OBJ's war on corruption: The body count has begun

Incidentally, if this war on corruption is sustained, as I believe it would, President Obasanjo and his aides involved in the anti-corruption crusade will soon find their rout littered with familiar public faces and names – all casualties, as the body count mounts. They will find also, that most of the disgraced faces and names are people close to the Obasanjo Administration, some people appointed by him, some who have done business in the name of his government as well as prominent members of the ruling PDP. The cleansing exercise he has embarked on is going to be a very ugly, painful but inevitable orgy. Nigeria has once in lifetime opportunity to come clean and must not falter.

HANK ESO

One of the most popular songs in Nigeria today is titled, Nigeria jagajaga (Nigeria disorganized), by an indigenous artist, Idris Abdul Kareem. The song is a vitriolic and trenchant social criticism of present day Nigeria A few weeks back, when the Mr. Kareem played the song in a public event attended by President Olusegun Obasanjo, he got an equally vitriolic and scathing, public, and un-presidential lambasting from the president – there and then.

Obasanjo loves Nigeria and takes any criticism of the nation personally. His devotion and service to Nigeria has never been in question. However, until now, many Nigerians have come to believe that he was only paying lip service to fighting corruption, a major bane for the country. All that seems to be changing and with great dramatic fanfare.

As General George Patton declared long ago, “There is only one unchanging principle of warfare: that is, to inflict the greatest amount of death and destruction upon the enemy in the least time possible.” This strategy generally leads to what is known in military jargon as body count. Every worthy commander knows that to attain the best body count results, one must operate on the basis of “take no hostages”. The true soldier that he is, General Olusegun Obasanjo, the President of the Federal republic of Nigeria has commenced his body count as his war on corruption, gathers steam. Corruption remains the biggest challenge facing Nigeria since it compounds and gives impetus to every other national problem, including security of life and property.

As expected, so far in this war there have been no hostages only casualties: read Tafa Balogun, Fabian Osuji, Adolphus Wabara, and Mobalaji Osomo. Governor Joshua Dariye is hanging by the skin of his teeth over grand larceny and money laundering allegations, while Governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha of Bayelsa State has not been fully cleared of a 2004 Independent and Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) indictment for allegedly approving and paying a total N1.7 billion to seven fictitious companies he owned or had connections with as contract sums. Many more are in the pipeline, so much so, that the question on the lips of Nigerians, is who is next? Obasanjo has finally managed to sum up the courage to send jitters down the spine of corrupt Nigerian public officials. All these while, it had been said that it was not possible to sanitize Nigeria and that Obasanjo could not do it. How wrong Nigerians were in making that assumption. The only impediment was Obasanjo’s courage of restriction. Now that he has dropped that façade, corrupt Nigerians certainly have sufficient reasons to lose sleep.

I said a long time ago that President Obasanjo was nobody’s fool. And that he would not let anyone rubbish his legacy. Nor would he allow history to become his enemy. I recall concluding my 7 May 2003 piece titled “A bad cultural example, Mr. President” with the following lines:

The Obasanjo we know, is not daunted by challenge or criticisms. Indeed, I suspect that such challenges reinforce him as a stubborn person and leader. In this context, the only person who can tarnish, beat, or destroy Obasanjo’s credentials is Olusegun Obasanjo himself. But I know this for a fact; he is too shrewd, politically cunning, military astute, historically savvy, and personally very stubborn to allow history to become his enemy. As he begins his second and final term in office, I have a deep-seated suspicion that Obasanjo will surprise with “shock and awe”, his many trenchant critics, Nigerians and more so, his PDP colleagues and allies over the next four years. Obasanjo is nobody’s fool, and will therefore not go down in history as one.

Almost two years later, it seems that I’m already being proven right. Incidentally, if this war on corruption is sustained, as I believe it would, President Obasanjo and his aides involved in the anti-corruption crusade will soon find their rout littered with familiar public faces and names – all casualties, as the body count mounts. They will find also, that most of the disgraced faces and names are people close to the Obasanjo Administration, some people appointed by him, some who have done business in the name of his government as well as prominent members of the ruling PDP. The cleansing exercise he has embarked on is going to be a very ugly, painful but inevitable orgy. Nigeria has once in lifetime opportunity to come clean and must not falter.

President Obasanjo will also find strewn on his path in this anti-corruption war, vexatious and brambly obstacles and indeed, surprisingly deep-seated resistance. He must, therefore, be on his watch as he takes on powerful interests who have all but wrecked Nigeria with their impunity. Generals Buhari and Idiagbon learned a very bitter lesson when their tried to clean up the Nigerian augean stable in 1984. Entrenched corrupt forces saw to their ouster under the pretext that their regime had become too draconian. In truth, the Buhari-Idiagbon regime was the most disciplined, transparent and patriot military regime Nigeria ever had. It is a pity that the two generals did not seem to have read Machiavelli’s The Prince and George Orwell’s 1984 before hand.

President Obasanjo should also be ready to withstand innuendoes and barbs against his person, queries about his own dealings and whether he was personally truly beyond reproach. These challenges will be built on rumors some so damning and almost believable. Those who would like to truncate his anti-corruption efforts would likely zero in on his family and in-laws. These, as is mostly the case for national leaders, may yet prove to be his Achilles Hills.

Be this as it may, I don’t exactly recall who and where, but I remember reading an article in the 1980s, in which a top Nigerian soldier was credited with saying that he would feel more comfortable going into battle knowing the battle plan had been drawn up by Gen. Obasanjo, with Gen T.Y. Danjuma executing it. That, in essence, was an unvarnished tribute to the strategic – some would say cunning skills - of President Obasanjo. A few day ago, I heard a Nigerian who had fought on the Biafran side during the civil war, recount with awe, how the Third Marine Commandos, under Obasanjo’s charge had strategically snapped up the Owerri sector at the close of 1969, thus triggering the collapse of Biafra. Since he came to power in 1999, Obasanjo had unceasingly made the point that Nigerians were still learning about democracy. Having given them sufficient time to study and imbibe the democratic process, he is now putting them to the test. And interestingly, many are flunking the exams in style.

Why did Obasanjo suddenly decide to clamp down on corrupt Nigerian officials. Why the volte face? I have several theories, all conjectural. But this one is the most credible of all. I suspect that Obasanjo had somewhere along the line entertained or better put, considered the possibility of extending his tenure in office. Not necessarily a Third term, but an extension of the current term by one year or so. That would have allowed him to finish the programs and projects he had at hand, of which an anti-corruption shock therapy would have been one of the last segments of the plot and of his presidency.

Evidently a Third term idea did not receive the support he wished. More importantly, since there were already allegations of a hidden agenda and self-succession plot, Obasanjo mindful of popular wave of people power sweeping the globe, did a rethink. As the plan reverted to status quo, and cognizant that he had only two years to round up his affairs, he moved the anti-corruption campaign up on his agenda to avoid missed opportunities. There are hints also that the cleansing is being carried out at the behest of Nigerian creditors, especially the Paris Club. And here we are.

If we had all along speculated that there was a Third term agenda, Obasanjo himself clarified (confirmed) it all, when during a recent visit to Berlin, Germany, he admitted that he had been under pressure to stay on for a while. This point, already well known to me and I suppose, any attentive Nigerian observer in the US and Europe, was first reported in Nigeria by The Guardian in its 4 April 2005 editorial, titled, “Third term? Perish the thought.” As the editorial has put it:

Speaking in Berlin, at a lecture organised by the Germany-Africa Association, he said that "some people" had been "worrying" him to "stay a little longer". He however assured his audience and the listening world that he would leave office in 2007. That was the first time President Obasanjo would comment on the widely-rumoured possibility of his search for a third term in office. Hitherto, all sorts of persons - his close aides, political associates, leading party members, and self-appointed spokespersons had denied that the president was interested at all in, or indeed scheming to succeed himself.

Interestingly, I recall reading many years ago a similar account of a similar but separate circumstance. By that account, when it was time for the military to disengage and return Nigeria to a democracy in late 1979, German Chancellor, Mr. Helmut Schmidt, a close friend of Obasanjo, had asked him to consider staying on since the military regime was doing such a good job in Nigeria. As we all know fully well, Obasanjo did not heed that advice, thus ensuring his niche and place in history as the first military head of state in Africa to voluntarily cede power to a democratically elected government.

I have only digressed as a way of pointing out why the Nigerian anti-corruption campaign has suddenly gained fervor and will turn into a rampage in the remaining twenty-four months of Obasanjo’s presidency. Obasanjo knows Nigeria well enough to know that we have become a corrupt nation. Nobody is born corrupt, and it will be stretching incredulity to criminalize every Nigeria as corrupt. But some people and some segments of Nigeria have taken to corruption with such impunity that it now seems that every Nigerian is pathologically corrupt. Obasanjo knows fully well, that this is an issue begging to be aggressively addressed.

Undoubtedly, Obasanjo also knows that something rotten and essentially very undemocratic happened in Nigeria during the 2003 elections. Incidentally, while he might not have personally sanctioned the pervasive electoral fraud nationwide, he was in the end, a beneficiary of its odious outcome and as such, has at the least remained vicariously liable. It was all tied to corruption and money politics. Nigeria, not having lived down the deleterious effects of the 2003 elections, is unlikely to live up a clean bill of health to hold free and fair elections in 2007. The only way to address such problems and avoid a repeat in 2007, which will mar Obasanjo’s smooth transition and probably his legacy, is to clean the Augean stable well head of time and remove from Nigeria’s body politik, those who represented gross impunity in public service and in Nigeria’s officialdom. This would be a sanitation similar to what he did with the Nigerian military. A corollary of that exercise will be the removal of the impunity to offer and accept bribe under any circumstance. Hence the battle has been joined.

Official corruption and corruption in high places has lead to a simmering resentment in Nigeria – the sort that breeds a disemboweling revolution. Not to attack the scourge would be an utter disservice and disloyalty to the oath of office that the president had sworn. But more importantly, as I have suggested elsewhere, Obasanjo is too historical astute, to allow the cruel forces of history to consign him to the dump of failed leaders; certainly not after he got the opportunity and his “WISH” to rule Nigeria a second time, hence his present strategy of triage.

Political events in Abuja continue to stupefy. Recently I wrote a piece in which I urged Nigerians not to cry for Tafa Balogun. I hasten to add to that list, Senate President Adolphus Wabara. Though being both Igbo, we share the same ethnic pedigree, I feel neither sympathy nor compassion for him. Indeed, I might well say that I have always believed that it was a matter of time before the emperor would be made to dance naked. That date became manifest on 22 March, the day when senate bribery scandal, that began to unravel on the Ides of March came into full public glare. I have already on these pages in months past, aired my views on former IGP Tafa Balogun and Senator Wabara highlighting why men like them, who have made impunity a way of life form Nigeria’s crucible. But we really need not suffer them any longer. It speaks volume that Balogun, a man entrusted with national law enforcement would be faced with a 70-count charge of fraud and money laundering involving N13 billion. While we must accord Mr Balogun the right of presumed innocence, we cannot but wonder how much of that money was paid up, so as not to uphold the law or to subvert the due process rights of Nigerians, even if only one person was in the end affected.

But really, it is hardly surprising that Nigeria’s number three man, Senate President Adolphus Wabara, was recently caught with his hands in the till. Neither was the way President Obasanjo handled the affairs any more surprising. For long, Wabara had it coming! And for long, the President waited for the right person he would use to set an example about his seriousness and commitment to fight the scourge of corruption in high places. Regrettably Wabara will in the end take many down with him—some, perhaps innocent victims and others, willing perfidious accomplices.

Since 22 March, when the current senate bribery scandal broke, I have waited for Senator Wabara to resign. It happened finally on Tuesday 5 March. It came not one day sooner. Wabara knew that he was the proverbial “dead man walking”, the day he strayed into Nigerian politics. He was only driven by his greed and blind ambition, if not, he knew he was prone to blackmail as well as to being manipulated by those who made him the senate president for their own ends. That his erstwhile Foreign Service antecedents, which never appeared on his Biography, were not being publicly discussed did not mean that they did not exist. Neither did it mean it was unbeknown to Obasanjo. For now, the chicken has come home to roost. Way back in September 2003, I had this to say of the Senate President:

Senator Wabara knows too well, given the way he came to power that he too, despite his presumed colossal stature, bestrides a powder keg. Those in PDP who made him can easily undo him. They have the info, ammo and the motive -- and time is their ally. [See When some Igbo leaders become clever by half]

If senators – all colleagues and subordinates are insinuating themselves into Wabara’s senate leadership realm, it is because he has opened his doors or the can of worms to let them in. Or alternatively, because he has let the genie out of the bottle. In actuality however, when Igbo leaders like Wabara, wittingly or unwittingly falter by compromising themselves, their actions are inevitably exploited to the hilt in collectively demonizing Ndiigbo and casting us all as Shylocks. No Igbo leader who lends himself to allegations of profligate or perfidious acts, can honestly carry in his face, a nolimentangere against outsiders meddling in Igbo affairs or when they make crass and disparaging pronouncements about our collective pathological lack of fiscal prudence and probity. [See Wabara’s cliffhanger: The fire next time]

Wabara will have the dubious distinction of being the third Igbo Senate President in eight years, not to complete his term in that office. But the bottom line in his case is that he was destined to fail. As an Igbo and a person, Wabara ought not to have become Senate President under any circumstance. I derive no joy in the tripping up of another Nigerian public official and more so, an ethnic kinsman. But I did offer my vindicating points on Wabara a year ago. Under the present circumstance, all I can say in summation is good riddance to bad rubbish!

Minister of Housing, Mrs. Mobolaji Osomo is a victim of “eye service” and duplicitous intent. She was only trying to ingratiate herself to the President’s family and it backfired. She thus earned her sack. Those who believe that it is okay to bend the law, so long as their principal’s family is taken care of, are wrong and should be made to pay the price. However, I don’t believe that some of the prominent Nigerians -- including governors, ministers, legislators and other top functionaries of government -- who are now disavowing Osomo did not, in fact, have prior knowledge and approval of their acquired interests in the contentious sale of Federal Government houses in Lagos State. Osomo is now left with the short end of the stick. That should be a lesson to those public servants that engage in unwholesome acts on behalf or the behest of their masters.

Prof. Fabian Osuji was indeed a victim of his own stupidity. How absent-minded could the professor have been that he did not follow what happened between Malam El-Rufai and the Senate cabal over the N54 million ministerial confirmation scandal? And indeed, how naïve and undiscerning could he be, to have done what he did, well after the President had warned ministers in-council not to buckle to the pressure of offering bribes to legislators in order to facilitate their budgets being passed? The sartorial professor had it coming. There is no excuse for stupidity – no matter how you explain it. I’ve read some write-ups defending Prof. Osuji and some, suggesting that he was entrapped. Balderdash! All he did was rubbish himself and every Igbo man who aspire to high office, for no just cause. Someone should have reminded him of the saying in his Imo village, about the pitfalls and repercussions of the okelekwu sooro ngwele daa mmiri – the rat that dived into the pool with the lizard.

I am not unaware that concerns have been expressed about the propriety of the President taking Senator Wabara and Prof. Osuji’s case to Nigerians on public television. Indeed, because the process was reminiscent of military rule, some senators thought the president was wrong in the way he handled it all on television. They did not see this as entailing due process. Well, the beauty of it all, is that it made the accusation process transparent and irreversible. Nigerians have been duped several times by many deals made behind closed doors in the corridors of power. Had the President called in the culprits and asked them to resign, they would have gone public later to claim that they had been forced to resign under duress. We have seen it all before. Hence Obasanjo did the right thing in allowing Nigerians to be the judge. After all, those involved were elected officials who were beholden to their electorate. It was also his prerogative to fire Prof. Osuji anyway he wished.

On this issue, here is my take. So far, those who have fallen in this anti-corruption campaign are few and far in-between. But it is a good start. Like rotten apples, if they could be plucked and dispensed with one at a time, soon enough, the orchard will become incrementally cleaner. Secondly, Obasanjo is using young men and women who do not belong to his generation to cleanse Nigeria. If the el-Rufais, Ribadus, Ezekwesilis, and Akunyilis of present day Nigeria can deliver the goods and a clean bill of health for Nigeria, others will surely follow the trends they set. After all, success is contagious and the rule of law un-malleable.

It is yet too early to know how far President Obasanjo intends to and can carry out this anti-corruption crusade. Some have averred that he will hedge when the klieg lights turn discomfortingly to those close to him. Questions are already being raised about the business dealings of his son Gbenga Obasanjo and about a Ministry of Defence financial scam allegedly involving his cousin, Julius Makonjuola, a former official of the ministry. Will the president blink?

How the president reacts to these issues and the overall resistance to his anti-corruption campaign, which is bound to increase, will determine if the present efforts are sustainable or just another public policy window dressing and therefore a fluke. It would also prove that the president’s commitment to transparency and ending corruption is whole and not selective. If it were in any form proven to be the latter, the present achievements would be an insalubrious effort on his part.

The ongoing anti-corruption campaign is particularly critical for the president. I’m sure he is mindful of the criticism that since he assumed office in 1999, not a single senior public figure has been convicted of bribery, grand larceny or for any other form of official malfeasance, and this was not for lack of wrongdoings or high-profile accusations and dismissals.

President Obasanjo, I believe, means well for Nigeria, though his leadership style may not always suggest so. I was once told by someone with connection to Aso Rock, how the First Lady had phoned him to inquire about the use of one of the executive jets for an overseas trip. The President had to the surprise of his guests, told the First Lady and his delegation to either travel by commercial flight or stay home. Again vintage Obasanjo! But its shows that he has the ability to put down his foot. If he had merely weighted the sale of the government properties in Lagos State in favour of his in-laws, who by his own admission were disproportionately reflected on the list of the buyers, he might have looked the other way. He did not. And that was to his credit.

It is obvious, to anyone who has done business in Nigeria, that if you wanted your government contract, import license or certificate of occupancy to be approved, you paid some bureaucrats to ensure that the item was included in the same batch containing that of a powerful Nigerian – a governor, a minister or an army general. In the present dispensation, you asked to be coupled with someone that had connections with the Presidency (Aso Rock). As the lingo goes in Nigeria, “Who born dog; and who born the pickin who will hold up the approval of the sale of properties in which “Baba’s in-laws” have an interest?” That was Mobalaji Osomo’s thinking and ploy, and thankfully, Obasanjo (Baba) proved her wrong. Now Osomo knows who is the Top Dog!

As Obasanjo moves ahead to claim his niche as an anti-corruption crusader and thus carve his legacy in stone, he must reform his leadership style, slightly. You see, Obasanjo tries to lead. Indeed, he does make an honest effort, but overlooks the reality that effort is not synonymous with accomplishment. Perhaps, if he was more of a leader and less of a boss, his efforts and accomplishments will begin to mirror each other. For now, and on this corruption crusade, Obasanjo de kampe, and he has my full support and endorsement. Go get them, Baba! Eshe oo!

With neither anger nor partiality, until next time, keep the law, stay impartial, and observe closely.

Hank Eso, is a columnist for Kwenu.com (New Jersey). His commentaries on Nigerian politics and global issues have appeared in The New Times (Lagos), African Profile International (New York), The Nigerian And Africa Abroad, (New York) and in Gamji.com.

THE IMPARTIAL OBSERVER

HANK ESO