Over the last few months we have been watching an unseemly spectacle in Nigeria involving President Olusegun Obasanjo and Vice President Abubakar Atiku.
The two political heavyweights have been making public nuisances of themselves since both men began levelling accusations and counter accusations of corruption against each other. What a palaver!
Now they are at each other’s throat over the vice presidency. Obasanjo wants Atiku to step down now that he has joined another political party in preparation for the presidential election in April.
It seems that these two do not appear to have anything better to do, so they are trying to outdo each other in the battle to show who is the better fighter against corruption and better champion of good governance. Obasanjo, who is on his way out, can afford to engage in schoolboy stuff.
Let’s take the issue of corruption, which sparked off the kerfuffle. Honestly, why is it that it was only after Obasanjo failed miserably to get a third term in power that the issue of corruption came up? After all, in the seven years that Obasanjo and Atiku have ruled the roost, only the small-timers have been ensnared by the anti-corruption authorities. The big guns have been allowed to carry out their activities with impunity. And it is not just under Obasanjo’s tenure that this has happened.
Late last year, an official of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission said that since independence 46 years ago, Nigerian politicians had helped themselves to trillions of dollars of state money. So, what’s the problem with Obasanjo and Atiku? The point is, it is a case of two frustrated politicians taking out their pent-up anger on each other – and giving Nigerian politics a very bad name indeed.
Let’s face it. Nigerian politics has always had a bad reputation. Only, we were told that under the tenure of Obasanjo everything would change. But has it? Not really. In fact, it is becoming clearer by the day that Obasanjo is not all what he was cracked up to be. He came to power in 1999 promising to cleanse Nigeria’s sordid reputation for grand corruption. But in the final analysis, this has not been the case.
Even Obasanjo’s friends at Berlin-based Transparency International, the global corruption watchdog, are appalled by the fact that Obasanjo has not lived up to his much-vaunted claims that he is the best man to fight corruption in Nigeria. In an exclusive interview in Berlin with Nigeria’s Daily Sun newspaper last year, Dr. Miklos Marschall, TI Regional Director for Europe and Central Asia, said rising corruption in Nigeria was quite worrying for the organisation.
“In spite of the fact that Obasanjo is co-founder of TI, it is demoralising for us at Transparency International that his being at the head of government has not solved corruption problems in Nigeria,” Marschall told the Daily Sun. He said that Obasanjo might have had a personal desire to rid Nigeria of corruption, but apparently lacked the political will to tackle it.
“He [Obasanjo] personally comes across to us as someone who wants to make a change,” Marschall told the newspaper. “Politically, he appears not strong enough [to tackle corruption]. You have a complex political system. It seems Obasanjo is not able to fight the corrupt elite. He probably wants to fight, but he seems to have huge limitations.”
The problem is that Obasanjo thinks he can handle everything all by himself. It is for this reason that so many of his so-called advisers are frustrated. Although they ostensibly offer advice, Obasanjo does not heed this. He prefers to do things his own way. This prompted one of his advisers to moan to me when I was in Nigeria last year: “It’s like someone buying a guard dog, and he spends all night barking.
What’s the use of the guard dog?” Maybe Obasanjo thinks he is still in the army where he has been used to barking out orders.
The point is, Obasanjo has been behaving like a wounded elephant since shots were fired at him when he failed last year to get his way and have the constitution amended so that he could stay on in power for a third term. After the rebuff, he turned his attention to Atiku who was expecting to replace Obasanjo.
Naturally, Atiku became estranged from the ruling party so he had to find another political camp – hence Obasanjo’s attempts to get him to relinquish the position of vice president.
This really does not augur well for the integrity of the two highest offices in Nigeria or the coming elections. The war of words has indeed reached a very nasty stage. What does this say of Nigerian politics? It says an awful lot. And you wonder why Nigerian voters treat their politicians so disdainfully?
