Former President Olusegun Obasanjo was at the Presidential Villa on Sunday.
He was accompanied by oil magnate, Mr. Femi Otedola, andboth men were seen at the chapel, where the former President reportedly worshipedand prayed for the president and others who were there.
The official purpose of the visit was not disclosed, but sources speculated it visit might be for two purposes.
The first, they said, might be a meeting between Obasanjo and President Goodluck Jonathan to resolve their well-publicized differences, while the other might be a discussion of the $620,000 bribery standoff involving Otedola and a member of the House of Representatives, Mr. Farouk Lawan.
While Otedola was the giver of the bribe, which was allegedly for the purpose of overlooking his company involvement in the fuel subsidy scam, Mr. Lawan, the receiver of the bribemoney, was arraigned in court in Abuja on Friday and is remanded to jail pending a bail hearing. Next Friday, his bail application will be heard by Justice Mudashiru Oniyangi.
It was learnt that while there have been calls for the arraignment of Otedola as well,the former President may have gone to Aso Rock to convince the President that the oil magnate be made a prosecution witness in the trialof Lawan.
With reference to the reconciliation theory, both Obasanjo and Jonathan have squared up lately, especially onthe need to tame the members of the Boko Haram sect. Obasanjo has continually blamed the President for not acting to end the endless killings of the sect.
In a widely-disseminated opinion article yesterday, Jonathan’s spokesman, Mr. Reuben Abati, denounced “The Hypocrisy of Yesterday’s Men,” a loose reference to the debate started by former Minister of Education Oby Ezekwesili, who recently invited the government to a public debate over squandered resources. The government said it would do no such thing.
“When one of them was in charge of this same estate called Nigeria, he shut down the Port Harcourt airport and other airports for close to two years under the guise of renovation,” he wrote in apparent reference to Obasanjo. “The Port Harcourt airport was abandoned for so long it was overgrown with weeds after serving for monthsas a practice ground for motoring schools. It was reopened without any improvement and with so much money down the drain, and the pervasive suspicion that the reason it was shut down in the first place was to create a market for a new airline that had been allowed the monopoly use of the other airport in the city.”
On the contrary, according to Abati, “Under President Jonathan, airports across the country are being upgraded, rebuilt and modernized; in less than two years, the transformation is self-evident.”
He lamented: “We have too many yesterday men and women behaving too badly. We are dealing with a group of power-point technocrats who have mastered the rhetoric of public grandstanding: carefullycrafted emotion-laden sound bites passed off as meaningful engagements.”