightly hinted that in 2011 he might be contesting for the councillorship of his ward in Oguta Local Government Area of Imo State. Ademola Adeyemo profiles the controversial politician
Remember Senator Arthur Nzeribe? He was the Senator who represented Orlu Senatorial District in the Senate for 13 years. That makes him the man with the record of spending the longest number of years in the Upper legislative house. The Orlu Senatorial zone is one of the biggest zones in the country with 12 local government councils and a population that is equally high. It parades prominent politicians such as Chief Fedinard Anaghara, Chief Hope Uzodinma, Chief Achike Udenwa, the immediate past governor of Imo State, Chief Rochas Okorocha, the late Dr. Kingsley Ozumba Mbadiwe and the late Chief R.B.K Okafor, to mention but a few. From available records, the zone has produced four senators out of six representatives since independence in 1960. Out of this, Chief Arthur Nzeribe has represented the zone three times.
Widely referred to as the "Maverick", Nzeribe bulldozed his way into political limelight in 1979. He did so when he "donated" a jet to the late Owelle of Onitsha, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe who was then the presidential candidate of the defunct Nigerian Peoples Party (NPP), for his campaign. The gesture earned him political prominence and consequently the Senate seat under the umbrella of the NPP. Although he grew up as a mission boy, not many people could trace his history beyond the fact that he came home from a sojourn abroad with a lot of money to throw around. He had enough money to last him for a life time, he once confessed.
After the collapse of the second republic and Buhari/Idiagbon military regime entered, Nzeribe went into political cooler but re-emerged in 1992 during the ill-fated Babangida transition. He later formed the famous Association for Better Nigeria (ABN). The association was notorious for its anti-democratic stance. The ABN collaborated with Babangida regime to truncate the transition programme and denied late Chief Moshood Abiola his presidential mandate through a frivolous legal ambush.
Before the election, precisely on June 10, ABN, led by Chief Arthur Nzeribe secured an injunction from the late Justice Bassey Ikpeme of the Federal High Court Abuja, stopping its conduct. But that came to naught because a decree empowered the then National Electoral Commission (NEC) to disregard such order once an election date had been fixed.
So the annulment to Nigerians and the world came as a great shock and disappointment as no cogent reason or reasons were given for the annulment. In 1998, when General Abdulsalami Abubakar took over the reign of government following the death of General Sani Abacha, he set in motion another transition programme under which Nzeribe joined the All Peoples Party (APP) and again won the senate seat representing the Orlu Senatorial District in Imo State.
Barely few months into the new administration of then President Olusegun Obasanjo, Nzeribe allegedly initiated an impeachment motion against the former President. He was upbeat that he had the necessary votes in the Senate to dethrone Obasanjo. He claimed he had 74 senators on board for this project. However, his plot back-fired with many of his colleagues rebuffing him. He also got suspended by the Senate.
When Senator Jonathan Zwingina (Adamawa) moved the motion to suspend Senator Nzeribe, all 68 Senators present voted in favour including his fictional supporters. The "political strongman" in deed stayed away from the floor of the senate on the day he was suspended. Only a politician of Nzeribe's mode would go to the floor of the Senate with no single supporter on a day he plans to sponsor a motion to impeach the President. Probably only in Nigeria can a politician pull that kind of stunt merely to entertain the press and the public.
Senator Zwingina in moving his motion for Nzeribe's suspension condemned Nzeribe over his alleged "consistent and unchanging anti-democratic character". His crime was that by tabling an impeachment notice against the president, he was embarking on a mission to destroy the "nascent democracy".
Rabiu Ibrahim in his "Insight Nzeribe: A Maverick's Meltdown" published in the Weekly Trust of October 25, 2002 surmised Nzeribe's controversial performance on the senate floor on the day of reckoning. He said: "Nevertheless, this particular day was supposed to be his day of glory, when by his deft or daft calculation, he would lead a majority of the members of the senate to first proclaim distaste and then to impeachment proceedings of President Obasanjo. And secondly, turn the game on the Senate President by roundly voting to impeach him. The culmination would have been the anointing of his very self, seen as gadfly of Nigerian politics, as the new and third Senate President in the spate of four years. It was not to be. The day could well be described as his waterloo, as his colleagues clamped an indefinite suspension on him until he purges himself of 'anti-democratic and disreputable conduct."
Nzeribe had established a reputation as an enigmatic politician who thrives in swimming from one intriguing controversy to another. He had attracted the toga of a politician who regales in endless webs of intrigues and scheming and to his critics, he was an inconsistent politician. For example, after the impeachment hoax and following the leadership crisis in the Southeast caucus of PDP in the Senate, Senator Nzeribe probably saw a silver lining in the horizon and decided to jump ship by decamping to the PDP in order fulfill his ambition of becoming the Senate President. Soon after abandoning his party for the ruling PDP, he became Obasanjo's choirmaster and started a political propaganda in support of Obasanjo's second term in office, the man he attempted to impeach a few months back. He derided the call for a President of Igbo extraction in 2003 and vowed that Obasanjo will win again and again.
For Obasanjo's project, Nzeribe quickly established a new organisation, the Movement for National Accommodation and Consensus (MONAC), to persuade the registered political parties to adopt President Olusegun Obasanjo as consensus presidential candidate in the 2003 elections. Giving reasons for his action Nzeribe said: "The leadership of Obasanjo's party, the People's Democratic Party (PDP), has emphasised several times that Obasanjo would be the party's candidate for the 2003 presidential election; the governors of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) are more pro-Obasanjo than the PDP; if my party, the All Peoples Party (APP), was unable to produce a presidential candidate in the 1999 presidential election - when the political situation was more favourable - what are the prospects of its being able to produce a candidate in 2003? So, you see that, objectively, the three political parties are on the way to adopting President Obasanjo for the 2003 presidential election. All that MONAC is doing is to make the adoption process a smooth one by making it more self-conscious and convincing."
Asked why Obasanjo should be adopted as a consensus candidate when everyone knows that the man has not "performed", Nzeribe replied that the question of "performance" did not arise. The issue, he clarified was to make peace between the factions of the political class and preserve their class power
Senator Nzeribe at an interactive session with journalists sometime ago in an answer to a reporter's question seeking to know why he likes being a spoiler, said "I just like throwing spanner into works I don't like." It is as simple as that. But just when someone wants to ask another question, he adds the clincher: "But does Nzeribe spoil for nothing?" He asks. No one could answer.
However, Nzeribe, the smart politician met his political waterloo in 2007 when his attempt to return to the Senate for the fourth time was truncated by the then governor of Imo State, Chief Achike Udenwa who mobilised the Orlu People's Consultative Assembly (OPOCA) led by Dr. Samfo Nwankwo to stop Nzeribe. He was thrashed by youthful Senator Osita Izunaso, his former political son. Some people have attributed Nzeribe's failure to return to the Senate in 2007 to his alleged support for Obasanjo's third term agenda.
To many people, the defeat signaled the end of Nzeribe's political career. According to Nwankwo, Nzeribe has been forcefully "retired" from politics and it "will be worse for him if he contemplates going back into politics because he will be trounced in a very merciless manner."
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