Former president Olusegun Obasanjo and President Goodluck Jonathan
The
latest round of bickering and mudslinging between former President
Olusegun Obasanjo and President Goodluck Jonathan took a new twist when
the former chose the auspicious occasion of a CNN interview to
criticise Jonathan’s approach to the Boko Haram insurgency. He said, “To
deal with a group like that, you need a carrot and stick. The carrot is
finding out how to reach out to them. When you try to reach out to them
and they are not amenable to being reached out to, you have to use the
stick”.
Prior to Obasanjo’s recent comment, he
had stunned his audience, at a gathering to review the unemployment
situation in the West African sub-region tagged, the West African
Regional Conference on Youth Employment, held in Dakar, Senegal, as he
fired salvos at his protégé. The ex-President as a guest speaker
predicted a revolution was looming in Nigeria if the high rate of youth
unemployment which he put at 72 per cent remained unchecked and should
the Jonathan government fail to create employment, the attendant
catastrophe would consume the elite, himself included.
Still smarting from his Dakar outburst,
he continued his barrage at Jonathan, this time around in Warri, at an
event marking the 40th anniversary calling to ministry in the vineyard
of God of the President of the Christian Association of Nigeria, Pastor
Ayo Oritsejafor, where he described the President as a weak leader
pointing to the government’s lukewarm approach to the Boko Haram crisis
and the pervading insecurity in the country that could have been
effectively tackled if decisive action had been taken by the Jonathan
administration.
November last year, President Jonathan
broke his silence in a televised media chat as he responded to
Obasanjo’s prescription, describing the military invasion (to fish out
militants who killed some security men) and brute use of force on the
people of Odi as futile as it only resulted in bloodshed and loss of
innocent lives.
Not long ago, Obasanjo also took another
swipe at Jonathan’s administration for waste of the country’s foreign
reserves, put at about $35bn in 2007. Obasanjo said, “We left what we
call excess crude, let’s build it for the rainy day, up to $35bn; within
three years, the $35bn disappeared. Whether the money disappeared or it
was shared, the fact remains that $35bn disappeared from the foreign
reserves I left behind in office. When we left that money, we thought we
were leaving it for the rainy day…”
Meanwhile, as a strategy to check
Obasanjo’s overbearing influence on the ruling Peoples Democratic Party,
loyalists to Jonathan have been mounting pressure on government to
petition Obasanjo to the International Criminal Court at the Hague on
the invasion of Odi by the military which left civilians dead. By any
standard, this equates to crimes against humanity. Another ploy to tame
the rampaging former president are plans to expose some of his misdeeds
during his 8-year tenure.
The postponement of the BoT chairman
(s)election can easily be linked to the face-off between President
Jonathan and Obasanjo as loyalists of both men came to a stand-off in
their bid to elect a new chairman, which interestingly was the only
agenda of the meeting. Delegates were torn in two minds as to whom to
pick amid intense lobbying for the former president’s candidate, Ahmadu
Alli, a former chairman of the party, and President Jonathan’s preferred
choice — the newly appointed chairman of the Nigerian Ports Authority —
Tony Anenih, with the sobriquet, ‘Mr Fix It’.
As events unfolded, it became crystal
clear that the battle for the BoT chairmanship had a direct bearing on
the tussle for the presidential ticket of the PDP in 2015 and whoever
emerges as chairman is crucial to that agenda. Jonathan’s group opposed
the election of Obasanjo’s anointed candidate, Alli. His group convinced
other members that it won’t augur well for Anenih to be the chairman of
NPA and the BoT, as others should be given the opportunity to serve the
party. Apparently, the Jonathan camp opposed the Pro-Obasanjo’s choice
of Alli, arguing that such would be detrimental to the President’s
second term ambition. On the other hand, Anenih’s emergence as BoT
chairman might hinder the choice of Obasanjo’s candidate for the
presidential race in 2015. Therein lies the stand-off.
Obasanjo is getting tacit support from
northern political figures in the PDP, especially those eyeing the 2015
presidential ticket. They consider his feud with Jonathan as capable of
withering his powers and ultimately truncate his ambition to contest the
2015 election. These northerners still feel shortchanged that the two
terms of Umaru Yar’Adua’s administration which began in 2007 was not
completed before Jonathan came onboard, shoving aside the zoning
arrangement of the PDP. They reason power should return to the north in
2015 and any role Obasanjo can play to rejig would be welcome. This much
Obasanjo displayed when he invited politicians from the north to the
launch of a “political” mosque project. A good number of northern
governors and politicians were present at the fund-raiser at Abeokuta.
They made generous donations to the project.
Obasanjo in the past was instrumental to
Jonathan’s meteoric rise from a deputy governor in Bayelsa State to
governor, then vice-president, Acting President, substantive President
and later elected as President in the aftermath of Yar’Adua’s death in
2010. The Ota farmer is believed to be peeved by his exclusion from
Jonathan’s administration as the President now seemingly prefers his
kinsmen and hangers-on as members of his inner caucus rather than
seeking his benefactor’s opinion on key national issues. More so, his
disaffection with Jonathan can easily be traced to the elections in the
South-West states of Ondo, Osun and Ekiti where the PDP lost to the ACN
and Labour Party. Against this backdrop, if Chief Olusegun Obasanjo now
finds everything wrong with the man he installed as president, then it
must be nothing more than an agitation for the 2015 polls.
That the former president is building
bridges across the country ahead of the 2015 elections and picking holes
at Jonathan’s government is a strong indication that he has pitched
tents with those opposed to Jonathan running the 2015 election.
Awkwardly, the President is up against his benefactor. Indeed, Jonathan
is fighting the battle of his political soul as he now seems to have
reneged on the promise he made to Nigerians that he won’t seek a second
term in office and Obasanjo is at the front of the queue to stop his
re-election.
In the event of Obasanjo’s inability to
clinch the PDP ticket for whoever becomes his anointed candidate in the
BoT, his ties with the members of the PDP who have defected, and are now
part of the planned merger among the ANPP, CPC and the ACN will prove
invaluable as his anti-Jonathan rhetoric has already won him support
from the north, a majority of whom are still angry at the PDP’s zoning
arrangement that was allegedly breached by Jonathan.
However, as the incumbent, Jonathan can
swing major decisions in his favour. He has enough resources, as some
recent appointments and contracts awarded have shown, at his disposal to
deploy in a desperate bid to ensure he returns, but he must first slug
it out with a strong northern candidate from the PDP in the primaries
and another from the possible merger of some opposition parties in the
election proper.
It is not happenstance that Obasanjo has
come out unscathed from tough political battles; ask the likes of Atiku
Abubakar, his former vice-president; former governor of Ogun State,
Gbenga Daniel; former Senate President, Anyim Pius Anyim; former Speaker
of House of Representatives, Umar Ghali Na’Abbah and a host of others,
the ex-president has always had his way in the end. He sure wields a lot
of influence politically in spite of his resignation as the chairman of
the BoT of the PDP sometime ago. It has been an herculean task
replacing him and now it seems President Jonathan might be stretching
his good luck rather too far should he decide to contest in 2015.
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