Obasanjo’s Call To Honour Abiola: Lest We Forget

“Yes I agree, Abeokuta would have produced a third president if not for bad belle. They did not allow him (Chief MKO Abiola) to be president. He deserved to be honoured because he sacrificed for Nigeria”, former President Olusegun Obasanjo ranting on late MKO Abiola on Bloomberg TV Africa.

If any Nigerian is looking for the face of the best known hypocrite in the country, let him not look further than former President Olusegun Obasanjo. He is the poster face of hypocrisy in Nigeria and perhaps in Africa in general. It is not his fault, he presided over a nation in democratic transition for eight years and institutionalised the biggest economic heist in Nigeria’s history, yet the nation he did these terrible things to have weak institutions to bring him to justice. That is why he has the temerity to be pontificating all over the place as a “saint” and even contemplating selecting another president for us in 2015 despite his disastrous outing in 2007 in leadership selection, which was the genesis of the 12,000 deaths we have recorded today in the name of insurgency. Obasanjo is able to grandstand today over the “poor leadership” of President Goodluck Jonathan because he knew that most Nigerians suffer from selective amnesia that is if not total amnesia. That is why yesterday’s President’s men who between 1999 and 2007 strutted the Aso Rock Villa like the proverbial colossus and were TOTALLY detached from the people are today’s social crusader and the “change we desire”. What a pity!

Back to Obasanjo. It would be recalled that when the June 12, 1993 Presidential election which late Chief MKO Abiola was poised to win was annulled by the military, General Obasanjo was among the few disgruntled Southwest and other Nigerian leaders that did not join in the campaign to revalidate the mandate that Nigerians freely gave to Abiola. As a matter of fact, Obasanjo was quoted as saying that “Abiola is not the messiah Nigeria is looking for”. His disdain for Abiola became even more apparent when by providence he became president as a civilian in 1999 and for eight years the “progressives” in the Southwest and in Nigeria in general led a campaign to make June 12, the nation’s Democracy Day because whether we like it or not the annulment of the June 12, 1993 election marked a watershed in the country’s democratic development. Obasanjo refused. He insisted that May 29 is our Democracy Day, take it or leave it. He never wanted Abiola in life or in death to get any recognition for our present democracy. Like Chief Uche Ezechukwu used to say, Obasanjo prefers to be the “only cock crowing in the yard”. A man who was gloating in his book how he achieved what revered Obafemi Awolowo could not achieve-presidency of Nigeria-cannot claim not to be part of the “bad belle” people that ensured that another person from Abeokuta never become president in 1993. Aside Obasanjo’s failure to make June 12, Democracy Day, he did not thought it wise to name any federal institution after Abiola. Even when President Goodluck Jonathan in honour of Abiola named University of Lagos after him and it generated all kinds of brouhaha there was no voice of support from Obasanjo. I posit that Obasanjo’s recent call for Abiola to be honoured was not out of repentance from his old ways of being the only cock that crows in the yard, but a calculated move to establish another front of crisis for Jonathan in the Southwest. I trust the sophistication of the Southwest people, they know Obasanjo more than some of us and would not buy into his deliberate attempt to obfuscate history and extricate himself from among the saboteurs that killed Abiola’s presidential dream.