The Godfather of OPC?

Dialogue With Nigeria AKIN OSUNTOKUN

The claim that former Secretary to the Government of the Federation Babachir Lawal made about Nigerian presidents of Yoruba origin on Channels Television prompted me to reflect on a separate, weighty, and anonymous referral I recently encountered. A United States–based Nigerian scholar of African politics visited Nigeria to research for a forthcoming book. During his interviews with opinion leaders, he spoke with a frontline Nigerian of Northern origin who declined to be named. In the course of the interview, this individual described Obasanjo as the “godfather of the Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC).”

Now if ever there was a laughable proposition by any measure of the imagination, this is it!. It is one that makes no sense at all and is readily dismissable. Yet it was the report of a respected scholar who valued his interviewee enough to include him in a select sample of opinion leaders. Maybe the man is reminiscent of the buffoonery of Donald Trump who grossly exaggerates his mindless falsehoods but would then turn around with the excuse that he does not expect to be taken seriously.

The implication of holding such a mindset is appalling even if he was speaking metaphorically. Obasanjo’s profile is so antithetical to that of a purveyor of Yoruba irredentism that he would have to be deemed schizophrenic to believe this of him. I don’t know any Yoruba personality who is so spontaneously irritable at placing any political emphasis on his Yoruba identity. He would relentlessly retort that he is a Nigerian first before he is Yoruba, never mind the shaky grounds on which such formulation stands. He and the Yoruba are mutually disdainful. The culture is fading, but whenever Obasanjo is mentioned in discussions among the Yoruba, the vintage disposition of the typical Yoruba is scorn burnished with his demonisation as a “Northern stooge”. In the deep cleavage ridden Nigerian politics, he is the exceptional ‘detribalised’ Nigerian nationalist. Even if Nigerian nationalism often amounts to pandering to the whim of the dominant conservative wing of the Northern political establishment.

I pressed on, this has to be a joke, right? No, the man was dead serious, the Professor cut me short. He said he reminded the interviewee of Obasanjo’s conspicuous hostility towards the militia group captured in his belligerent directive that ‘anyone who calls himself OPC should be shot on sight’ and went further to incarcerate the two leaders of the organisation, Frederick Fashehun and Gani Adams for two years’. The man responded that the former president was just playing games.

(Wikipedia defines ‘the Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC) as a Yoruba nationalist, regionalist, and vigilante organization in Nigeria. It is also known as the Oodua Liberation Movement (OLM) or the Revolutionary Council of Nigeria. It is based in southwestern Nigeria and has grassroots support within the Yoruba ethnic community’.)

Pondering the gravity of what I just heard, I lost my appetite. How does one begin to engage with this kind of mindset? Even at the level of fables, how can one and the same person be the godfather of the Kaduna mafia (“a small circle of people based in Kaduna, the former capital of Northern Nigeria, that manipulated the levers of political power for their personal economic benefits and also in pursuit of Northern political and administrative hegemony within the Nigerian federation) and OPC simultaneously?

“The group, according to Nvendaga Jibo, supposedly achieved most success during the military regime of General Obasanjo, where many of its members were appointed to key positions of power and used its alliance to obtain patronage and disburse favour to friends and associates”. And in the coup of December 1983, the leading conspirators (representative of the mafia) had requested him to pick up the baton he left behind in October 1979 but he declined. You will recall the Mohammed Buhari junta routinely self identified as an offshoot of the Murtala-Obasanjo regime.

I have recalled all this readily available intro on Obasanjo in response to an allegation levelled by  Babachir Lawal (I otherwise regarded him as a big brother). Recently on the channels television, he took umbrage at the presidency of Ahmed Bola Tinubu whom he accused of insufferable arrogance and being totally disrespectful of the North. It is telling that Lawal, who previously led the Northern Christians’ revolt against Tinubu’s Muslim/Muslim ticket in 2023, has reemerged within the protective custody of the Northern political establishment. This reemergence is a measure of the resilience of the ‘one North’ strategy.

Now, he advocates the determination of the North to vote as a ‘bloc’ to get rid of the president in the next general elections in 2027. He generalises the Tinubu behaviour as typical of the Yoruba, claiming that ‘When you help the Yoruba to get to power, they repay you with disdain, they turn around to treat you as a subdued and conquered people’. If memory serves me well, the only other Yoruba to have served as president of Nigeria is Obasanjo, first as a military ruler and latterly as elected civilian president. Well, should I include Ernest Shonekan?

In an unintended response to Lawal, Abraham Ogbodo wrote of Vice-president Atiku Abubakar in the Guardian “Being Vice President for eight years, between 1999 and 2007, with almost coordinate powers with the President in the first four years, has not assuaged that thirst for power in you”. My own experience as spokesperson for the Obasanjo reelection campaign and political adviser supports this observation.

He told me that his grand political strategy (which came back to haunt him) was to cede wide latitude to Abubakar to grapple with the administration of Nigeria’s political economy in their first term and grant similar powers to the Vice-president to run the foreign affairs of Nigeria in their second term (Obasanjo refers to it as making him the busiest Vice-president in the world). This strategy was to ensure the preparedness of the latter to eventually succeed him as president. Ironically, thus empowered, there was hard evidence of conspiracy by Atiku to preclude Obasanjo from serving a second term in office. He had employed the empowerment to cultivate and build a coterie of powerful political loyalists not for Obasanjo’s reelection but for his usurpation to supplant his principal.

A notable moment was the interview he granted to the British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC Hausa service. On the eve of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP presidential primaries, he was asked of his intention. He said he had three options. One was to run with Obasanjo, the other was to run with Alex Ekweme and the third was to run himself. It is fair to argue that the North has felt marginalized under Tinubu’s presidency, although I am not certain of the full basis for that claim. Im nonetheless gratified at this grudge. There is the need for all Nigerians to suffer the political dysfunction of the prevailing quasi unitary constitution. Like Buhari before him, the president has glaringly advertised the bane of over-centralisation of power at the centre.

In the biography of the late General Shehu Yaradua produced by the Shehu Yaradua Centre ‘Yaradua traced the problem to Nigeria’s system of government. “As long as the central government is so strong, so long shall we continue to have problems”. Its hierarchical instincts and command structure had led it to create a unitary system disguised as a federation…Yaradua advocated the creation of a six-state federation in which each state would have far greater autonomy and identity, with powers to raise its own police force, stronger courts, and a greater share of derived revenue” (p252)

He went further “Over the last two years, both the federal and state governments have been retrenching people because they admit that there isn’t enough money to pay them. And yet we have just gone ahead to create more states and more local governments…So now we have got 36 states and 774 local governments. Those are enough I think to just about wipe out the country. I hope one of these days our children will find sanity and restructure the country in such a way that it is able to survive” (p 288).

Beyond Soludo’s eccentricity

The saying by William Congreve that “Hell hath no fury than a woman scorned” nicely sums up Charles Soludo’s predicament, his envy of the rising profile of his predecessor in office, Peter Obi. In veiled reference to obi’s pledge to do one term in office, (if elected as president in acknowledgement of the North/South rotation of the office of the Nigerian president). Thus responded Soludo “How can anybody with a functioning brain say that? Do you think you’re speaking to fools? “You come to people and say you will do only one term, any politician who says that must be sent to a psychiatric home because the person must have some mental problem,”

This is a sad commentary on Soludo not Obi. It beggars the question, what else should the former presidential candidate of the Labour party have said? Isn’t this the most rational and practical commitment Obi could make in the present Nigerian political context? If Soludo does not grasp this elementary logic and would go to the extent of branding the commitment as evidence of Obi’s need for psychiatric attention, then he is the one being grossly irrational and stupid. If commitment to one term in office is abnormal, then why would it be an option in the constitution in the first place?. Did Atiku not make a similar pledge at the last Presidential election? Was Nelson Mandela in need of psychiatric attention when he chose to serve just one term in office?

In the prevailing Nigerian milieu of mercenary politics, we can, of course, not rule out the possibility that the Anambra state governor is playing to the gallery of a one man audience, namely President Tinubu. In his bid for reelection in 2027, it is open secret that a major headache Tinubu can do without is Obi. It is similarly a fact of contemporary Nigerian power politics that the man who can make Soludo’s reelection as governor of Anambra state a mirage is the president. Other than decamping to the All Progressives Congress, APC, a next best option is to declare that he is prepared to become the president’s aggressive attack dog.