[peterclaver2006]

When he was running away in 1993, Babangida thought he could one day, re-write history to serve his purpose. For this, he heaped on himself so many appellate and spoke so vainly of how he re-engineered Nigeria. Today, he is a living witness that you can’t fool the people all the time. Obasanjo mimicked and indeed surpassed as his humiliating failure of the eight years became obvious. He tagged himself, ‘founder of modern Nigeria’, ‘father of a new Nigeria’ and such other vain epaulettes that only advertise his limitations. As Babangida commissioned so many revisionists to commence his re-invention quest after failing so badly, so is Obasanjo, so frustrated with just a prologue of his disastrous siege of the last eight years, have done. But we know that these are exercises that are doomed before they are started because one cannot run away from his deeds. Idi Amin, Jean Bedel Bokassa, Samuel Doe, Mobutu Seseseko, Mengitsu Haile Mariam and such other soulmates of Obasanjo sure have their own trumpeters. Such fluid and vacuous ‘achievements’ the author struggled to put together all tailspinned into the hellish enclave we have in our hands today. If Obasanjo and co thought they would live on such tenuous struggles to whitewash a disastrous regime which, with over N40 trillion, reduced life expectancy from 55 years to 39 years, then it has a job in its hands. If for eight years, a regime has nothing to celebrate than lying about settling Ndigbo (such horrible farce), setting up a kitchen cabinet of cronies, setting up a hunt dog in EFCC, licensing telecommunications companies, extorted them green and unleashed them on Nigerians and such other incoherent ‘achievements’ the writer sweated to invent, then we need nothing to prove the fact that this man, Obasanjo is a gross failure. Compared with Abacha, Obasanjo is a proven misfit, as shown in the riotous charade he ran for eight years. Abacha must be protesting from his grave presently for attempting to compare him with this duplicitous sly man called Obasanjo and he is right because given all indications, Abacha ran a better, more honest government than Obasanjo and this is a fact that is as real as it is damning for the deceptive regime and its handmaidens. With all manners of international sanctions, Abacha never subjected Nigerians to continuous extortions in the name of fuel price increases Obasanjo made a fundamental policy of his regime. Yet Abcha built roads, equipped hospitals, controlled the foreign exchange regime, perfectly handled inflation. Obasanjo was not able to achieve any of these with an eight years oil boom while he left with a sadistic imposition of another fuel price increment, with inflation nearing a 2,000 per cent digit, with all infrastructures dead and carted away by him and his cronies, with Nigeria leased to armed robbers and all manners of killers, etc.

Here is your Obasanjo, do you have any contrary view?


OBASANJO AND HISTORY’S JUDGMENT.
By Peter Claver Oparah


Recently, former President Olusegun Igbochukwu Obasanjo was quoted as expressing the optimism that history will someday vindicate him. The occasion was one of the sessions in self-masturbation, the type rulers who had wasted their commission and were on the cutting edge of history resort to. Styled a welcome ceremony by former students colleagues of his, newspaper reports had it that the ceremony was severally interrupted by power outage, an uncanny way history wanted to outrightly remind Obasanjo of the futility of eating one’s cake and having it, as such hope for a brighter judgment by history he lacerated and raped so violently portends.

It was obvious that Obasanjo and the people that mount that dry re-invention quest for him were very much aware of what history and indeed the millions of Nigerians that suffered the buccannerist feel of Obasanjo in power had for the sly ex-leader. It was very clear what his standing is with a history that had been so generous to him yet he flunked all in the pursuit of annoying pettiness, guile, sheer duplicity, mediocrity, vanity and primitive personal greed. By laying the intended shortfalls of his anti-climatic regime on history, Obasanjo was trying to extend the elastic tolerance of history to unimaginable limits. For this he is home with all manners of under-achieving pretenders to leadership that diverted the primary spaces of their offices to serve narrow and often corrupt ends that shortchange the society in the long run. One other fellow that employs history in such demeaning light is Ibrahim Babangida, Obasanjo’s soulmate in fraud and dubiety and with whom he wrote the leviathan of the present hobbled state, which devours its inhabitants with roaring passion.

But pray, how does Obasanjo want history to see him after the grand debauchery of the past eight years? Like Babangida deceived himself to think, does he think that history is an irreverent brunt bearer, a purifier of sorts that blots out one’s misdemeanors and makes heroes of villains and vice versa? Is there any chance that Obasanjo was oblivious of the pallid state he endowed on the country with a bottomless revenue base in a regime that would shock the hell out of all of us on how a government should not be? Why is it that people like Muhammadu Buhari did not lay on history the burden of accounting for their deeds in office, even as the forces of revisionism seek to obliterate our perception of what is right or wrong?

But as to how history will remember Obasanjo, let me give him a sneak preview, if he and his trumpeters pretend they don’t know. History will remember Obasanjo as the leader who came with trailer loads of promises and delivered mere trays of peanuts at the end of his regime. History will judge him by the power sector he promised to put right in six months but which at the end of six years degenerated from the over 3,000 megawatts he met to below 1,000 megawatts when he left, with trillions of megawatts of darkness generated by phantom power stations that gulped trillions of Naira in a cesspool of corruption Obasanjo dug. History will note that Obasanjo presided over the worst state of infrastructures recorded in the nation’s history where the country was severed into several bits by irreparable roads while trillions of Naira went down the corrupt drain Obasanjo sunk in eight years of unimpeded waste-laying. History will remember Obasanjo for intentionally killing the nation’s refineries under a dubious deregulation policy that ended up growing a cult of rent-seeking billionaires while impoverishing the masses.

History will remember Obasanjo as the regime that reaped an eight years oil windfall but which paradoxically inflicted the most callous, inhuman and mindless extortion on poverty-wracked citizenry through countless fuel price increments. History will remember Obasanjo for the organized corruption he promoted while mouthing the commitment to fighting corruption. While Babangida gave corruption an official stamp, Obasanjo tended and grew it to the stature of an all-encompassing decibel, an intractable anathema to national growth. History will remember Obasanjo for his sickening hypocrisy, annoying shortcomings, absurd pettiness, personal insecurity, morbid personality complex and his many deficits, which were rolled into one insipid brand of babaism, with all the attendant fatalism that prodded the country to the very edge of disaster as the eight years of unprecedented leadership dementia lasted.

History will remember Obasanjo as the grand patron of official stealing that doubled as an unlikely thief-catcher, with the myriad of untidy corrupt deals that will outlive many generations trailing his uninspiring frame. History will remember Obasanjo as the man that promoted a bizarre, asinine and insensate cult of educationally-challenged urchins, street toughs and mandarins to desecrate and trample the sacred canons of democracy while he celebrated them in a move to spite all that is sane and decent in Nigeria. From this morbid passion sprouted the anathema of the Lamidi Adedibus, the Uba dynasty, the Ahmadu Allis, the Ibrahim Mantus, the Anenihs, the Bode Georges and such other references of soulless gadflies that cooked up the contrived political flashpoints that flowered the descent into babaism.

History will remember Obasanjo as the leader whose feel on gold turned it to saw dust; the direct opposite of Midas and after whose deadly touch, Nigeria became a prostrate, clay footed giant lying lifeless on the slab of the political, economic and social undertakers Obasanjo grew while in office. History will remember Obasanjo as the man that promoted the violent defrauding of the poor and the weak and a callous empowering of a cult of sybaritic buccaneers that live on public rent and duping the whole for survival. A pervert Robin Hood that was driven by his personality deficits into believing that he would outrun his sordid past. History will remember Obasanjo for burying the educational and the health sectors, livewires of any society that aspires for progress and left the country with a carcass of ill-manufactured and poorly ventilated placebos.

History will remember Obasanjo as the man that destroyed while mounting empty sloganeering of good intent, a terribly circumspect and mediocre leader that rubbed off negatively on all sectors of governance. He remains the only leader that grew an economy in decayed infrastructures and pitched darkness! History will remember Obasanjo as the uncaring leader who feathered his nest and those of the dumb hirelings that sang his useless praises while inflicting maximum pains on the rest of the citizenry for eight years. History will remember Obasanjo as that lawless dictator that rode roughshod over the country’s laws and statutes and denigrated its courts and traditions so as to serve his pristine interests. History will remember Obasanjo as the Nebuchadnezer that pursued vindictive policies that stood out for their crudity in persecuting those that disagree with him and rewarding those that urge him on his self-elected deathwish. History will remember Obasanjo as the one that twisted court judgments so as to make them amenable to his caprices. History will remember Obasanjo as the old man blinded by infantile selectiveness in dispensing favours and persecution, an unfeeling principality that relished the arts of naked sadism with such grand fervour. History will remember Obasanjo as the one who did the direct opposite of what he preached and preached the direct opposite of what he did. History will remember Obasanjo as the leader that lied with the prurience of a dripping basket, a grand adult that relished infantile games and pranks and adopted such a directive principle of governance in Nigeria.

Need I go further? History will remember Obasanjo for offloading the highest number of Nigerian workers into the unemployment market through a dubious right-sizing policy. History will remember Obasanjo as a the leader, who through dubious reforms, turned Nigerian graduates into okada riders, recharge card sellers, prostitutes, armed robbers, political thugs and street urchins, who turned the countries industries into churches and miracle markets. History will still remember him as the one that led the army of self-glorifying hustlers as reformers and who ended up duping the country of all its assets and reformed their pockets while depravity was launched on our true native land. History will remember Obasanjo as that leader that presided over the most carnivorous defrenestation of the poor, the institution of havens of corruption in the ministries and public corporations and the satiation of the naked greed of political urchins.

History will yet remember Obasanjo as the man that presided over the largest volume of premeditated political murders, the worst state of insecurity, the most disastrous state of inflation, the state of widespread want and despair in the midst of unparalleled oil wealth. History will remember Obasanjo as the man that presided over the most heinous official theft that humbled the Babangida/Abacha epochs. History will remember Obasanjo as the man that presided over the most callous stripping of public assets under various shady garbs. History will remember Obasanjo for whimsically manipulating the structures of the state to the service of self while his terror of a regime lasted. History will remember Obasanjo for being the grand machinator and concoctor of electoral fraud in Nigeria; the man that visited all sectors of national fraud with horrible fraud such that if the evil Babangida wrought on Nigeria would take two century to correct, the evil Obasanjo visited on Nigeria will take ten centuries to correct.

I and millions of other Nigerians that suffer the aftermaths of Obasanjo’s bizarre presence here for eight years already know what history records for him. The practical effect could be gleaned from the intractable wreck he left after eight years in power. I am very convinced that he and his handmaidens that now seek to secure the stable door after the donkey has bolted, know what his place in history is. It is in his nature to pretend that he was numbed for the period he turned deaf and blind to our plea for a better polity. In his pretence, he still believes history still owes him an IOU after eleven years in power. But we know he is playing the game other despicable characters that have taken turns to rape men and history played. He will never win this war.