I received feedback in my mail on my last article titled 'Oh, for a James Ibori or Ghali Na'Abba!'. While many agreed that two leaders stood firm against the excesses of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, unlike today's current set of weaklings masquerading as governors and lawmakers, others disagreed with my view on the issue of the controversial third-term agenda, which I claimed Ibori and some of his colleague-governors stood firmly against.
A veteran journalist informed me that contrary to the claim, the majority of the governors supported the Third Term agenda because, like Obasanjo, they will also benefit from it. "If Obasanjo's tenure was extended by another four or six years, the same would have also applied to the state governors then, and that was why many of them supported the bid clandestinely," he said. A former lawmaker even told me Ibori was one of the funders of the failed third-term agenda.
I couldn't get across to Chief Ibori, but I spoke with a former governor in the Northwest political zone who also played a major role in the Third Term Agenda saga. He said many of the governors, including Ibori, worked covertly with concerned Nigerians to kill the Third Term agenda while few governors who were the "OBJ boys' supported it. According to him, the agenda was entirely Obasanjo's idea, and that was why he convened the National Political Reform Conference in February, citing the need to review the constitution in order to stabilise the country.
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"I don't think it is correct to say Ibori supported the third-term agenda then. The whole thing was entirely Obasanjo's idea, even though some governors supported it, but definitely not Ibori. Many of us worked covertly and underground to ensure we killed it while giving Obasanjo the impression that we were on the same page with him. If you recall, we, the PDP governors, then never wanted him to get a second term. Why would we then want to extend his tenure to get a third term?. Obasanjo never liked Ibori for many reasons, especially due to his closeness to Bola (Tinubu), who was then in the opposition party and was at loggerheads with the president on the issue of the creation of additional local councils in Lagos State."
"Don't forget, the bill was killed in the National Assembly. Many of the governors gave clear directives to the senators and reps to vote against it. Many of the lawmakers told us they were being offered huge bribes that were tempting by Obasanjo's men in order to buy their conscience, but we told them not to accept and that we will compensate them. I know some governors even rewarded their lawmakers double the money they were offered by Obasanjo's men. So, if Ibori funded anything, it was for lawmakers not to support the third-term agenda of Obasanjo."
"Obasanjo's third-term agenda started way back even before 2006. The report of the 2005 national confab that he convened had in it a six single-term presidency, which will start with Obasanjo after completing his eight years. We governors worked together to ensure that report was not implemented, and Ibori played a major role in that aspect. In the National Assembly, the likes of Aminu Masari, Ibrahim Mantu, and Ken Nnamani also worked with us covertly to ensure the third-term agenda was not successful. It is also public knowledge that the late Ibrahim Mantu shared money in the Senate. That is the truth about the third-term agenda."
This claim was corroborated by a former governor of Abia State, Orji Uzor Kalu, in his autobiography titled 'My Life.' In the book, Kalu claimed Mantu, who was then the chairman of the Senate Constitution Review Committee, worked with the governors to kill the Third Term agenda while also pretending to work with Obasanjo to actualise the Third Term agenda. Kalu also confirmed that when Obasanjo's men gave the late Abia senator, Uche Chukwumerije, the sum of N50m as a bribe to support the third-term bid, he asked him to return the money and gave him another N50m as compensation.
As reported by TheCable in its October 10, 2020 edition, titled 'Mantu was the real hero of Obasanjo's failed third term bid, Orji Kalu says in new book,' Kalu said the true hero in the efforts to stop the tenure elongation was Ibrahim Mantu, the then deputy senate president--who ironically was seen as spearheading the agenda.
The newspaper reported, "Openly, Mantu, then-chairman of the senate constitution review committee, was the legislative arrowhead of the attempt to change the two-term limit to pave the way for Obasanjo. But behind the scene, Mantu plotted and worked against it, according to Kalu, who was the governor of Abia state at the time. In his autobiography, a copy of which was made available to TheCable, Kalu astonishingly claimed no one worked against Obasanjo's continued stay in office more than Mantu. He said the former deputy senate president had collaborated with him in recruiting those who would vote against the constitutional amendment bill and was careful in choosing key senators they worked with".
He wrote, "I have seen a lot of people claiming credit for the failure of Obasanjo's third-term bid. If there is any credit for it, it has to go to Senator Ibrahim Mantu. He is the true hero of the third-term war. The hero of what we did should be Mantu and nobody else, because he was the one who brought the strategy of how we would do it, and he was the one who told me not to tell Ken Nnamani, the senate president.
"He told me that the senate president was on both sides of the Atlantic. He said nothing we discussed should get to Nnamani because he was with them while he would appear to be with us. I insisted that we carry the senate president along, but Mantu assured me that Obasanjo will get everything we discussed with the senate president within seconds.
"He also told me to be careful with Senator David Mark because he too will brief Obasanjo about anything that was said to his hearing pertaining to the third-term project. That was how we left both Senator Nnamani and Mark out of the loop in our plot to destroy the third-term agenda. Mantu and I promised ourselves during the process and coordinated those we recruited to vote against the amendment."
Kalu also alleged that Obasanjo gave senators N50 million each to vote in favour of the bill, but that those mobilising against it had draughted various strategies to ensure it did not see the light of day.
"Obasanjo broke the central bank open and gave each senator N50 million to vote for the third term. Chukwumerije brought his own to the Abia liaison office in Abuja to show me, and I asked him to go and give it back to them, and I arranged fifty million naira of my own and gave it to him, just to encourage him," he said. "And so everybody, even those fighting corruption, knew that this money came from the CBN. They did not say anything."
"We had plan A, plan B, and plan C strategies to stop the third term. Unfortunately, some of the governors we were meeting with--I don't want to mention names--were only meeting with us to have something to take back to Obasanjo. They were neither here nor there. Mantu was the one who scuttled the third term, and in doing so, he incurred Obasanjo's eternal hatred. So Nigerians should celebrate him."
It is, however, surprising that till date, 88-year-old Obasanjo has refused to tell Nigerians the truth and nothing but the truth about the failed third-term agenda. In an interview he granted in 2011, the former governor of Oyo State, the late Senator Abiola Ajimobi, said, "This is me that was given N50 million by the Third Term people, and I refused. How many people can do that? How many Nigerians can see N50 million on their tables and will refuse? I rejected it." If the likes of Orji Kalu and Ajimobi lied, could that also be said of former United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who wrote on page 638 of her autobiography, No Higher Honour: A Memoir of My Years in Washington, that Obasanjo, despite his repeated denials, had in fact approached the then U.S. President George W. Bush for support to amend the Nigerian Constitution in the bid to extend his tenure in office?
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Condoleezza Rice writes, "In 2006, when President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria sidled up to the President [Bush] and suggested that he might change the constitution so that he could serve a third term, the President told him not to do it. 'You have served your country well. Now turn over power and become a statesman."
I strongly believed that Obasanjo laid a faulty foundation for Nigeria's democracy beginning from 1999 after years of military mis-rule. Here is a man given a second chance by God to escape a death sentence and placed in the highest office in the land straight from prison. Rather than show appreciation and make good use of God's mercy, he rode the nation roughshod throughout his eight-year tenure as president and also wasted taxpayers money on a failed bid to perpetuate himself in office. These are monies that could have been used to fix roads like the Lagos-Ibadan Motorway, which Obasanjo failed to do throughout his eight years as president. Yet, the same Obasanjo is quick to accuse the National Assembly and some former governors of corruption. The ugly and crooked foundation laid by Obasanjo in removing state governors unconstitutionally is what the likes of the incumbent president are building upon, as exemplified in the case of Rivers State.
It is ironical that, as he is wont to, Baba Obasanjo has not written any letter to President Tinubu since assuming office over two years ago. However, there is an urgent need for him to write a letter now to Nigerians and tell us the whole truth about the third-term agenda. Failure to do so, he will be doing himself a great disservice, and posterity will not be kind to him. If he continues to prevaricate, ultimately, he will answer and render a full account to his Maker someday.
Akinsuyi, former group politics editor of the Daily Independent, writes from the United Kingdom. He can be reached at [email protected]
