Expectedly, Tinubu and his APC acolytes have descended on Obasanjo, trying to portray him as a hypocrite and unqualified to criticize them since he was known to exhibit dictatorial tendencies and presided over fraudulent elections.
But I think the APC is missing the point here. Like I explained above, people will prefer a dictator who can preside over economic growth than so-called democrats who will destroy the economy and send everyone into poverty and hunger. Democracy means nothing when one cannot afford to eat or provide respectable shelter, clothing, or necessities for his/her family.
Tinubu and his handlers are just playing the ostrich, ignoring the feelings of abject hopelessly pervading the land and thinking that they would continue to manage Nigerians and keep things under control by deploying their sophisticated ethno-populist propaganda and vote manipulation mechanisms.
Dare I say they are gravely mistaken! Instead of focusing on how to reverse the current rate of economic deceleration, the government’s main preoccupation is on changing the narrative and continuing the deception, throwing mud on anyone who complains about the hostile economic environment; instructing the incompetent National Bureau of Statistics to revise the unemployment figure and inflation downwards.
Regardless of what they say about Obasanjo, they can never erase the fact that he is still arguably the best-performing president in Nigeria’s history.
The reforms he championed saw the country’s GDP growth averaging 6.59 percent during his tenure and reaching 15.3% in 2002—one of the highest in the world. He also facilitated the elimination of Nigeria’s huge debt burden, rehabilitated and vastly expanded the middle class, improved public education and our universities, with professors earning commensurate pay (adjusted for cost of living) with those in advanced parts of the world, brought down inflation to single digit, and re-engineered a reverse japa – where Nigerians living abroad began relocating back to Nigeria in search of better jobs and starting businesses; all because things were looking better and Nigerian companies and businesses were attending career fairs in top-ranked universities in the world and competing for talents with Fortune 500 companies. Oh, those were glorious years that Nigerians would give anything to go back to!
Yet, for all his achievements; for all the moral right he has acquired to criticize the current government, deep down, Obasanjo must harbour regrets for setting the country on its current trajectory and for having allowed his vaunting personal ambitions to overshadow the real needs of the country.
Obasanjo became President at a critical juncture in Nigeria’s political and economic evolution. He had a blank slate to write and craft the future trajectory of the country, but he could not separate his personal interests/ambitions from what was good for the country.
No matter how hard he tries to run away from it, he bequeathed to the country the current corrupt and utterly useless electoral management body – the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) that can never be relied upon to conduct a clean election. Obasanjo can rail against the current leadership of INEC; He can call them corrupt, and demand for their removal. But he holds the record of appointing the most corrupt, incompetent, and reckless leadership for INEC ever in the person of Maurice Iwu.
It was precisely for this reason and the blatant manner Obasanjo set his political thugs on Anambra that soured his relationship with Chinua Achebe and made the revered novelist to thumb his nose at Obasanjo’s attempts to confer on him a national honour’s award.
Iwu largely acted as a puppet for the ruling party, removing and disqualifying candidates at the behest of Obasanjo, with little regard for legal procedures or due process. His behavior was so brazen and reckless that he ordered the announcement of election results in Abuja while voting was still ongoing in several states.
Even more absurd, some of the results he declared showed candidates receiving more votes than the total number of registered voters in those states – a mathematical impossibility. The 2003 and 2007 elections, overseen by Obasanjo, are widely regarded as the worst in Nigeria’s history, often described by democracy scholars as the “most rigged,” a “sham,” and the “worst” elections ever held in Nigeria.
Obasanjo himself called the 2007 election a “do-or-die” affair for his party, and in his reckless pursuit of victory, orchestrated such blatant fraud that even the eventual winner, Umaru Yar’adua, admitted the election’s fraudulent nature and began efforts to reform Nigeria’s electoral process.
The APC only refined Obasanjo’s playbook in conducting fraudulent elections, moving the rigging machine from the voting booths like Obasanjo did, to collation centres where ordinary citizen’s interference would be minimal. Had Obasanjo truly positioned INEC to conduct free and fair elections, it would have set a precedence that subsequent governments could not have been able to sidestep or reverse.
How Obasanjo must be regretting daily now that the foolish pursuit of his ambition to continue to control and determine the fate of his successors led to the reversal of all the reforms and economic growth he championed, which, coincidentally, was sustained by his two successors in office.
In addition, these successors hold the record of being the only leaders genuinely committed to the conduct of free and fair elections in Nigeria and worked assiduously to achieve it. But because his successors would not sheepishly allow him to remote control them, he lost his cool, railed against them incessantly, falsely accused them of all manner of crimes, and took advantage of their genuine efforts to conduct clean elections by mobilizing a malevolent and incompetent opposition to wrest power away from them.
Worse, he knew the candidate he supported against his docile but successful successors was a virtual economic illiterate. He had earlier described him in his memoirs, My Watch, as not being sound on matters of the economy. Of course, the party and candidate he helped to power in 2015 fully understood his capacity for mischief and never allowed him to undermine him/them or even allow for free and fair elections afterwards.
It is to Obasanjo’s eternal shame and regret that in pursuit of personal and inconsequential battles, which, he won, he meanwhile lost the most important war – which is Nigeria and its future viability and prosperity. Except, of course, if he doesn’t care about Nigeria but prefers personal accolades like being described as the best president in Nigeria’s history.
Akor is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at the University of Alabama
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