South African President Thabo Mbeki has described his Nigerian counterpart Olusegun Obasanjo’s acceptance of the scrapping of a plan to extend his tenure as an outstanding act of statesmanship, an official statement said on Tuesday.
The National Assembly — the Senate and the House of Representatives — last week in Abuja rejected a proposal to amend the 1999 Constitution. This would have allowed Obasanjo to run for a third term at the end of his current mandate in 2007.
Mbeki described Obasanjo’s call for national reconciliation in the aftermath of his Parliament’s rejection of the amendments as ”an outstanding act of statesmanship”, said the statement from the Nigerian president’s office.
Since the beginning of this year, there has been a heated debate on the possibility of Obasanjo extending his tenure beyond 2007.
Under the 1999 Constitution, Obasanjo (69), who came into office in 1999, must step down in May 2007 after serving two four-year terms.
The dispute was stirred in Parliament when his supporters presented last April 11 a proposal to amend 116 items in the Constitution, including allowing him a third term.
In a letter to Obasanjo, Mbeki praised the former for urging members of his party to accept the decision of the Parliament as ”a victory for democracy” and for urging all Nigerians to ”heal the wounds of acrimony and march forward together”.
”With no reservations whatsoever, I would like to thank and salute you for these comments as you responded to the decisions of the Nigerian National Assembly.
”The comments communicate an outstanding act of statesmanship that I am convinced must and will inspire all Nigerians, our own people, and our brothers and sisters in the rest of our continent, as we all strive to empower the masses of our peoples democratically to participate in the own systems of governance,” Mbeki wrote.
”Even though you were speaking to the leadership of the PDP [the ruling People’s Democratic Party] and the Nigerian people, we, the rest of Africa, should apply what you said, to our own countries.
”It is only in this way that we will achieve the objective we share, of genuinely respecting the aspirations of our people and placing Africa where she rightly belongs among the world community of nations,” Mbeki said in the letter, according to the text.
”I am truly inspired that you, a tried and tested leader of the peoples of Nigeria and Africa, spoke to all of us in unequivocal terms to reaffirm our sacred task to entrench democracy throughout our continent,” Mbeki concluded. — Sapa-AFP