Audu Ogbeh's Letter To Obasanjo

By Reuben Abati

December 11, 2004

Guardian

Audu Ogbeh, former college lecturer, playwright, former Federal Minister and an old friend of the President, who also happens to be the Chairman of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is on collision course with the President. He has leaked to the Punch of Saturday, December 11, (or maybe someone else did so on his behalf) a very embarrassing letter, which says a lot that is damaging and ominous about the Obasanjo administration.

The letter vindicates those of us in civil society who have spent so much energy trying to warn this government about the dangers of wielding power with excessive arrogance.

 For Audu Ogbeh to put his pen to paper, is an expression of complete frustration.

The leakage of the letter to the press places him in a position of strength: he has succeeded in placing his fears on public record. He has openly distanced himself from the Obasanjo administration. He is asking the public to note that when the Obasanjo government began to drift, he was not one of the architects of the descent.

He has also managed to say in his letter that Obasanjo is the problem with Nigeria, and that he alone can solve the problems that have arisen. In other words, Audu Ogbeh is passing a vote of no confidence in President Obasanjo, as Chairman of the President's party, he is telling us that Obasanjo is on his own, and that he is not in any away implementing the party's agenda. Truly, there are serious problems in the PDP.

It is a party that is divided against itself. Now that party members and chieftains are beginning to criticise President Obasanjo and distance themselves from him, the clear indication is that the implosion within the PDP which many had predicted would occur in 2005 with telling impact, has already begun. It is worth noting that the same day that The Punch newspaper published Audu Ogbeh's letter, Tim Menakaya, Obasanjo's first Minister of Health and also a member of the PDP granted an interview to ThisDay newspaper in which he is quoted as saying "one on one, I will tell Obasanjo he has failed". Menakaya, one of those beneficiaries of the Obasanjo administration, now turning against the man, did not bother to make his point one on one.

He has told the whole world on the pages of a newspaper that Obasanjo has failed. Let no one pretend that this kind of insider testimony lacks weight. In due course, Obasanjo's spokesmen or even the President himself would reply Audu Ogbeh. He would be called names after a fashion. When Wole Soyinka wrote a similar letter to President Obasanjo, he got a reply which the newspapers published until Soyinka wrote yet another stinker to which the President could not find a response. When Chinua Achebe also wrote a letter to the President recently, he was asked to shut up.

Audu Ogbeh should be prepared for a lot more fire. His letter is constructed in form of an advice; he must know that he is dealing with a president who has since declared that he is not under any obligation to accept anybody's advice including observations by his own official advisers who are paid to do just that. The weight of Audu Ogbeh's letter is in the sub-text; the letter writer says a lot by not saying much, but the significance of his gesture is obvious enough. The Punch which must be congratulating itself for scooping other newspapers, tried to put its own spin on Ogbeh's letter by simply highlighting the content, but nonetheless, a deconstruction of the letter is in order.

Titled "Anambra and Related Matters", Ogbeh's entry point is the Anambra crisis, and the failure of the Obasanjo government and the PDP to contain the spread of anarchy. As party Chairman, Ogbeh was involved in the early attempts to find a solution to the crisis. So deep must be the confusion within the party that the Chairman has moved from being a peacemaker, to a critic. But he merely hides under Anambra to make more general statements of a damning import.

He asks: "The question now is, what would be the consequences of such a development? How do we exonerate ourselves from culpability, and worse still, how do we hope to survive it? Mr President, I was part of the second republic and we fell. Memories of that fall are a miserable litany of woes we suffered, escaping death only by God's supreme mercy. Then we were suspected to have stolen all of Nigeria's wealth. After several months in prison, some of us were freed to come back to life penniless and wretched. Many have gone to their early graves un-mourned because the public saw all of us as renegades." Now, he makes his point as follows: "I am afraid we are drifting in the same direction again. In life, perception is reality and today, we are perceived in the worst light by an angry, scornful Nigerian public for reasons which are absolutely unnecessary."
Every word above is like a stone thrown in Obasanjo's face. By comparing the Obasanjo government to the NPN-led Shagari government of the Second Republic, Ogbeh is saying that things are really bad with Nigeria. The NPN ran an irresponsible government populated by egomaniacs and kleptomaniacs. This was the season of the squandering of Nigerian riches, and the people were very angry with the Shagari government.

Elections were rigged; party thugs became overlords, and the government refused to listen to wiser entreaties. Ogbeh says Nigerians perceive the Obasanjo government in a similar light, and that the people are angry and scornful.

Ogbeh is a student of literature. The message of literature is embodied. It is codified. Ogbeh has declared, and we have no cause to doubt him, that the Obasanjo government is as corrupt and as irresponsible as the government of the Second Republic. The irony is that certain key members of that Second Republic may even insist that the NPN did a better job, that in fact the Second Republic was a lot better.

No less a person than Joseph Wayas, Senate President in the Second Republic is on record as having said this much when he lamented that he presided over a far more hardworking and responsive National Assembly. And he is right. Shehu Shagari was a sober and innocent President, with a dignified mien.

Ogbeh avers that the Obsanjo government is attracting public anger for reasons that are "absolutely unnecessary". It is absolutely unnecessary for example for government to wage war against the people. The politics that this government plays with the prices of petroleum products is nothing short of an assault on the people. In Anambra, the people are holding the President and the PDP responsible for the chaos in the area, because they insist that if the election in that state had not been rigged in 2003, there would have been peace and not the kind of madness that is being witnessed.

The war that the Federal Government has just fought and lost against the Federal Government over the creation of and allocation of revenue to local councils is also absolutely unnecessary. The Supreme Court judgement in the case is an indictment of both the President and his legal advisers. In another country, the President would tender an apology to the Lagos State Government.

But instead of eating the humble pie, the Federal Government has been boasting that its position has been vindicated by the Supreme Court. What has been vindicated is not so clear. And it is because of this kind of unnecessary barefaced lying that the people are angry and distrustful of government.

Again, consider the President's sudden acceptance that there should be a national dialogue. It is absolutely unnecessary that he had to spend five years to get to this point. The committee that he has even set up is made up of government officials and appointees, and one or two outsiders, conveying the impression that this is not even something that the President intends to be serious about. The list of omissions and commissions is endless.

Ogbeh is afraid that as was the case in the Second Republic, many of the key actors in the present dispensation may end up in detention. He is worried that the Obasanjo government may fall. And he is not alone in this thinking. So he adds: "Mr President, if I write in this vein, it is because I am deeply troubled (all of us are) and I can tell you that an overwhelming percentage of our party members feel the same way though many may never be able to say this to you for a variety of reasons".

In other words, members of the PDP are also angry and unhappy with the performance of the Obasanjo government. But they cannot say so because they are either afraid or they are vulnerable or they are sycophants who are more interested in lining their pockets. Ogbeh opts to speak on behalf of this silent majority.

And it is remarkable that in this part of the letter, Ogbeh switches from the use of collective pronouns, to personal pronouns. He places the problem at Obasanjo's doorstep, with the advice that the President should do something to stop the drift because "we can either by omission or commission allow ourselves to crash and bring to early grief, this beautiful edifice called democracy".

The use of the word beautiful to qualify democracy should be underlined. Democracy is beautiful but the problem is with its Nigerian managers. Ogbeh reserves the hardest punch for the last paragraph. He tells us that he is writing "on behalf of the Peoples Democratic Party". Is Obasanjo so mixed up that even his own party has to adopt special tactics to communicate with him? Hear Ogbeh: "On behalf of the Peoples Democratic Party, I call on you to act now and bring any, and all criminal, even treasonable activity to a halt. You and you alone have the means. Do not hesitate. We do not have too much time to waste." The use of the phrase criminal and treasonable activity should also be underlined.

Ogbeh's letter is a sad commentary on the Obasanjo government. It is the kind of letter that should have been written by the Chairman of an opposition party. But this is Obasanjo's own party accusing him of condoning criminal and treasonable activities, failing to act, offending the electorate, endangering democracy and moving the country on a path of destruction. These are very serious charges. It would be interesting to see how President Obasanjo responds, the kind of defence that he offers. Whatever happens, it should be remembered that Ogbeh speaks not just his own mind or the mind of many in the PDP but the mind of the majority of Nigerians.

 In a recent newspaper interview, Alhaji Lateef Jakande only grudgingly gave the Obasanjo government a failure mark of 30 per cent, and he said he did this just because of the GSM revolution, the credit for which is not entirely Obasanjo's.

The writing of the history of Obasanjo's second coming as Nigeria's Head of State has begun. The pity is that it is starting rather early. The meaning of this kind of situation is that the people have already given up on the government so they are already composing its obituary. The sad news is that President Obasanjo would spend the immediate future, outside Abuja trying to explain himself and his government. Such an explanation would have been "absolutely unnecessary" if the circumstances were happier.