Pact and Impeachment
By
Was President Olusegun Obasanjo right to have shared with journalists details of the secret pact? Many of the Sunday papers last week reported on the pact that the northern caucus of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) asked presidential aspirants to sign as a condition for supporting the emergence of a southern President in 1999. President Obasanjo claimed not to have signed, but that is still being debated. Regardless, I think he was right to have disclosed the existence of such a pact, and not just for the simple reason that you have got to fight with what you have got.
The President was right because since the impeachment crisis started, there has been so much dissimulation about who was behind it, with a lot of characters deluding themselves about what this was all about. Words like probity, transparency, separation of powers and such other niceties have been used to dress up a thoroughly dishonourable agenda. Inevitably, the President had to give his own perspective. Firstly, to afford the country the benefit of a balanced assessment and secondly to show his tormentors up for what they really are over-pampered hegemonists who having gotten so used to having their way cannot bear even a little discomfort.
Increasingly, the consensus that is emerging is that the impeachment threat is plain and simply a regional power grab that seeks to achieve four interrelated objectives: First to arm-twist a recalcitrant President and cripple his Presidency; second to scuttle his chances for a second term; third to reverse the power shift arrangement that was the basis for the successful take-off of the Fourth Republic; and lastly but mainly to regain the Presidency for those northerners who say they are born to rule. What informs the present urgency (some would say desperation) on the part of this breed is that they feel a need to move fast before Obasanjo goes any further in killing off their tribe of parasites that had perfected the art of feeding off the system.
I think that rather than debate the rightness or wrongness of the Presidential disclosure, we should instead ruminate on how Obasanjo, a much-touted nationalist and friend of the north, arrived at what is so clearly an epiphany. Obasanjo is a man who obviously so believes in the country to the point of annoying many other Nigerians who had all along argued (rightly) that there was very little in the country to justify or sustain such a belief. Obasanjo had spent his entire public career denying that north, south, east or west exist or should exist. In propagating this lie, he often rained considerable abuse on those who did not agree with him.
Being asked to sign a northern pact must, therefore, have been for him a rude awakening that compelled him to think things over. More so coming so soon after his imprisonment and humiliation under Abacha, about which many northerners did very little. It is a sad day for Nigeria that one of the pillars of the Nigerian myth is now being forced to rethink his position. It is sad because often, fresh converts are usually the most fundamentalist zealots. And I worry for how Obasanjo intends to use the new light that he has just seen. The country should worry too.
Obasanjo had always carried on as someone who believed that the only reason why southerners like Awolowo and Abiola failed in the larger Nigerian politics was that there was something they did not do right and which he had done right. Now the reality seems to have dawned on him that the only southerner acceptable to our born-to-rule compatriots is one who does not have a mind of his own like the Obasanjo of 1976-79. Many of us learnt long ago to live with this reality.
Some people argue that disclosing the pact will lead to a hardening of the northern opposition to Obasanjo. So what is wrong if the north is hardened against him? And which north, anyway? Those who push this line of thinking are those who have obviously brainwashed themselves into believing that the fear of the north is the beginning of political wisdom.
Not any longer.
Not many people relate to the north on the basis of fear anymore.
The annulment crisis and the anti- Abacha struggle put paid to all that.
The impeachment crisis could just advance things further as we resume our journey from the point at which an evolving dynamic was deflected by the Abdulsalami transition. No one is afraid of returning to the trenches, and the impeachment crisis could just help us arrive at the long-averted but much-needed face-off that would let each of us know where we stand. I suppose that thinking men and women from the north also realize this, hence their concern that things should not go out of hand.
Contrary to the claim in some quarters, power shift was not an act of northern magnanimity but an imperative of survival on the part of northern power brokers who knew that Nigeria and they with it would have been wiped out if the crisis of 1993-98 had been allowed to reach its logical conclusion. The impeachment crisis questions this imperative in a way that could yet lead to an unraveling.Farouk Lawan, spokesman of the impeachment party in the House of Representatives has already told us that the House will not be swayed in its resolve to impeach Obasanjo by the entreaties of elder statesmen like General Yakubu Gowon and ex-President Shehu Shagari. To confirm his seriousness, Lawan has reeled out 15 fresh charges against the President (making a total of 32), including one that is still under investigation by a committee of the same House. Some honourable members say they are not aware of these new charges, suggesting that a shadowy cabal has taken over the work of the House. Gowon and Shagari know why they are seeking peace. Lawan and Na Abba and their fellow travelers can go on pretending that they are wiser than their elders.
Perhaps, the reprisal for disclosing the pact is a revving-up of the impeachment engine, maybe to forestall the disclosure of other pacts that may even be more damaging. But the resolve of the impeachment party to proceed with what their spokesman has now openly admitted is a "project" tells us something: Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.
Nov 2002