Obasanjo Quietens as Buhari's Sword Dangles.

Ex head of state, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo has suddenly gone quiet in his public spats with President Muhammadu Buhari. And for good reason. He knows Buhari is a no-nonsense army general and will not hesitate to move against him if only to show the whole world and his critics he does not believe in sacred cows and is not afraid of anybody. The sword of Damocles, read

Buhari

Obasanjo

Buhari, hangs low, ominously over him. Obasanjo was thrown off his strides by the sudden bringing up of the power projects quagmire by Buhari when the Buhari Support Organization paid him a courtesy call. The whole project and the sleaze that came to accompany it was the major black spot of his administration and there was no way he was going to wash his hands clean of it if it comes to judicial scrutiny. And the penalty could be severe. Two long-running cases of graft have of late ended in disaster for Rev Jolly Nyame, ex-governor of the north-eastern state of Taraba, who was sentenced by an Abuja court to 14 years in prison and Joshua Dariye, ex-governor of the nearby state of Plateau, who also bagged the same prison term. All to the glee of Nigerians, who want more big fishes nabbed by the hook of anti-corruption. Obasanjo is 80 and a single day in prison for him is going to be more than a disaster.  And recent history is not on his side. Lula, Brazil's former president has just been sent to prison to corruption and the sky has not split into two. Close aides have been advising him to pipe low as Buhari will just send him to prison for nothing and cronies now loud will not hesitate to abandon him and let him stew in his own juice.
Yet Buhari does not even need to arrest him or send him to jail. He only needs to set up a probe panel and that would be enough to finish Obasanjo. His enemies, who are legion will only be too glad to come to such a panel with sacks of indictments genuine or ludicrous. Many Nigerians will not be able to tell the difference, besides, having suffered terribly at the hands of corruption, they will not care to put accusations to much scrutiny. A probe will be a public, kangaroo trial for Obasanjo and he will hardly get any justice. $16b was wasted on the power projects, perhaps the largest single case of corruption ever in Africa, without a single wink of electricity to show for it and there is no way he is going to escape censure, even though no single instance of graft has been traced to him directly. The whole mess happened under his long watch of 8 years and the buck stopped on his table. It will be very difficult for him to handle the noise, the mayhem, the opprobrium such a probe will spew into the political space.
SAUDI ARABIA GETS A BLOODY NOSE.
The opening match of the current edition of the World Cup going on in Russia has seen Saudi Arabia ship in 5 goals against the host country, making an average Russian team play spectacularly. That is why the tournament is a World Cup and not a cup for the best gladiators. Otherwise a lot of folks will start querying the injustice of Italy staying behind at home and Saudi Arabia attending the tournament. In world football, Saudi Arabia is a midget and Russia is not itself oversized but the Saudis turned them into giants overnight.
Luis 'the snake' Suarez misbites.
The World Cup match between Uruguay and Egypt has just ended. The first half was cagey but the two teams came out in the 2nd half more adventurous and that section was more noteworthy for Luis Suarez's two glaring misses. He might have been more restrained in biting with his teeth but his biting feet seems to have been in remission with that disinclination. That is the stuff of which genius is made of at any rate and we expect him to be sharper in coming matches. In tight matches like this, a half chance might be all that is needed and Uruguay was grateful to seize it via a header by Athletico Madrid's Gimenez. Egypt will have to improve in the final third in subsequent matches.

Luis 'the snake' Suarez.

Buhari, Abiola, Obasanjo and June 12.

In the heat of the annulment of the June 12, 1993 elections, with nationwide protests the most visible affairs on Nigerian streets and the nation on the brink of collapse, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo formed an organisation that had as its immediate and express mandate, the re-validation of the election results. It was almost a national coalition, credible too, with the present head of state, President Muhammadu Buhari, a prominent member. In its inaugural meeting in Otta Farms, home of Obasanjo, the group issued a communique which expressly condemned the cancellation of the polls and called for their re-validation and attendant declaration of Chief M.K.O.Abiola as president-elect of the country. Gen Buhari was to give fillip to this quest by granting an interview to Tell magazine in which he categorically stated, told all and sundry, that the elections were meant to fail right from the beginning. 'The elections were meant not meant to work, right from their inception' were his words. A copy of the interview should still be available in the relevant archives. In the same interview, Buhari debunked the insinuation that the north was against the candidature of Abiola, reminding everyone that Abiola won in Kano, the home state of his opponent, Alhaji Tofa, and challenging Gen. Babangida, the grim strongman who conducted and then annulled the elections to name just a couple of those in north opposed to Abiola. With the tension in the national air so thick and Babangida cornered in his Aso Rock Villa, government headquarters, like a rat that had overplayed its hands, Buhari's bold interview was a very dangerous thing to do. It was just like laying his life on the line and in no small measure did he alarm the powers that be.
By the time the meeting would reconvene in the same venue, Buhari got the rudest shock shock of his life. In the interval, Babangida had sold the idea of the Interim National Government to Obasanjo, a stop-gap arrangement to be headed by the industry titan, Chief Ernest Shonekan, A fellow Yoruba like Abiola and even from the same city of Abeokuta. Shonekan had little compunction in playing Judas and so was Obasanjo. In fact it dawned on everyone that Obasanjo's earlier moves to side with Abiola were nothing more than a mischief to harvest some of the national outpourings of anger and put himself a bit in the spotlight. He was a guy who liked swimming with the tide but not for long. A new current and he was away with a fresh shoal. Buhari was dumbfounded when Obasanjo started to digress from the commonly-stated objective of poll re-validation and realized he had been fooled into being drafted into a fool's errand.  In fact, Buhari stormed out of the meeting halfway and was never to attend it again. In fact, the meeting was never to hold again.
Hence it is on record that Buhari was the only leader to have taken a consistent stand on the whole June 12 saga, even endangering his life in his vociferous insistence, and his decision to honor Abiola should be seen only in this light. When he became the president of the country again and the clamor to honor Abiola got strident, Obasanjo told not a few aides that doing such was going to anger the north. He simply lacked the gravitas for boldness. Now a northerner has done it and everyone is happy, north and south. 

Buhari

Abiola

Babangida

General Babangida and General Abacha: A 'Friendship' that Ruined Nigeria 1.

By late morning on February 13, 1976, Col. Buka Dimkah and his co-conspirators had succeeded in assassinating the head of state, General Ramat Mohammed, and in capturing the national radio station where he made his infamous broadcast of imposing a dawn to dusk curfew. It was as far as he got. Loyal troops rallied quickly and it was left to Col. Ibrahim Babangida to persuade him the game was up. And at the same time, carry out a bit of reconnaissance. Considering the heat of the moment, it was a task that would require tremendous bravery, even foolhardiness. Babangida went and instantly catapulted himself into national fame. And power. Overnight, a mid-level officer started dining and wining with the head of state himself, and other powers that be. Pictures would later emerge of Babangida playing checkers with General Olusegun Obasanjo and General Theophilus Danjuma, head of state and chief of army staff respectively, the two most powerful men in Nigeria at that time.
The taste of power would never leave his mouth and as early as 1981, was himself already plotting the overthrow of President Shehu Shagari, the civilian regime that supplanted the military regime of General Obasanjo in 1979. He had enjoyed the trappings of power and had evidently seen that those who were his superiors in the military regime he helped sustain were not better than him intellectually and morally. Which was a grave indictment of the superiors because Babangida's moral quotient was abysmally low and the intelligence he often prided himself on bordered mostly on the charms of a confidence trickster. As he himself unwittingly confessed, comparing himself to Diego Maradona, the great footballer whose celebrated dribbling skills must have inspired the general in weaving intricate and outlandish political, economic and social twists and turns around hapless Nigerians while he held sway as president. The goodwill, if there was any, that Shagari enjoyed on coming to power barely lasted three months. His administration was horribly effete, dominated by incredibly venal subordinates who were far more powerful than he was. But corruption wasn't the only evil of his regime. In 1982, he orchestrated the massacre of hundreds of his own kinsmen in Bakolori, Sokoto State, poor folks protesting the confiscation of their farming lands for a dam project without being paid adequate compensation. The army moved in and mowed down hundreds in what would later become known as the Bakolori Massacre. The 1983 national elections, the only one his regime would superintend easily became the last straw that broke his back. These were so rigged that ballot boxes and papers were being hawked in the open streets and the outrage and violence that greeted the polls was the coup de grace Babangida needed to stage his own coup. Helped ironically by the sheer cowardice Shagari himself displayed in refusing to disengage him from the army, having been warned several times, by all and sundry, that if his regime was to last, Babangida held the key to that longevity. Babangida had acquired tremendous wealth in the defunct military regime and in the intervening years had bribed and corrupted many a military officer: buying for them luxurious vacations, building houses for them, sponsoring children's education abroad. He stuck out as a dangerous sore thumb to the civilian regime and the fact that nobody deemed it expedient to move against him was a sordid testament to Shagari's overall weakness.
Nobody was going to shed tears, sincere or crocodile, if Shagari was removed but then Babangida would still have to need troops and several other officers and the officer that mattered most was Brigadier Sanni Abacha, General Officer Commanding 2nd Mechanized Division, Ibadan, a formation that had under its command all the army formations in Lagos, the seat of power. Apart from being a fearless army officer, Abacha himself had a large following in the army. A lifestyle dominated by women and beer had ensured he was not without a plethora of buddies that he could count on at any time. Abacha himself was to announce the overthrow of Shagari's regime in 1983.
Babangida later claimed in an interview that in a meeting of senior officers convened to choose a successor to Shagari, most of those present tried to prevail on him to accept the post but that he declined out of altruism, or whatever he attributed to his decision. He had his own loyalists, no doubt, but General Muhammadu Buhari was the obvious choice. Like Shagari, he was a Fulani and it would be of less consternation to the Hausa-Fulani power base if a Fulani man overthrew another Fulani. Babangida was not even technically Hausa, his origins being farther south in Bida, Niger State. Then there was the resolute stance of General Mamman Vatsa who was Babangida's friend and knew him very well. Mamman stood up, he was a poet, and in trenchant eloquence, harangued his fellow officers that if they were removing Shagari as a result of corruption and inefficiency, it made sense that the efficient, spartan and incorrigible Buhari should supplant him. Mamman was to be later executed by Babangida for plotting against him when he would eventually become head of state. That would be about four years later and General Domkat Bali, a top member of the Armed Forces Ruling Council that confirmed Vatsa's death sentence, had admitted that the evidence they relied upon to nail him was weak, in reality, the seeds of his death was sowed in that meeting that chose a successor to Shagari. Babangida was not happy about his snub. He had plotted, organized and financed the coup and it must have necessarily riled him to be denied his just rewards but there was little he could really do. He quietly swallowed his bile and decided to wait for another chance.
Which he knew would certainly present itself. And he was emboldened in his expectations by his intimate knowledge of Buhari. He knew that Buhari would never succeed in a country gone to dogs like Nigeria. He knew Buhari was disciplined and incorrigible, traits that made him the archetypal army officer, but he also knew him to be a poor administrator. Buhari was a 'civil service' army officer. In administration, he could be counted upon to leave tasks, even important one that demanded personal attention, to subordinates. He would leave tasks and instructions to subordinates and expect them to carry out their performance to the letter. With the civil service Nigeria has, that was going to be a recipe for disaster. In many instances would he be unaware of what was going on in his own administration. The qualities that made Buhari a splendid officer were going to be grossly inadequate as the head of state. Babangida started plotting against Buhari the very day Buhari became head of state.
  

How Obasanjo Killed the Yar'aduas 2.

When Obasanjo was drafting Umaru Yar'adua into the presidential race in 2006, he was already a wounded president: at loggerheads not only with the entire country that he governed, but also with most of his subordinates. The legacies he had tried to entrench were in dire tatters and he had just suffered a humiliating blow over his Third Term Agenda, a quest to run for a third term, one above the constitutionally stipulated two. All it needed was a stamp of approval by the Senate and he spared neither time nor cash to lure the lawmakers, folks who had worn the corrupt tag all their lives. But even if his popularity had not nosedived, there was no way Nigerians could ascertain that a Fourth Term Agenda would not supplant a Third Term and beyond that...Dictatorship of any kind, civilian or military, was a tune that sounded a bit sour in the streets, Nigerians just about shaking off the trauma of the brutal dictatorships of General Babangida and General Abacha. Besides, northerners felt it was their turn to occupy the seat, their case premised on the unwritten agreement that the cause of national stability would be best served if the presidency was rotated between the north and south. Most people in his Yoruba ethnic stock were even less interested. Even if he had not alienated most of them, they were the most sophisticated group in the federation and were not likely to buy into any ethnic scheme. The result was predictable, except for cronies who were feathering their own nest from the scheme. The rejection in the Senate was devastating and Obasanjo was said to have held on to the sides of his chair trying to steady himself in the shock of the humiliation. And it was especially bitter because the party that brought him to power, the Peoples' Democratic Party, had an overwhelming majority in the Senate.
The president sulked for days unending. He had been made a laughing stock. Naturally, he didn't like parting with money and it hurt him to the doldrums he had lost a colossal sum for nothing. Colossal it was, money having been trucked into the Senate in special, capacious sacks called Ghana-Must-Go to bribe Senators. The gentlemen collected the money and then turned to give him a black eye. He had come out badly battered in what seemed a political Ponzi scheme.
 But he had to hand over power to a successor in barely a year. That was when a little smile flitted across his eyes. If they could prevent him from succeeding himself, there was virtually nothing anybody could do to stop him from anointing a successor. And Umaru Yar'adua sprang instantly into his mind. But the then governor of Katsina State was a very sick man, a fact that was well-known to everybody. He had been a heavy smoker all his life, with the attendant medical consequences, and in fact had had a kidney transplant. But that didn't matter a jot to the president. Yar'adua was his man. If he performed creditably in office, he would be credited with installing such an effective successor; if his illness hampered him from achieving much, well, Nigerians had given him a black eye, they deserve their own eyes to be gouged out. It would serve them right, very right. As military leader, Yar'adua's elder brother, Shehu, was his second in command and there was do doubt he would wield considerable influence on the younger one, gratitude being an associated factor, appreciation for choosing him from among thousands of healthy, capable northerners. Anointing Yar'adua as his successor would be a win-win case for Obasanjo.
The rest is history. Obasanjo spared no effort to make Yar;adua president. The cash left over from the Third Term bribery operations was promptly deployed to buy delegates during the PDP primaries and the general elections were a stroll for Yar'adua. It didn't matter that he collapsed during one of the presidential campaigns and had to be rushed to Germany for treatment, it didn't matter the presidential elections were heavily rigged: and even if they had not been rigged, the electorate were too ignorant to worry about the health status of an incoming leader, at any rate the electorate had hardly mattered in Nigerian elections.
So Yar'adua became president, placed under a burden that was too heavy for his health, a frame of mind and body that could hardly support lesser duties of governance in tiny Katsina State. There was no guarantee he would have lived longer if he had not become president but kidney failure and pericarditis were two things the toll of governance in a country infernally difficult and complex as Nigeria was going to exacerbate.  
   But Yar'adua was smart enough to know that Obasanjo's scheming was not out of genuine love for him. He knew he was going to die soon anyway and it wouldn't be bad if it was written he became president of his country even for a day. However he didn't die without exacting a little pound of flesh from his supposed benefactor. Obasanjo was to suffer a little hurt when the first pronouncement his protege made in office was to denounce the same electoral process that brought him to power, Obasanjo's retaliation against Nigerians. But the Nike Grange affair almost delivered a mortal blow. Recall that Nike Grange was Obasanjo's protege and was nominated by him into Yar'adua's cabinet. As Minister of Health, the professor of pediatrics allegedly flouted the president's order to return all unspent money in ministries to national coffers. Yar'adua was enraged. Obasanjo felt it imperative to intervene but the president, his protege, would have none of it. Iyabo, Obasanjo's daughter was also involved in the scandal, as senator superintending over the health ministry, but her father wouldn't care a hoot if she got her ass fried. It was Nike he was interested in saving but Yar'adua would have none of it. Yar'adua actually felt no compulsion to take orders from Obasanjo. He was of a radical persuasion, having been member of the leftist Aminu Kano-led PRP in the Second Republic while his own father was briefly vice-chairman of the conservative NPN. He had a master's degree in chemistry and in fact was the first university graduate to become president of Nigeria while Obasanjo barely finished secondary school before joining the army. He rebuffed all Obasanjo's entreaties and was to compound recalcitrance and ingratitude by bringing Nike to court in handcuffs, an act that brought Obasanjo fuming to no end. "Shehu gan ko le ba mi dan eleyi wo." An English translation of that Yoruba cliche would read: "Shehu(Yar'adua's late elder brother) would not have tried the insubordination with me."

How Obasanjo Killed the Yar'duas 1

The Yar'dua brothers have been dead for some time now but few ever realized the role Olusegun Obasanjo, ex head of state, played in their demise. These two powerful Nigerians were closely associated with him in their lifetime but even though he later fell apart with them, it would be a bit ridiculous to suggest he would even wish death on them but two grave errors of judgement on his part would eventually send the two to the great beyond. The elder Yar'adua was the Chief-of Staff, Supreme Headquarters, Obasanjo's deputy when he was military head of state. Yar'adua was barely a colonel when the then head of state, General Ramat Murtala Mohammed, was assassinated in an abortive coup detat in Feb 13, 1976. Obasanjo who was his deputy was promoted head of state by the selfless insistence of General Danjuma, Chief of Army Staff. and in order to assuage the wounded feelings of northern elements in the polity, Colonel Yar'dua was promoted to brigadier and soon major general in order to qualify him for the position of Chief- of-Staff, Supreme Headquarters, in effect vice-president. Colonel Muhammadu Buhari, presently president, was also considered for the post but deemed too incorrigible and inflexible for the highly political post of vice head of state.
Many an officer would be naturally miffed by this exceptional promotion. One of them was Colonel Sani Abacha, a Kanuri man from Borno but brought up in Kano who grumbled, albeit very silently, that he should have been at least considered for this special favor, having come from the same Kano as General Murtala.  But he understood too well the unusual circumstances that prodded his resentment and didn't make much fuss of it. Besides Abacha was very fond of women and beer and as long as the two flowed freely, the world wasn't such an unfair place even though while Yar'dua retired as major-general in 1979, Abacha, who was his mate, only got promoted to brigadier in 1980. Nobody knew what precisely caused the rift between Abacha and Yar'adua while they were in the army. Perhaps Abacha didn't grumble too silently and a whisperer could have been up to a mischief. Yar'adua was from a well-heeled family, his father having been minister in the First Republic and could be a bit condescending to others. His new, sudden position too was making him feel a bit heady and he and the stubborn Abacha were not likely to be great friends. By 1978, he had included the name of Abacha as one of the officers to be retired from the army. Abacha hit the roof. Here was a guy who was his mate in the army, who got unfairly promoted over him...who now had the nerve to root for his retirement. Yar'adua's attempted  betrayal really cut him to the quick. He loved the army, it was the only life he had known and had done nothing to warrant a premature retirement. To worsen matters, Yar'adua arranged for Abacha to be failed in one of army assessment examinations. Yar'adua however got a shock when the list was presented to Obasanjo. His hands as head of state was very weak, he got there fortuitously and those who installed him must be stronger than him, but on this matter, he stood his ground. He loved Murtala who was not only his boss, but was also helping Obasanjo maintain peace in his own family and would not want to visit premature retirement on any officer from Kano. He firmly had Abacha's name erased from the retirement list and that was how Abacha survived Yar'adua's purge. He would later become Nigeria's strongman in 1993 and Yar'adua would die in his prison later. Abacha never forgave Yar'adua for that retirement move. When Obasanjo and Yar'adua were being tried by Abacha  for a coup in 1995, Yar'adua told Obasajo 'Boss, did I not warn you of this man?'