By Adagbo Onoja
Your Excellency,
I trust that you are your
ebullient self at this moment. It must be so after you brilliantly dashed to
Abuja to stop ‘them’ from responding to former President Obasanjo’s dramatic
departure from the PDP in the sulking, childish manner typical of “our great
party”.
Even from the social media response I can see, you scored a sharp
distinction in that move, toning down the impact of thunder and such a terrible
commentary on the PDP.
For the same Obasanjo to walk
out on the house he single handedly built in that dramatic and pregnant manner
must suggest to everyone that the house is now occupied by people he cannot
live with. There are those who say his own private interest explains his being
an impossible co-occupant. But can that be true even when his allegations
against the invading occupants are also borne out by the facts on the ground?
His departure just can’t but be a terrible certainty. This is simple logical inference
since no one else in the PDP got in there outside of the OBJ framework for
recruitment and progress in the party, meaning that no one there can claim
higher moral, organisational or ideological grounds as to say that it doesn’t
matter that ‘Baba’ left.
Even if it were true that OBJ made his move just in
time to pre-empt a disgraceful expulsion, the point is that he has beaten
‘them’ to it and such is what life is all about. The long and short of it is
that his departure and the manner he executed it is part of what keeps him
still referential in Nigerian politics to the chagrin of all those who hate,
despise or have utter contempt for him.
You may now see the point in
congratulating you for investing the remnant of the PDP with some prestige by
saying that the party would go and beg ‘Baba’ even though everyone knows that
no begging or ‘begging’ would change anything now. Having congratulated you on
what no one should deny you the credit, permit me to also add that it is about
time you formally and completely put what Chief Zebrudaya would call final full
stop to your commitment to President Jonathan and his ill-fated re-election
mission. You would be entitled to respond instinctively to this unsolicited
advisory with three initial questions on your mind: who am I to tell you to
close any commitment to the president; why should you do so and what do you do
if you do not support Jonathan?
Let me dispose of the first one
first. The reality is that, up till today, there are people who still call me trying
to book an appointment to see you, for example. There are others who know full
well that I am no longer in Dutse but do not believe it is a genuine
separation. Some are waiting for me to join ‘them’ in bashing you on the pages
of newspapers to believe that there is some distance between you and I.
When
they read me giving you your due, they entertain doubts. That is their own
headache, not mine or yours but what all these bring up is that, somehow, you
and I are still tied up in popular psychology. I am in love with that in the
context of the original force that bound you and I together. That is the spirit
of saying No to nonsense, irrespective of the cost implication even to our own
personal security, a trait which found organisational coherence in the defunct
PRP’s codebook on popular rebellion. PRP is no longer in existence but its
discursive consciousness lives on.
Not only that you codified
power as a governor in that discursive consciousness, it was also in the spirit
of that heritage that you blocked the late Abubakar Rimi from doing something
comparable in a way to what you are doing today in respect of your commitment
to Jonathan now. And it is in that context that we have to call you to order at
this point.
You have many people around you who can or who should do this but
none of them has the same reasons why it is I who is doing it. One reason for
that is you, more than anybody else, knows that, although I could ask someone
for financial assistance, nobody has ever bought me with money yet, meaning
that, even in your sleep of sleep, you will agree that this is the most
original and genuine voice on this issue that you can hear.
And, in case you would be
tempted to say that I was opposed to Jonathan in 2011 and this is a case of
someone who has difficulty in shifting position, let me make a distinction
between then and now. In 2011, I would say that when you watch Jonathan on
television, you would say exactly the same thing Henry Kissinger said about how
it could have occurred to anyone that Ronald Reagan could be president of the
United States.
Then you would reply by saying that the same Kissinger also said
that Reagan surprised everyone by bringing down the Soviet Union. And you and I
would go on like this until you would put my stubbornness in its place by
jokingly asserting your primacy. Perhaps, I should acknowledge the point that
you never minded the authority gap between you and I in this routine debate
within the larger ‘rotation of power’ debate preceding the eventual endorsement
of Jonathan for the 2011 presidential election. Now, this is a different
opposition based on the Jonathan the world has seen in the past four years.
Your Excellency, nobody argues
against the fact that you are very intelligent. You are, indeed, intelligent
because I have seen your red biro on my drafts too many times, from the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Government House, Dutse. I am also aware that
some senior citizens of this country call you an ‘enigma’, probably at your
back and they do so because they wonder how Barewa College education could position
you so intellectually.
As foreign affairs minister, yourself and Bola Ajibola
never got on well. But Ajibola never failed to ensure that you had an encounter
with the British media much of the time we were in or passing through London
where he was the High Commissioner under Obasanjo. And the only reason is
because he said he loved to hear you speak. And there are many such examples I
can give, the logic here being that, apart from the ‘PRP’ consciousness, we
follow brilliance in following you. Now, what is the iota of brilliance in the
Goodluck Jonathan project? Absolutely none! That entitles us to complain that
you are misleading us from the path of knowledge and brilliance to something
else and against which we are entitled to rebel.
That answers the second
question as well in terms of why you should end your commitment to Jonathan. At
great strategic, political and moral cost, you have put yourself as a paradoxical
ideologue of Project of Jonathan who, in himself, is a dimension of the
Nigerian crisis. How could that happen?
The third and final question is
what should you do then? I would be the last person to urge you to convert to
being a Buharite. In fact, I was politically happy when you were not one of
those who changed over to the APC. If you recall, I did a widely published piece
on November 19th, 2013 titled “Time for Sule Lamido to Pull Back”,
advising against your moving out of the PDP. I did so because I do not know any
condition that would bend crayfish enough to where Sule Lamido and General
Buhari would share a party together and it would work well.
If all the efforts
to make the two of you become ‘friends’ between 2008 and 2011 didn’t work, how would
such happen just because Lamido had to find just any space outside the PDP but
in which he would have had to share homestead with Buhari?
Around 2008, a Buhari ideologue
expressed solidarity with one of the early popular programmes you launched as
governor. I expressed surprise that your government was getting such solidarity
from such a quarter even as you were always at Buhari’s throat, although Buhari
never hit back at you. The ideologue surprised me further by saying that we
should not mind Buhari and Lamido since they were politicians and we should
always support what was right.
That encouraged me further to start a process
that would have culminated in a Buhari-Lamido trek through Kano, for whatever
it was worth. Your reconnection with Buhari was considered important in the
context of your being the most experienced Northern governor and, by
implication, a leader and one who should, therefore, be able to reach and hold confidential
dialogue with all other actors on the spectrum even as tendency or other
differences might exist.
The process proceeded apace,
including a chance meeting between you and the said Buhari ideologue at a
wedding or some occasion like that at Azare in Bauchi State. But before anyone
could say reconnection, you again went on a Buhari blitzkrieg and everything
was completely rubbished. Thereafter, it became impossible to show that one was
serious in what was being contemplated. And the plan died at that point.
When
Buhari visited the Government House, Dutse in the course of his 2011
presidential campaign, you resisted all urgings to convert the conversation in
the Holden Room to a deep session with Buhari about Nigeria, in spite of
whatever differences. From that moment, I gave up in obedience to the wisdom
thrown at me by the fellow who said, ‘leave those two Fulani men alone’,
notwithstanding my media reportage of that occasion in a way that suggested
that both of you overcame an undisclosed hostility. Nothing would, therefore,
have prevented me from concluding that you had been bitten by the opportunism
bug if I saw you hobnobbing with Buhari once he became APC presidential
candidate. It was great you didn’t move over.
However, the matter as it
stands today, is beyond that. Nobody asks you to go and campaign for Buhari
even though that is what your conscience should propel you to do since what you
say about Buhari in private is also what you say in public - that he is not
corrupt but surrounded by some people you have your reservations about. I do
not have a clear idea of whom you might have in mind. You might be right there because
I personally see a particularly signed up fascist around him hoping to become a
governor. But it is not up to you but up to the people of his state to decide whether
to elect him or not. Moreover, there are also a number of quality people there
who would counterbalance such elements in the Buhari architecture.
What I am trying to save you
from is the tragedy of erasing the record of a life of individual and
collective rebellion with your unwarranted conversion to being an ideologue of
a Goodluck Jonathan and whatever interests pushes him. It is that contradiction
that is the point about this letter. Otherwise, by now, the Buhari people are
in no need of more voters and campaigners. Even though the vote has not been
taken, it is the realisation that Buhari would have won with an embarrassing
gap between him and the so-called incumbent that has moved the people in
government to start juggling with election date.
That is another very dangerous
attribute of the Jonathan moment in power – this idea of devaluing any and
everything and bringing them to his own level irrespective of the consequences
for the entire country. One would expect the society to fight such things but
our society is not yet sufficiently out of the metaphysical constraints of
pre-capitalist sociality to do so. The tragedy is that, in this divide, you are
in the camp peopled by elements you have no history to share with.
You are not just there as a
bench warmer but as a crusader of some sort, staging a march past where angels
fear to even tiptoe, making such a comment as the certainty of PDP winning this
election while responding to Obasanjo’s dramatic exit. Though more of political
showmanship than substance, such statements still carry a discursive
signification that can propel one strategic mischief or another. An incumbent
cannot be dismissed in a power struggle in Africa and even the most committed
supporter of Buhari must leave room for such a possibility.
Nevertheless, the
statement completely fails to reckon with Shakespeare’s wisdom to the effect
that certainty is the chief enemy of security. Above all, the statement does
not reckon with nemesis. Yet, with virtually the same allusion in religion, in
science and in Marxism, nemesis is the most frightening reality about life. It
is as clear as sunrise that should PDP win without being right, the next thing
it would meet would be nemesis. And nemesis in an age of fluidity is what
nobody can even ‘guestimate’ its implications today. It would have been better
not to try to win without being right or put any contraption. Of course, people
in government would always claim that they have more information than the rest
of us. Since 1993, that has been the response of every government but they
always crashed the same way we, the less informed, have perceived.
But the point here is that you
have no business belonging to any cabal that either does not know or does not
care that there is a conjuncture. Of course, there is and it shows nowhere else
more than Obasanjo as PDP’s critique. Obasanjo, the grand author of the essential
PDP has renounced it obviously for several reasons but the most central of
which MUST be this Jonathan’s commitment to certain actions even when he knows
or MUST know that they are destructive of the Nigerian spirit.
For example, why
has he virtually declared a state religion, symbolically and empirically? It is
neither in the interest of Christianity nor of anybody at all. That is just one
example and anyone in the country today can name several of such nation-
debasing praxis. This is the action of somebody who is reading the letters but
cannot understand the spirit of the idea of “the end justifies the means”. The
country can go to hell as long as Jonathan is in the Villa and goes by the title
President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of
Nigeria.
Your Excellency, let me end
this letter this way: Jonathan is not worth anybody’s worth, certainly not yours,
whatever fears or idiosyncrasies you might be manifesting. This is not because
the people in APC are any qualitatively different from the PDP but because the APC
has beaten the PDP to it this time the moment they have been more popular with
the people. You need to perform an act of renunciation of cabalistic intrigues
going on in the government today, not for the attention of anybody in APC but
for history to show that, although you missed your way into the wrong camp for
quite some time, you eventually made peace with the people of Nigeria by being
on their side.
It doesn’t matter if you do this a few minutes before the final
hour. In this regard, take your bearing from Obasanjo rather than from
Jonathan. Obasanjo has certainly been part of the rot in Nigeria but Nigeria
forgives him because, in that moment in history when the concept of
nation-state has been undergoing severe interrogation and the suffering and
misery that comes along with that for the majority, he stands rock solid for
the preservation of this extraordinarily beautiful but over-raped country.
Today, the degree to which
Nigeria has been raped is a source of embarrassment for everyone. Imagine being
at a lecture or a seminar in which Nigeria is the referent in global statistics
of poverty and infrastructural primitivity. And this happens all the time and
everywhere, turning one’s happy, life-time encounter with knowledge into
sadness and unconscious brooding. How could a country so permanently say No
even when its Chi permanently said
Yes? Buhari may not reverse this hopelessness dramatically but the idea of a
change in the people leading this country at this moment would, in itself, mean
so much in the possibility of moving toward where one could ever proudly
introduce oneself any and everywhere as a Nigerian.
In terms of the possibility of
moving Nigeria where one could feel proud, there is a global approval rating
that cannot be dismissed when thinking about Buhari. What that global rating
conveys to everyone is a cautious statement that there has been found someone
within the Nigerian establishment who could discipline Nigerian capitalism and
save the system from radicalisation, be it radical nationalism or terrorist
radicalisation. Otherwise, how would the ultimate articulators of the interests
of the liberal World Order such as the International
New York Times or The Economist
stake their pedigree in preferring Buhari?
They must have seen strong chances
of his leadership in moving the country forward, in every sense of the word, particularly
if Buhari quickly and successfully liberates himself from the stranglehold of
PDP propaganda. I am referring to the kind of stranglehold which made him deny
himself the golden opportunity to define the terms of negotiation between Boko
Haram and the Federal Government in a way that would have embarrassed both of
them; the stranglehold that would make him begin to wear somehow funny dresses
just to show to people that he actually mixes and the stranglehold that might
make him uncritically embrace Neoliberalism as to end up a caricature of
himself.
Other than some of these, there are no reasons why a Sule Lamido would
not prefer a Buhari to the Jonathan we have seen in the past four years. It is
not a matter of your right to choose who to associate with and not to because I
believe that if you should find me behaving completely different from the ONOJA
you knew too well, you would equally be alarmed and call me to order. And I
would note that someone is talking there.
So, once again, it is “Time for
Sule Lamido to Pull Back”, this time in a different direction. If you insist on
not ditching Jonathan for reasons of information you may have which I wouldn’t
have, advise him to seek a ‘negative security guarantee’ from Buhari if his information
is that he cannot win the impending election fair and square. That means
approaching Buhari to say: hey, can we work out the succession rites in such a
way that I don’t end up in jail?”
There would be nothing new in that. It has
been grudgingly grabbed from conflict management into mainstream statecraft to
accommodate the multi-dimensionality of power and complexity of life itself. As
things stand today, this looks the least complicated of all the other tricks
that are clearly being contemplated in the Villa. One hopes they know the
limits and potentials of each and every tricks they are considering in today’s
changed global and even domestic environment.
Domestically, the dynamics
appears to have worked out in such a way that Nigerians have found out that a
Buhari is actually who they needed, at least compared to Jonathan. There is no
wisdom at all in going against the people. After all, is democracy not the
foolishness of the majority becoming the wisdom of the age once expressed?
Humbly submitted!
Oga Jonathan doubled the #50m bribe ; oh I mean 'transportation money '...yeye dey smell
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