I have decided to post the full text of the commentary on the indictment of President Olusegun Obasanjo over the misappropriation of the Petroleum Trust Development Fund (PTDF), because the original post made some people very uncomfortable once they saw that the references linked to websites publishing Orikinla Osinachi. So, this one does not link to any website or media on Orikinla Osinachi. I am not the one who first mentioned the indictment of President Olusegun Obasanjo. Even the President of the Senate did not hide the facts that President Olusegun Obasanjo was equally guilty on " Nnamani: Presidency Violated Laws On PTDF" the cover story of The Guardian on Sunday March 4, 2007. I don't think the honourable Senate President is linking to Orikinla Osinachi. And you cannot delete what he said as published on The Guardian. Go and read what Honourable Ken Nnamani said. The Orbit: Obasanjo at the Bar of History
Vanguard (Lagos)
COLUMN
March 4, 2007
Posted to the web March 5, 2007
By Obi Nwakanma
Lagos
THE indictment of President Olusegun Obasanjo by the senate committee investigating the affairs of the Petroleum Trust Development Fund (PTDF) did not pull much of a surprise. The thunder had long been stolen. Much of the details of the issue under the Senate's review were already public knowledge; largely contained in the allegations raised against President Olusegun Obasanjo by the Vice president, Atiku Abubakar in the last six months. Atiku, with whom the president is currently, engaged in a war of attrition, roundly put the integrity of Saint Matthew of Owu to question, from the moment the PTDF affair broke. The nation was listening. It seems that the Senate committee, aware of the mood of Nigerians, rose to its duty for once, and spoke, not caring whose ox was mauled in this particular case.
The indictment of the president by the Ndoma-Egba Committee, nevertheless, puts in very sharp relief the dilemma of Nigeria - an unhappy country held in thrall by a national political leadership, whose activities could put the Black Beard and his buccaneering gang to shame. The spectacular irony is that the senate committee's statement came about the same time that Mr. Ribadu, executive chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) was rising in defense of President Obasanjo. The president, Ribadu claimed, is not corrupt. But the vice-president is. But go figure, Nigerians! On May 29, 1999 at the Eagle Square, Olusegun Obasanjo looked Nigerians in the eyes and made a solemn promise: he would heal this country riven by sectarian and ethnic differences, impoverished by many years of blind, tyrannical leadership and corruption.
He would give succour to Nigerians who had been oppressed, murdered, violated, imprisoned, dehumanized by years of military dictatorship. He would work to make Nigeria "great again." Many Nigerians read Obasanjo's lips. But they neither looked deep into his eyes, nor could see his soul. Not long after those words were solemnly offered at the Eagle Square, Obasanjo reneged on one of the cardinal principles on which he stood: he disavowed the idea of convening a National Conference. It was no longer an option, since the National Assembly, in Obasanjo's estimation, could function in those terms. Indeed, one of the principal issues was the status of the 1999 constitution, created to serve the political interests of Sani Abacha. Obasanjo apparently saw the extensive power which that constitution granted him, and any talk of its review became tantamount, in the president's view, to a challenge against the sovereign. He was the sovereign.
He embarked on the early subversion of the National Assembly, whose independence, guaranteed under the principle of the separation of powers, was to remain for the president, merely academic. The first acts of political insincerity embarked upon by this president was his direct intervention, through the use of coercion, and sometimes the threat was quite brazen, to influence the outcome of the leadership of the National Assembly. He sought to install a prolix or rubber stamp parliament: his first choice for Speaker of the National Assembly, Salisu Buhari, who had made sundry claims of spurious provenance as it all turned out. In the senate, Obasanjo and his operatives pushed and installed the lukewarm but convenient Evan Enwerem, whose claims about his past, when it equally came to serious scrutiny fell apart.
There is a very well informed school of thought holds, that the president's choices were clearly deliberate, since he had all the security background reports of these men: he chose those whom he could always manipulate and blackmail. He fought the late Dr. Chuba Okadigbo, a sophisticated political theorist and operator, who quickly read the Obasanjo era, and fought to establish legislative independence in order to check the cat in the hat. The subversion of Okadigbo and his ideas of the balance of power became one of the central goals of the presidency, and he embarked on that operation to dismantle Okadigbo's leadership of the senate with both missionary zeal and native guile. Newspapers reported many sightings thereafter of the movements of "Ghana-Must-Go" - which entered the national political lexicon therefrom, as the means of shamelessly influencing the discourse of the National Assembly by serious financial inducement.
Ghali Na'Abba, the fiery former speaker of the Federal House of Representatives survived this onslaught, but Okadigbo did not. For much of the first half of Obasanjo's term, the president actively subverted the legislature by creating, with his possession of the purse, a condition of the musical chair in the upper chambers of Nigeria's National Assembly. It allowed him to play emperor. As an imperial president, Obasanjo ordered the demolition of Odi and Zakibiam. He established the Oputa panel, and made it a paper tiger: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The idea was not national reconciliation and healing, the aim for the Oputa panel, as it turned out, was to create a distracting circus. Obasanjo pledged to heal Nigeria: before our very eyes, he went to Bayelsa state, and not only cussed them out, he told them that but for him and the civil war, the Igbo would have colonized them, and whatever claim they have about their oil fields.
His approach of gunboat diplomacy, finally triggered off the Niger Delta rebellion by MEND and others, who were originally armed by the PDP in the first place, to forment political terrorism against their political opponents in the 2003 elections. One of the early signs that Obasanjo was not interested in the economic reconstruction of Nigeria was when he fell out with his first Economic Adviser, the highly experienced Philip Asiodu, who told him some frank truths, and got fired. He fought everybody who stood between him and power. We do not know, yet, the full truths. But one truth we know is that it does seem that ultimately, for President Obasanjo, it was all about power: his mission in these eight years was not to heal or revive Nigeria: it was to exert the enormous powers granted him by a rogue constitution.
The promise of May 29, 1999 was all sheer rhetoric. It also seems clear to me that there was a deliberate mission to subvert the goals of democracy, by those we now call "stake holders" who simply wanted a proxy government. Like gamblers, they placed their bets on their surest horse. They did not of course reckon on a number of factors, the principal one being the susceptibility to spontaneous combustion. They campaigned on the strength of Obasanjo's stature as a former Head of state, whose public interventions over the years signaled him as a potentially unifying, and incorruptible force, and they told Nigerians skeptical about Obasanjo, that his prison experience had humanized him: the man himself looked sober and penitent. But those who brought out Obasanjo from Prison, and shoed him into power were both unfair to him, and to Nigeria.
His transition, under very normal circumstances should not have been to state house, but to rehab, for trauma healing. In other words: those who retailed Obasanjo to Nigerians in 1999 sold us all a dummy: they did not reckon that the kind of enormous power granted him could unhinge, even the most stable of mind amongst us. Now, we have an Elephant in the China shop.
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