Et tu Obasanjo?

Last week, former President Olusegun Obasanjo at the first Akintola Williams lecture, called on President Muhammadu Buhari to brace up and stop giving excuses. Nothing new, at least for some of us who have been shouting ourselves hoarse that the present government would do well to focus on the future and stop complaining about the past. Good enough that the advice this time is coming from one who takes pride in Buhari’s election and one who has served eight years in the same office.

January this year, this column in a piece titled, Our President needs help, called on the president to do the needful and take urgent actions on the economy. Nearly a year on, one can simply copy and paste the words therein without changing anything except that things have gone from bad to worse. Our monetary and fiscal policies are not aligning so much that between the finance minister and the Central Bank governor, one is not sure who is doing what while the president pretends that nothing is amiss. Investors’ confidence had plummeted too that what is going in our country is beyond capital flight and our government is still in the we-shall-do-this-campaign mood of late 2014 to 2015.

By now, readers should be familiar with the contents of Obasanjo’s lecture and not letter as many erroneously still claim. One aspect of the lecture I found self-serving was the comment: “The blanket adverse comments or castigation of all democratic administrations from 1999 by the present administration is uncharitable, fussy and uninstructive. Politics apart, I strongly believe that there is a distinction between the three previous administrations that it would be unfair to lump them all together.” Apart from laughing out loud, one could not but exclaimed Et tu Obasanjo? Naturally, the former president goes on the defensive whenever his 1999-2007 tenure is being discussed or analysed just as he wants to be the sole historian of that era forgetting that many Nigerians were adults during the period. It is interesting that Obasanjo is now asking for specific rating and not a blanket one that the Buhari administration often makes on the past 16 years. More interestingly is also the fact that his lecture came after the ever-voluble information minister, Lai Mohammed, disclosed that there would be no more excuses for the recession. Where has Obasanjo been all these days?

Maybe, just maybe, there’s more to this unsolicited advice than what we see or read outside. Obasanjo’s rights as a Nigerian cannot and should not be abridged, and so he has inalienable rights to criticize his country’s government, but when did he start standing on the peoples’ side? An octogenarian, who grew up with Obasanjo attending two schools with him in the process, told me something instructive when we met nearly two years ago. A friend’s father and one who worshipped with our former president at Owu Baptist Church, Abeokuta; he said on that beautiful afternoon when I asked him about his former classmate, “Segun? T’ara enikan lo mo”, literally translates, “He cares about himself alone.” The biomedical engineer who retired from the federal civil service added that Obasanjo works for himself and in his own interest alone. One could therefore be pardoned for not buying the idea that Baba is now on the side of the people or he has seen the light too, please perish the thought. Maybe access is no longer guaranteed or Buhari is refusing to be pushed around or remotely controlled by someone who refuses to accept that Nigeria does not revolve round him alone. Did he just discover that the Buhari administration spends more time apportioning blame than it does seeking to deliver on promises made during campaigns?

Again, Obasanjo did not say anything new that “The National Assembly stinks and stinks to high heavens” but the question is, How much disinfectant did he apply as president when senators and House of Representatives members got between N50 and N60 million each to support his third term ambition in 2007? We have not forgotten and such grandiloquent preaching from a pulpit of corruption like his cannot do anything in the much-vaunted war against corruption of the present government. Obasanjo’s posturing that he would have got a third term if he actually wanted one remains what I called it, posturing. The collective will of Nigerians defeated him and he cannot pull wool over our eyes trying to re-write history. It is however, gratuitous asking Buhari “to do what is being done with the judiciary with the National Assembly” whatever that means. Severally, I’ve been unsparing of our sybaritic and indolent National Assembly members but someone under whose watch the Halliburton and Siemens scandals occurred couldn’t tell us how to fight corruption.

Too often in Nigeria, many who are part of our problems continue to saunter around, telling us how to conduct our affairs forgetting that had they taken a tiny bit of their own advice, we will not where we are today.