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DEAR PRESIDENT
OBASANJO: ANOTHER LETTER
Niyi Osundare
When I told a friend a couple of days ago about my
wish to write another open letter to you (my fifth in
five years), his immediate reaction was “Don’t waste
your effort over a lost cause. Obasanjo is
irredeemable”. (This friend, by the way, was one of your
staunchest supporters in 1999). The results of the
so-called gubernatorial and Assembly elections were out,
and all the contested positions were falling like nine
pins for your Party, the great PDP, “the biggest
political party in Africa”. From the south to the north,
from the west to the east, your great Party had stormed
into “victory” like a behemoth, trampling all rules of
decent engagement, raw, astonishingly greedy, and
disdainful of the will of the Nigerian people. But I
have decided to send these few words to you all the
same, knowing full well that in the communication
between the two of us, the Nigerian people are the
eavesdroppers who are, in actual fact, more significant
than the primary interlocutors.
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President Obasanjo, Nigeria is dying
in your hands. But like some strange figure from another
planet, you seem absolutely unaware of the enormity of
the problem. Every act of yours demonstrates your lack
of respect for the people you rule, and your gross
underestimation of the level of political consciousness
they have attained in the past eight years of “nascent
democracy”, the degree of experience they have gained
from their suffering under your yoke and the yokes of
your equally oppressive predecessors in power.
Everywhere you have turned in the past four years
(sometime in the future, you would wish you hadn’t had a
second term), your feet have fallen on thorns and
pebbles: the fomenting of wasteful political
disaffection in Anambra, and Oyo States, the cunning
mavouevering that has turned you into an absolute
monarch of your great Party, the PDP, your routine
disrespect for legitimate court injunctions and
well-deliberated laws from the Legislature, your
back-handed attempt to extend your presidential tenure,
and your embarrassing showdown with your Vice President
over how BOTH of you have mismanaged and squandered the
resources of the Petroleum Trust Fund Development (PTDF).
As scandalized Nigerians watched their so-called Number
One and Number Two citizens dancing so abominably naked
in the streets despite their lavish robes, we all
wondered: what manner of rulers are these that have
absolutely no sense of shame?! Your Excellency, you
remind me of the proverbial king that has shat on the
throne. Your nose may be too far from the message of you
discharge, but the country is surely choking from the
stench.
Without a doubt, Mr President,
the climax of all these acts of misrule is the conduct
of the on-going general elections. Right from the
outset, Nigerians, tutored, no doubt, by past
experiences, have expressed their grave concern about
the dubious functionaries you appointed to the
Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC),
stating without equivocation that the “Independent” in
its nomenclature is both a ruse and a fraud. Their
memory still reels with images of FEDECO and its blatant
manipulations of the 1983 elections, and the electoral
commission that arranged your great Party’s “landslide
victory” in 2003. Nigerians complained about INEC’s lack
of preparedness, its tardy deliberations, its untidy
arrangements, its shocking incompetence (even by
Nigerian standards!), its utter corruptibility. As if to
confirm the people’s suspicion, a few weeks to polling
time, voting machines and other sensitive and secret
electoral materials were discovered in the private
residences of some chieftains of your great Party. The
country watched with mouths agape as law enforcement
officers wrung their fingers, moping over their complete
helplessness about this act of supreme criminality. The
culprits were untouchable, unarrestable by virtue of the
order from above. This and similar acts left us
wondering why evil people find it so easy to thrive in
your company; why nation-wreckers fester so recklessly
under the umbrella of your authority.
Then came election time, and
INEC played out your script to the last letter. Its
madness became a method, its seeming rowdiness a
well-rehearsed ruse – all in the service of rigging out
a dubious victory for your great Party. To be sure,
Nigeria has a notorious legacy of violent
electioneering, but none has surpassed this one in its
blatant perfidy: ballot papers with the logos of
opposition parties or the photographs or names of their
candidates missing; deliberate shortage of voting
materials in opposition strongholds; swapping or/and
stealing and/or disappearance of ballot boxes; lateness
or total absence of electoral officials; pervasive
thuggery – all this under the collaborative watch of
state security agents. In those places where no voting
took place, INEC made sure it voted for the electorate
and awarded landslide victories to your great Party.
Under-age pupils were corralled out of their classrooms
and made to thumbprint ballot papers for a fee; babies
were roused from their cradles, their big toes used in
place of adult thumbs. In many towns, the number of
votes cast is about double the entire population. . . .
Your Excellency, this is the
excellent sham and charade that produced your great
Party’s excellent landslide. The people’s voice has been
stolen, their integrity trampled in the dust, their
commonweal frustrated, their sacred trust ridiculed and
profaned by venal philistines. What INEC has awarded you
and your great Party is a Pyrrhic victory, dripping with
blood, sizzling with omens. It is the kind of victory
that has defeated Nigeria’s attempts at nationhood since
independence. Difficult to believe, but the papers have
quoted you as describing the elections as “free and
fair”, while Maurice Iwu, your INEC Mephistopheles, is
wild with self-congratulation. This shows how tragically
far both of you are from reality, how so terribly
cynical your judgements have become.
Mr. President, take a sobering
stroll down memory lane. Consider this: apart from
occasional religious riots and their ethnic fall-outs,
no other issue has brought Nigeria closer to the brink
of disintegration than rigged elections. Remember the
Western Region elections of October 11, 1965, rigged
with the same kind of blatancy by a party which shares
the same pedigree as your great Party, the PDP. Just
like your great Party, the National Democratic Party NDP,
(nicknamed “Demo” by the people of the then Western
Region), decided to force itself by every foul means on
a people thoroughly tired of its oppression and
resentful about it tactics. Weeks before the election of
October 1965, its chieftains, sensing how unfriendly the
electorate was, had boasted that they were bound to win,
whether the people voted for them or not. And as your
great Party has just done, the ‘Demo’ Party literally
dissolved the people and voted itself to power by a
process of massive rigging and savage intimidation.
The people rose in anger and
horror. Nights were loud with wails, days with silence.
Bonfires melted the bitumen on tarred roads. Houses went
up in flames. “Demo” sympathizers were doused with
gasoline in broad daylight and torched, to the singing
and dancing of irate mobs. The “wetie” uprising had
begun. The oppressive government of the day reacted by
flooding the streets with fearsome police armed to the
teeth. Security agents combed every street and filled
the detention centres with opponents of the “Demo”
party. But the crises continued unabated. Although the
uprising was basically in the western part of Nigeria,
the tremors were felt in every part of the country. The
country started to totter. Things were no longer at
ease. This was the situation that led to the military
coup of January 1966, which in turn led to the massacre
of the Igbo, the counter-coup of July the same year, the
attempted secession of Eastern Nigeria, and the gruesome
civil war (from which we have yet to fully recover). You
were one of the “heroes” of that war, Mr. President, and
you remember that the casualties numbered in thousands.
Should I remind you about the
elections of 1983 which the National Party of Nigeria,
NPN, (again cut out of the same cloth as your great
Party), under the presidency of the God-fearing Alhaji
Shehu Shagari, rigged so shamelessly in their brazen
effort to cling to power by all means? Clearly three
months before that election, a colleague close to the
corridors of power had told me how many states of the
federation the NPN had decided to take and how many it
was going to concede. I dismissed my colleague’s
prediction as some kind of beer-induced gossip, and my
laughter nearly brought down the roof of the staff club.
“You will see”, he said as he picked up his car key and
left. When I saw him three months later and about two
days after the election, he looked at me with a
mischievous smile on his face and asked: “Didn’t I tell
you?”. Mr. President, just as your great Party has done,
the NPN violated the commonweal of the Nigerian people.
The people reacted, and as the cliché goes, the rest is
history.
Mr. President, just in case you
have forgotten the NPN’s Landslide 83, do you remember
the historic events of June 12, 1993? Your
comrade-in-arms, General Babangida dribbled the country
“a little to the left, a little to the right”, but the
people persevered, bent as they were on throwing off the
yoke of military dictatorship. To everyone’s surprise
and much against General Babangida’s expectations, the
election of June 12 went so smoothly, and was so
universally accepted, that many of us were beginning to
see the germ of the Nigeria of our dream. But Babangida
killed that dream by annulling the election and sending
us, Sisyphus-like, back to the bottom of the frightening
mountain. The country has yet to recover from the trauma
of the Babangida blow. I have never stopped asking: why
is it that every time the Nigerian people team up to
vote for progress, their rulers always make sure they
mock their plight and abort their dream?
President Obasanjo, here you are
again, a link in a long and troubled chain, a joint in a
chequered juncture. You and your great Party have ruled
this country for eight years. Our people are sicklier,
hungrier, more insecure, more illiterate, less
confident, less hopeful now than they were when you and
your great Party mounted the saddle. They are yearning
for a change and they see the ballot box as a peaceful
and legitimate route to that change. But you and your
great Party have decided to violate the people’s will
and frustrate their yearning. Now Nigeria is back again,
on the brink. Bonfires at the barricades. Houses aflame.
Corpses by the roadside. Days of trouble. Nights of
turmoil. International observers who witnessed ballot
boxes being snatched and swapped at gunpoint, who saw
fantastic figures being declared for areas where no
voting ever happened, are wondering: where will this
lead the country? When will Nigeria grow?
You were reported as having said
the elections were free and fair. If indeed they were,
why are towns burning? Why are the so-called
election-winners on the run? Why are some of your
landslide governors holed up in their gubernatorial
fortresses, afraid of stepping out in the streets? Why
are there no victory dances in the streets? President
Obasanjo, you had the greatest opportunity in the world
to shape the destiny of Nigeria and put her foot on the
road to the future. But you turned the noble act of
political competition into a “do-or-die” battle. And
true to your words, the country is dying from your
doing. Time there was when you were a statesman,
respectable and respected worldwide; how could you have
so rapidly slipped to the status of a PDP apparatchik?
Electoral violence might have served you and your great
Party in 2003. But, alas, this is 2007. Our rulers may
be the same venal, visionless bullies they have always
been. But the Nigerian people are not where they were
four years ago. That is why the barricades are up again.
That is why women are demonstrating in the streets,
their clothes turned inside out. Read the handwriting on
the wall. President Obasanjo, Nigeria is dying under
your watch. You and your great Party have put our
country to shame by turning it into the laughing stock
of the international community. Cancel these jungle (s)elections
and dismantle INEC, your great Party’s house of fraud.
Nigerian people will only be led by those freely elected
by them. They will not be ruled by ghosts.
Your Compatriot,
Niyi Osundare
New Orleans
April 19, 2007
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posted 25 April 2007
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