By Olakunle Abimbola
On former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s kiss, let Peter Obi and Obidients enjoy their democratic swoon. Soon, they would know it was all over a dud cheque.
Whatever happened to African Democratic Congress (ADC), Obasanjo’s “third force” of 2019?
The last time one checked, wasn’t ADC busy sacking its presidential candidate? Or the courts sacking the national executive that purportedly sacked the candidate, in a live political echo of that hilarious TV comedy, Fuji House of Commotion?
Or, to the fib he sold Atiku Abubakar (after Obasanjo junked ADC, in that same 2019) — Obasanjo, with fellow busy-bodies, temporal and spiritual: Chief Ayo Adebanjo, Catholic Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah, Winners Bishop, David Oyedepo and Muslim cleric, Sheik Abubakar Gumi?
Were they not all crushing losers, reflective of Jamaican Reggae great, Jimmy Cliff’s great hit: “The bigger they come, the harder they fall?”
Atiku! Peripatetic as ever: is he not still howling from the wilderness, trying to lead a broken PDP — the same PDP he and Obasanjo wrecked, pushing personal glory over service to country, in their blighted presidency, from 1999 to 2007?
This year, as per his wont these past three electoral cycles starting 2015, the flighty, restless Obasanjo has moved on to Obi, his freshest mischief to scam the gullible.
Poor Obi! He is nothing but the latest faggot to keep aglow a flickering Obasanjo public flame, fated to extinction, anyway, even as the good Lord keeps the Ebora very much alive!
If Obi and co doubt, they should “go verify!” — incidentally Obidients’ strident whoop, to spur St. Peter’s fantastic stats, in their halcyon days of social media roar, when, in Achebe-speak, they danced selves lame before the real dance began! Now, the cold ash of reality is setting in!
Still, in a way, Obasanjo, Obi and Labour Party (LP) deserve one another — Obasanjo: vacuous doctrinaire; Obi: rattler of fake China stats; LP: opportunistic shell, ever whoring with the highest bidder, among the politically displaced and desperate!
What a breed! What a brood!
The great Awo — Chief Obafemi Awolowo of glorious memory — once let go a quip: only the deep can call to the deep.
But for Obasanjo and Obi, it’s the flip: only the vacuous could call to the empty. So, let both serenade and venerate each other in mutual vacuity! As for LP, it will yet bob up in 2027 for yet another highest bidder!
Still, much as Obasanjo postures and Obi floats and faints over a mirage, the so-called endorsement is not about Obi.
It’s all about a restive Obasanjo drawing attention to himself — his notorious pastime.
Still, in President Muhammadu Buhari and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the Obasanjo antenna rightly perceives a clear and credible danger, that could trash — once and for all — the Ebora brand of public service that ogles and gobbles private gravy.
In Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, Mark Anthony once mused why the Octavius army always belted his. Yet, when they went after Brutus and other plotters that killed Julius Caesar, the callow Octavius was but a subaltern; and Anthony, a full General.
When the Murtala military partisans went after Buka Suka Dimka and co, who brutally mowed down Head of State, Gen. Murtala Muhammed in a botched coup on 13 February 1976, Obasanjo was already a General while Buhari, as a Lieutenant-Colonel, just clambered onto the lower rungs of senior Army ranks.
Yet as President, PMB — no thanks to Obasanjo’s ceaseless vain glory, served in a seething, sparkling foam of empty sanctimony — teaches his old Army boss the ABC of unstinted public service, never blighted by grubby personal gains.
Laderin and surrounding hills and sprawl, in Abeokuta, Ogun State, offer a vivid contrast in the PMB/Obasanjo cosmos of governance.
Laderin hosts the Wole Soyinka Train Station, on the new Lagos-Ibadan standard-gauge rail corridor, itself a glittering metaphor for the most penetrating hard economic infrastructure, by any federal government, since 1999: a virtual explosion of rail, roads, airports, sea ports and bridges, even in the worst of economic seasons.
As with other stations in that corridor — which from Ibadan will terminate in Kano — none is named for PMB. Yet, future generations won’t ever forget which president emplaced that critical public asset. Not so, the Obasanjo ethos!
On the flip side of Laderin, bordering Oke Mosan (Mosan Hills), the Olusegun Obasanjo Hilltop Estate virtually hugs you, as you breeze in from Lagos, via the Shiun-Sagamu Expressway. Virtually co-joined is the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL).
So much private juice from supposed public sweat — and in your face too!
That the Land Use Decree (now Act), the legal instrument that makes such vast land access possible — for whatever purpose(s) — emanated from Gen. Obasanjo’s first coming as military Head of State, speaks to the man’s suspect public service morality.
Yet, this crass visibility, burnished by eternal self-worship, has made the old man no less jittery over his real place in history.
The other day, a pathetic Obasanjo, looking really trapped, blurted to BBC’s Hardtalk that his successors abandoned his 25-year rail modernization plan.
Even if that were true, how many kilometres of tracks did Obasanjo lay during his eight-year presidency? How many did “subaltern” PMB put together in less than eight years — and in relative adversity too?
Rail! In that, PMB has righted an epochal wrong. General Buhari scuppered the Lagos Metro Line. But President Buhari liberalized the rail corridor, even ahead of the constitutional amendments, still a work-in-progress.
As epochal reward, PMB will on January 24 inaugurate the Lagos Blue rail, with the Dangote refineries — critical twin-infrastructure beyond the ken of Obasanjo’s tenure.
Indeed, with his eternal posturing, and talking down others to look good, he grandly robs himself the nobility of self-correction.
Leaving rail, did Obasanjo’s successors also pull down the Second Niger Bridge, a phantom PDP-era vote scam, which take-off he personally launched twice? Or the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway? It’s true: a bad artisan almost always blames his tools!
But even pushing aside iron, brick and mortar, hasn’t PMB given Obasanjo fine tutorials in democracy etiquettes, as befitting a former officer and gentleman? Who is talking of “third term” now, except as a putrid puff from the Obasanjo era?
But imagine Tinubu winning the Presidency on February 25 and following that up with upscaling the Buhari-era infrastructure and agriculture thrust, fix power and not abandoning the social safety nets for the poor and vulnerable?
Whoever then would remember Obasanjo, his blatant self-worship and his narcissistic cathedral called OOPL, even if the man lives for a thousand years?
That naked fear drives the Obi endorsement noise. But for Obi, It’s a kiss of death.
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