ANAYO EZUGWU Chief Dan Ulasi is a former chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Anambra State. In this interview, he speaks on the controversy over former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s comment on President Bola Tinubu’s administration and the response from the Presidency, among other issues, ANAYO EZUGWU writes
What do you think of the tangle between President Olusegun Obasanjo and President Bola Tinubu’s spokespersons, with Bayo Onanuga saying Obasanjo doesn’t have the moral high ground to complain about the performance of Tinubu’s administration?
Constitutionally speaking, both Onanuga and Obasanjo have a right to free speech. It is for you and I to dissect what they have said and see where the truth is coming from, if any. But fundamentally, I have to say that democracy in itself succeeds with a heavy dosage of civility.
And in both Obasanjo’s comment and the reply by the presidency, I didn’t see any civility in them. Leadership should have some form of strategic discipline and not self-indulgence.
But what I saw, especially on the presidency’s reply, is a toxic stash-andburn politics, which could be dangerous. Sometimes it might be stoking paranoia and hatred. And once hatred comes into political discussion, then you have left the main point. Obasanjo made fundamental points at Yale University’s Chinua Achebe’s anniversary.
Some of them were factual. There are things you cannot deny. It depends on the way he said it and the way the perceptor is looking at what he said. I would have expected the presidency to reply to him point by point by trying to dissuade some of the things he mentioned.
He cannot conclusively say that this current regime is a failure but I will accept that the eight years of Muhammadu Buhari was a tragedy for this country.
I have said that severally, and anybody, who inherited Buhari will not have performed any magic. The only difference would be your methodologies because the whole system was flawed and collapsed as it were.
Even if Atiku Abubakar or Peter Obi had succeeded Buhari, they would be passing through this problem. The differential would be the methodology with which they want to apply solutions. It’s not just waking up and saying you remove subsidy, you float the naira, without concomitant solutions attached to it.
So, I would have expected the presidency to be more civil in their reaction or entirely even ignore him. Obasanjo has been somebody who criticizes everybody. Even Umaru Musa Yar’Adua whom he midwifed, his emergence as president, he also criticized him and wrote letters. But in this one, at least he’s commenting as it were.
So, I expect Obasanjo to know that he’s a very senior statesman, from military head of state to civilian president, he has a right to make commentary, but not a commentary that even runs down your country. Once you run down the leadership of a country, you’re running down the country. He’s not the only perfect person.
He got up on his inauguration day to remove oil subsidy without a concomitant solution to what he did
The tendency people want to see or believe is that he always criticizes others, believing that he is the only one who did some good Can you unpack these for us, especially when you’re talking about the toxic rhetoric that we’ve been hearing and what do you think is at the foundation of this?
If you remember, between 1999 and 2007, Tinubu was governor of Lagos State and Obasanjo was president of Nigeria. It was short of saying it was a civil war.
There was nothing the PDP government at the centre didn’t do to take Lagos State from Tinubu, and he resisted it. So, I can see a carryover of what happened 20 years ago into the present dispensation. One year plus is not enough time to have a fairly critical analysis of Tinubu’s administration.
I’m not defending him; I’m a PDP person and the country is in such a bad situation that if two top leaders, despite the situation we find ourselves, resort to use toxic language, then they are not helping the common people they are supposed to be serving. The reply by Onanuga, simply put, it’s unfortunate.
That’s the way I will describe it because it was so personal, going to his personal life, and it doesn’t bring anything because if you check all the presidents in this country, you probably would regard Obasanjo as the best.
All the loans we had through the military, he was the one who paid it off and got the European Union to forgive us the rest of our debts.
He stabilized the polity, he established the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC) and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). Tinubu also did his best, because subsequent people who succeeded him in Lagos, also transformed Lagos. That means he also had a vision. I would have expected Obasanjo to be a little civil in his commentaries.
There are comments you make and people are forced to reply. You may not like the reply, but they have a right to reply. But my concern is that where Nigeria is today, we don’t need such toxic languages from either side.
Can’t the Tinubu government decide to work on those things that Obasanjo highlighted rather than abusing him?
I must tell you that this is a very serious matter. A matter in which thousands, if not millions of Nigerians, if they are not dying, are at the point of death.
So, we shouldn’t be joking about it, either from Obasanjo’s comment or the reply from the presidency because we have given them the authority to run the affairs of this country to take care of us. Obasanjo rightly pointed out that nobody believes that anything is going so beautifully in this country.
As I said and you mentioned it in your comment, nobody believes so. If Onanuga had replied to Obasanjo item by item, comparatively speaking, with respect to the time he was president, it would have made some common sense and intellectual understanding, not going personal and away from the topic of discussion.
That’s why I said it was a little toxic and bothering on political concern. Once you start doing that, it’s a distraction and you don’t want people to look into the substance of what he said.
Have you read that presentation on leadership and state capture by President Obasanjo and what is it that Obasanjo said in that statement that is toxic?
You forgot to mention the aspect where he said that this government is leading Nigeria into a failed state. That’s the summary of what he said. If I say that you are stupid, depending on the tone I used in saying it, you might not be annoyed. Somebody else will tell you, you are very stupid, and you feel angry.
If somebody else has said what Obasanjo said about the Tinubu administration and many have been saying it, it would have been irrelevant to them. But it was said by a former head of state, with whom they had issues.
That was why I referred to when he was president and this president was governor of Lagos State. There was a kind of a crisis of confidence and you don’t forget that.
That is what I see playing out. It may be that Obasanjo feels that the young man is doing well, and he wants to tell Nigeria that he’s not doing well. That is his opinion. He’s not going to convince me or somebody else the way to judge Tinubu’s government.
Some people had in the past judged how Obasanjo performed, it’s not going to change anything. So, what I’m saying is that for comments like that coming at this point and the subsequent reply from the presidency, we don’t need them.
That’s why I’m being fair-minded in my commentary. Nigerians are dying and supporting Obasanjo or Onanuga doesn’t help the issue. We should be able to, if we have suggestions on how this country can do better, let the person say it out. Not when we have all died and you come telling us the armchair theoretic that if you had done this.
Why didn’t you tell us to do it? If you love this country, if you’re patriotic, tell us how to do it better. People are dying in this country. People are dying in every village, and in every town, people are dying. So, this rhetoric is not what we require at this point. That is a summary of what I’m saying, honestly.
How do you think this is going to play out because you’ve already alluded to the fact that you feel this is bigger than this statement and that it is being driven by historic animosity between these two gentlemen and is this a path to 2027?
I had the singular privilege and I call it a privilege, of meeting Obasanjo as president not less than 30 times. In fact, at some point in time, he would tell his senior special assistant, Andy Ubah to call me.
He’s a very argumentative person and very intellectually driven. Sometimes we’ll be talking and his Chief of Staff, Major General Abubakar, will come and tell me he has an appointment and he says I am president of Nigeria. This is more important to me because I’ll have the courage to tell him where he’s wrong and he will debate on it.
So, for those who have not had the privilege of talking with Obasanjo one-on-one, they will not know where he’s coming from. He’s somebody who positions himself, like I said initially, as a perfectionist. He ended the Nigerian civil war, so to speak, and believes that of all his colleagues, civil or military, he’s on a placement where nobody else would have done better.
That is his opinion, and I don’t quarrel with that. He is right to have his opinion, but what I’m saying is that no matter what his opinion is, no matter the dimensions of his opinions, I would have expected the presidency either to ignore him.
If the presidency had ignored him, the issue would have died down, or they graduate their discussion on relevant items, because not everything he said is relevant. They would have graduated it and then reply to what they think is important towards national development. That is the summary of what I’m saying.
Whatever their problems, everybody in this country knew that eight years of Tinubu’s governorship of Lagos State and the presidency of Obasanjo wasn’t a bed of roses. Anybody who thinks otherwise is deceiving himself. So, it’s a carryover, and I maintain that it’s a carryover. Why it has surfaced this time is what I can explain.
Obasanjo said several judges are in the pockets of wealthy politicians and individuals, and as a result, they deliver judgements not based on the law of the land, but on the highest bidder. Are these things not true?
I said initially that on both sides, there are factual statements. But if Obasanjo is talking about the use of law courts, I would need to remind you that a case was at the Aba High Court of Senator Wabara about his failed senatorial election but Obasanjo as president brought that case from Aba to Abuja and a judgement was given for him, and the next day he was made Senate President. It happened in this country and the media revealed it.
No government in this country can be described as pro-civil rule in terms of court processes. They have used the courts when it is convenient for them, and the courts in Nigeria have made themselves available to be used.
So, it shouldn’t be a topic of discussion or anybody blaming one party or the other because all of them have used the Nigerian judiciary. Unfortunately, it’s a good business for judges in this country. So, in terms of what you have just said, there’s nothing new about it.
Even if Atiku Abubakar or Peter Obi had succeeded Buhari, they would be passing through this problem. The differential would be the methodology with which they want to apply solutions
What about Obasanjo’s comment about a governor who perpetrated himself in a state for 25 years after he left office?
What I said was that there must be a reason why a civilized and cosmopolitan state like Lagos will allow somebody to repeatedly anoint those to be governors after being governor for eight years.
There was a time he had a problem with Babatunde Fashola and he nearly stopped him from doing a second term but that one fought back, and was able to secure a second term.
So, it is for those who live in Lagos to challenge him. It’s not for you, I mean, if you have a political inclination, you challenge him. I don’t think there’s any magic in what he’s doing. He probably has the resources to do it.
And if it is not comfortable, I don’t like it. Because it’s a one-man show as far as I’m concerned. I mentioned it first, but it is happening. Whether he will turn Nigeria into the same system, I think it will be difficult but you can see that we’re not running democracy. I’ve always said that we have a civil rule, what I call democratic centralism.
Somebody stays somewhere, apologetically using democracy to deceive people, and says, where have you seen that discussion taking place? It is what the president decides to happen that will happen. It’s a carryover of it into the Senate, into the House of Representatives, and they pass the laws.
We have a fundamental problem of our institutions not being able to democratize the system itself. So, it is not enough to criticize one person. How about the president of the Senate? How about the speaker of the Federal House? How about the governors? Do you know what the governors do in the various states?
They appoint all the commissioners. They appoint the chairman of the local government. They appoint even councillors. We have a problem in this country that we don’t need to itemize it to one person. That’s the fundamental problem with democracy in Nigeria.
As a PDP chieftain, what is your assessment of the Tinubu administration so far?
I have said that anybody who succeeded Buhari has to be a magician to do any better job within one year. I have repeated it even in this interview. So, it would be difficult for me to have a justification, either way, one year plus, to assess what Tinubu is doing.
All I would say is he got up on his inauguration day to remove oil subsidy without a concomitant solution to what he did. That is part of the problem we are in. So, he created a problem that he could not solve. Also, by floating the Naira, he created a problem he could not solve. So, it’s self-inflicting.
These two major problems are the summary of the Nigeria’s economic woos today. So, to that extent, anybody who complains about that is justifiable. But I’m not inside the system. I don’t know what they are seeing in the system.
But whatever it is they are seeing, they have to understand that Nigerian people are in a terrible mess. If the mess is about people dying, then it’s a very serious mess.
When do you think would be the best time to assess Tinubu’s administration?
You should give me another six months. What I normally say is that if somebody takes over, he has a justifiable reason to want to understudy. Even though it was the same party, he wasn’t in that government.
So, you need at least one year to be able to understudy what your predecessors did. And then we look at the footprints you are putting forward. Those footprints, I haven’t seen. And I must be honest with you, I’m not an economist.
They may have some footprints, but I’m not seeing it because the problem in the society is mounting by the day, by the week, by the month. So, if they are not doing anything the people can perceive, they better start doing it because we are talking about Nigerian life, not APC or PDP.
