OBJ To IBB In 1992:
Why You Must Not Sit Tight
Below is the full text of a speech General Olusegun Obasanjo had wanted to
read at a National Executive Council Meeting, in Abuja in 1992 in response to
General Ibrahim Babangida’s whimsical transition program, meant to keep him
indefinitely in power.
We are in the grip of a grave national crisis. There are very many dimensions to
this crisis. The aspect that has been the talking point lately is the crisis of
succession that has arisen from the botched presidential primaries and the
lackluster effort to manage it. Then there is the economic crisis, which has
received little or no attention in recent times and has been growing steadily
worse. In the social sphere the story is the same: social services and
infrastructures are crumbling and the human condition, the quality of life is
deteriorating. Nigeria is on the verge of total paralysis.
Most of those who can with some respect and credibility speak out against the
ills of the present have become victims of the practice that has come to be
called “settlement”.
Choosing a moment when they are most vulnerable, the government steps in with
generous assistance, to fly them or their dependants abroad for life-saving
medical treatment or favors of lifting oil or supplying fertilizer-patrimonial
governance. From that point, their silence is assured. With the nation’s health
care delivery system on the brink of collapse, only very few would not yield to
such blandishments. But can such blandishments be offered to the retired
schoolteacher, the retired railway worker, and the retired postal clerk? Or to
the farmer, the peasant or the Nigerian market women who constitute the majority
of our people? Are they too not citizens, entitled as of right to all the good
things that their nation can provide? Won’t the high and the low be better of,
if we improve the national health care delivery system?
The silence and acquiescence of those who have been co-opted into the system is
thus assured. Many of them have acquired wealth beyond their wildest dreams, and
will not now threaten it by principled dissent. For all such people, engagement
with power has been a kiss of intellectual death, an abandonment of independent
thought.
All the values we hold dear are under assault. The nation is wracked by tension
and despair. Hope has become a scare commodity, and fear a constant compassion.
I believe that the immediate context in which this meeting of the National
Council of States has been convened is the crisis of succession arising from the
unsuccessful presidential primaries. But this meeting cannot resolve anything,
for the council itself is of dubious constitutional validity. Under the
constitution, the Council should be presided over by an elected president of the
Federal Republic, and should include the President of the Senate and the Speaker
of the National Assembly. A president can of course invite people to advise him
or by law set up an Advisor or Consultative Council, but that Council cannot
have the status of the National Council of States prescribed by the
Constitution. As far as I am concerned, this is not a meeting of the National
Council of States. I chose to attend primarily because of the opportunity it
will afford me to put my views across on the number of fundamental national
issues. Mr. President, I have on few occasions in recent times sought this
opportunity to meet you privately and discuss these issues. But the chance never
came. So, despite my strong doubts about the constitutional validity of this
forum, I intend to speak for the record as an invited adviser. I shall be blunt,
Mr. President.
For the crisis we face requires blunt, forthright talk, not empty platitudes.
The primary elections for the presidency, it now seems in retrospect, were
designed to fail. As it became clearer and clearer that they would fail, many in
Nigeria and Abroad were expressing doubts about the credibility of the
transition program and about the good faith of the administration in the entire
process. Though believing that the law and the process were being manipulated
and that the result could only be a deformed baby, I nevertheless held that men
and women of goodwill in Nigeria would have to come together in a spirit of
community to nurture the deformed baby to normality. Little did I know that we
have on our hands not even a stillborn baby but a permanent pregnancy, an
abnormal situation fraught with great danger for both mother and child with
agonizing state of anxiety for the father and the family?
The crisis was preventable. All that was required was honesty of purpose, and
diligent implementation of the transition schedule in a manner that would not
raise questions about the integrity of the managers of the transition. What we
have had instead is manipulation on a scale almost beyond belief, and
rationalization of the most absurd kind. In the name of political engineering,
the country has been converted to a political laboratory for trying out all
kinds of silly experiments and gimmicks. Principle has been abandoned for
expediency. All kinds of booby-traps were instituted into the transition
process. The result is the crisis we now face.
There is a growing feeling that some (not all, I must add) Executive governors
have forgotten that they are the products of the transitional process and have
been elected to further foster it until full civilian democratic rule has become
a reality in Nigeria. They have not been elected to subvert the process. Anyone
of them, individually or collectively, who advises you (for whatever personal
benefits) to extend the life of your administration even by one day betrays the
trust of his people and is therefore a traitor to the country’s democratic
process.
In any case, the alleged electoral malpractice’s that are now the subject of
concern and shock have not been absent from both local and state elections
(including gubernatorial elections). Only the scope and magnitude of the
manipulations are bigger and larger. Our
Executive Governors who participated fully in the process should not give the
impressions that they are saints. This will impress neither one nor Nigerians.
They must not destroy the very ladder, which they have climbed to where they are
now.
The transition was aimed originally to terminate in 1990. For reasons that were
never convincing, it was shifted to 1992. It was claimed that the transition
that led to the Second Republic was “rushed”, and that that was why the Second
Republic came to grief. By stretching out the transition this time around, it
was said, the outcome would be stable and durable. I am sure those who made this
claim know better. The public is certainly wiser about their motivations. As I
pointed out then, a transition can be made to occupy whatever space anyone
choose. What counts is the result. If the outcome of the transition over which I
had the honor to preside with your support did not endure, it certainly cannot
be because it was “rushed’.
The government decreed two parties into existence, claiming that the five
parties of the Second Republic did not make for national cohesion. Yet the said
truth is that, even with two parties, the nation is more polarized, more deeply
divided, than it was during the Second Republic. The situation was different for
that matter during the First Republic when regional, largely ethnically based
parties, held sway. In both periods, persons whose authority was recognised and
accepted by the rank and file led the political parties. You could speak to the
leader or leaders of the party and be sure that you had spoken to the entire
party membership. Not anymore.
Those who call the government-created parties parastatals are even being
generous.
Parastatals at least have effective and accountable chief executives, who can
enforce order and discipline. The same cannot be said about the
government-created parties. And yet they are the vehicles through which it is
hoped that a stable democracy will be built and nurtured.
We delude ourselves.
The good manipulation we have witnessed these past years are all the more
disturbing because they do not even go to the heart of the matter, which is to
institute an enduring democratic order in Nigeria. The concern has been with the
rules and methods of selection, not with the building and sustenance of
democratic institutions and traditions. The managers of the transition are
furiously refining the means, long after they have forgotten the end. Our
country deserves much better.
Last March, at the University of Ibadan, I gave a lecture reviewing the Nigerian
situation. The interesting thing, Mr. President, is those three months after
that lecture at Ibadan I was stopped by armed robbers and my car stolen. If I
had been killed in that encounter, many Nigerians would have found it difficult
to exculpate the authorities from responsibility in the matter. I was grateful
to you for your prompt action in visiting me and helping with security vehicles.
I had to bear testimony that it was the act of pure criminals who could not even
recognize me. I state this to underline the deep-rooted suspicion and unbelief
of Nigerians and the credibility gulf between the government and the general
public. That is why the fragmentation of power and authority that now
characterizes your administration is dangerous.
So also is the existence of all kinds of shadowy, government-funded
associations, which make it their business to speak authoritatively for the
government, attack decent citizens in the most uncouth language, set individuals
against individuals, community against community, religion against religion,
soldiers against civilian, Muslim against Christian, and government against
citizen. In the process, they have almost destroyed the sense of community
without which this country cannot move forward. In the last seven years, the
labors of our heroes past have been steadily undermined. Not even that armed
forces, which we have always held out as the bedrock of Nigerian unity has been
spared this steady devaluation, clearly we cannot continue along this path of
destruction.
Prolongation of military rule cannot be the answer under the present
circumstances. The honor and integrity of the armed forces in whose name you
have governed this country these past seven years are at great risk. The handing
over of power to an elected civilian government on January 23, 1993, must
proceed apace. There lies the honour of the military, which must not be
destroyed. All that needs to be done between now and then can be done if there
is seriousness and honesty of purpose, and if the system is allowed to work
without manipulation.
We have a voters’ register, we have a national electoral commission in position,
with all the support system, for what they are worth, we have two parties. Let
the caretakers’ organized party conventions with the assistance of NEC to elect
the party flag bearer to contest the presidential elections on the basis
open-secret system. Let the ballot papers which can be printed in one week – we
did that in 1979 – be printed with the photographs of the two presidential
candidates against which the choice of a voter can be indicated. Mr. President,
it is a matter for great concern bordering on shame to Nigeria that Angola with
more inadequate infrastructures than Nigeria, being engaged in civil population
could organize a decent, world-acclaimed, free and affair election within a
space of one year with open secret ballot. Of course, where there is will, good
intention, determination and integrity, there will be way.
Any prolongation of military rule in the form of diarchy or any other
arrangement will not only bring the armed forces into utter disrepute, it will
amount to a declaration of war against the sovereign rights of the people of
Nigeria to choose their own leaders and conduct their affairs in accordance with
the constitution. Enough is enough. Asking NEC or governors to advise AFRC on
such issues as timing and period of transition with a view to passing the buck
is a big joke and no serious mind is amused or deceived by it. The
responsibility is squarely yours.
Except mentioning it in passing, I do not intend to dwell on the issue of
destroying the base of the Armed Forces through the ill-advised reported
proposal of moving Army Headquarters to Minna, Air Force headquarters to Kano
and Navy headquarters to Lagos. The capital of almost every nation I know is
also the seat of he headquarters of the Armed Forces. I have it on strong
authority that some others have advised you against such precipitate action. But
as one has come to know you a little bit better now that you are in power and
with power, you could toy with anything believing that Nigerians will shout only
for a while and you either silence them with chocking largess, intimidation,
hack letters or that time will silence them. You have acted and voiced this
tendency in the past. But Mr. President, every word, work and act of yours goes
into history. Nobody is immune from the verdict of history.
As someone who was in the battlefield during the Nigerian Civil War and who
unexpectedly but providentially assumed the mantle of the Commander-in-Chief of
the Armed Forces of Nigeria and the leadership of the government, I beg you in
the name of Allah not to mistake the silence of our people for acquiescence or
weakness and the sycophancy of the greedy and opportunistic people who parade
the corridors of power as representative of the true feelings of our people.
Nigeria needs peace and stability. It is too fragile to face another commotion.
In God’s good name drag it not into one. This is the time for you to have some
honorable exit.
May God help you and help our
country.
