Ever since Richard Nixon looked into the cameras and said, “Your president is not a crook!” even as he was breaking every law in the book trying to cover up the Watergate break-in, I had learned to cross out the “not” from politicians’ statements.
And what confirmation have I not had? George Bush said, “Read my lips!”, and claimed he would not increase taxes. Most recently, of course, we’ve had Bill Clinton pointing his finger straight at us and saying, ” I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
So I never believed General Olusegun Obasanjo (61), the former head of state of Nigeria (1979 to 1983) when he said, shortly after his release from Abacha’s prison, that he did not intend to run for the presidency of Nigeria. And last weekend the People’s Democratic Party, which has obtained the greatest number of votes in the two elections held so far in preparation for democratic civilian rule on May 29, nominated Obasanjo as its presidential candidate.
This means that if the voting pattern that emerged in the local government elections (December 9) and the governorship elections (January 9) is repeated in the February 27 presidential election, Obasanjo will become Nigeria’s next president. Forget that he ever said of another former head of state, General Yakubu Gowon, when Gowon attempted to run after having once been kicked out: “What did he forget in State House that he now wants to go back and collect?”
Obasanjo’s tongue is, as we graphically put it in the Akan language of Ghana, rather “painful”. Yours truly once tasted it. Obasanjo had just visited South Africa in 1985/86 as co-chair of the Eminent Persons Group sent by the Commonwealth to see whether there was any possibility of opening up any common ground between the Commonwealth and the apartheid government of South Africa, on democratic rule for the republic.
The reports that filtered back about Obasanjo’s doings were good: he had visited Nelson Mandela in prison; he had got himself arrested on a beach in Durban by ignoring the “whites only” sign; and he had told a crowd of Africans that they should revisit the old methods used by their ancestors to deal with their enemies (that is, study sangoma “weapons” of war).
But at the same time, the defence minister of South Africa, General Magnus Malan, was quoted as saying that he had found, on meeting Obasanjo, that as “soldiers”, they were “on the same wavelength”.
This sounded to me as if Obasanjo had committed treason against Africa. And I wrote, in my column in the African Concord magazine, that if he was on the same “wavelength” with Malan – a man who had repeatedly sent South African commandos to raid neighbouring African countries in search of African National Congress activists, and who dispatched apparently unmanned “hippos” into the townships to tempt young Africans to throw stones at them so that they could be shot dead by soldiers – I wrote: “If what Malan says transpired between him and Obasanjo is true, I hope Obasanjo can sleep when he goes to bed at night.”
I went to interview Obasanjo at the offices of the Commonwealth Secretariat in London when he came back from South Africa.
As soon as I greeted him, Obasanjo shot out: “But aren’t you a fool? How could you write such a thing knowing my background back home?”
I said: “Sir, I wrote `if what Malan said was true’.”
I wasn’t surprised when I learned, a few years afterwards, that his attempt to become the world’s number-one diplomat – secretary general of the United Nations – had not quite taken off.
As it happens, I’ve also met Obasanjo’s challenger, Chief Olu Falae (60). Falae was the secretary to the Cabinet and later finance minister when General Ibrahim Babangida was in power (1985 to 1993).
He is a remarkable political operator, for in order to get the chance to challenge Obasanjo, he had to defeat Bola Ige, a former governor of Oyo State and one of the heavyweights of the Alliance for Democracy (AD). Then, although Falae’s own AD had obtained a smaller share of the votes in the earlier elections than its ally, the All People’s Party (APP), Falae was chosen by the APP as joint candidate.
These are no easy accomplishments, and Falae will almost certainly catch a certain amount of flack, by way of protest votes, unless he can win over those whose ambitions he’s seen off with such aplomb.
I once drove Falae from his flat in London to Bush House to interview him for the BBC on the structural adjustment programme (SAP)that Babangida’s government was running.
Although everyone knew that the SAP programme was literally “sapping” the strength out of the Nigerian economy and eroding the standards of living of the people, Falae stoutly defended it. He even suggested that it was an insult to insist that the programme was an International Monetary Fund (IMF) creation.
“Look, those IMF people, didn’t we attend the same economics classes with them [at Yale and Harvard]?” Falae, a Yale graduate, asked. “Why should we sit down and let them tell us what to do when we know, as much as they do, what to do to the economy?”
Well, his past defence of the SAP is bound to be one of Falae’s weak points during the election campaign.
Perhaps because of that he will – contrary to expectations – welcome the fact that the election campaign has been truncated to a mere two weeks between the candidates being nominated, and the voting taking place.