The Former president Olusegun
Obasanjo has disclosed why he opposed the re-election of immediate past
president, Mr. Goodluck Jonathan in the 2015 presidential election.
Mr. Obasanjo’s reasons are contained in a book, Against the Run of
Play, written by Mr. Segun Adeniyi, Chairman of the Editorial Board
of ThisDay Newspapers.
The book, an account of what happened in the 2015 presidential election, is due for public presentation in Lagos on Friday.
The relationship between the former presidents, noted the author, had
soured long before the election. Mr. Jonathan, whose political rise is
widely credited to Mr. Obasanjo’s influence, had sought to make up with
his presumed benefactor and keep him on his side for re-election. He
arranged for a meeting with Mr. Obasanjo in his Abeokuta home.
Before leaving for the Ogun State leg of his campaign in January 2015
wrote the author, Mr. Jonathan had concluded plans to visit Mr.
Obasanjo, who had agreed to meet him.
Mr. Obasanjo, however, gave a condition: Jonathan must come along
with someone of sufficient credibility to act as a witness at the
meeting. Mr. Jonathan agreed to bring one along.
He approached the hugely influential General Overseer (GO) of the
Redeemed Christian Church of God, Pastor EA Adeboye, who accepted to
play the role of a witness.
But on the evening of 12 January 2015, the agreed date of the meeting
scheduled for Mr. Obasanjo’s Hilltop residence in Abeokuta, Pastor
Adeboye arrived in the company of Bishop David Oyedepo of Winners
Chapel.
“It was only Pastor Adeboye that Jonathan told me was coming with
him, but Bishop Oyedepo is a man I also know very well, so I had no
problem with his presence at the meeting,” Mr. Obasanjo was quoted as
saying.
The meeting, stated the author, was an unpleasant one for Mr.
Jonathan, a man Mr. Obasanjo had assisted to become Vice President and
then President. Mr. Obasanjo frontally told Mr. Jonathan that he was not
going to support his re-election bid, saying he considered his
performance as president sub-par and that he had acted less than
honorably for reneging on the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) zoning
arrangement, which prescribed that it was the turn of the North to
produce the president.
“I told him in the presence of his witness that I was not going to
support him for a second-term and I gave my reasons. Aside the issue of
zoning on which he was reneging, his stewardship up to that point had
also shown very clearly that he was not up to the job,” Obasanjo
reportedly said to the author in December 2016.
Mr. Obasanjo, according to the author, claimed to have nothing
personal against Mr. Jonathan, explaining that his disagreement with him
was based on certain principles on which he was not prepared to
compromise.
“My decision was based on what would be for the good of Nigeria and
since I didn’t consider Jonathan god enough, I told him to his face.
What would I be afraid of?” asked Obasanjo.
The outcome of the meeting was a huge blow to Mr. Jonathan, who was
initially billed to be on the ballot in February 2015 before the
eventual postponement of the election. Mr. Jonathan, expectedly, left
Abeokuta dejected.
The outcome of the meeting was the culmination of years of disdain,
initially muted, with which Mr. Obasanjo held the Jonathan presidency.
Signs of his irritation first manifested on 3 April 2012, when he
resigned his position as chairman of PDP Board of Trustees.
Two months later, he delivered a wounding assessment of the Jonathan’s administration’s capacity to confront corruption.
On 15 June 2012, at a debate organized by the club De Madrid (an
independent, non-profit organization comprising 80 former democratic
presidents and prime ministers from fifty-six countries) in Geneva,
Switzerland, Mr. Obasanjo laid into the Jonathan administration with
full force.
“I haven’t seen that will of persistency and consistency in Nigeria
because the people that are involved in corruption, they are strongly
entrenched and unless you are ready to confront them at the point of
even giving your life for it, then you will give in, that is the end of
it,” he told BBC
Ritula Shah, moderator of the debate. Clever sniping by an
accomplished verbal sniper. From then on, Mr. Jonathan was a sitting
duck.
A year later, Mr. Obasanjo abandoned sniping for an all-out shootout.
His first major target was the oil pipelines protection initiative of
the Jonathan administration.
“This morning, on my way from Abeokuta by road, I was listening to
the radio. I heard that the Jonathan administration said that they are
going to set up an agency for pipeline protection. Now, what are the
police there for? What are all the security agencies doing? This is
another chop-chop,” Mr. Obasanjo said in Abuja during a thanksgiving
ceremony to mark the 50th birthday of Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, a former
Minister of Education.
He sustained his attack with details of how he thought the Jonathan
administration was not interested in accountability, noting that its
handling of the Boko Haram insurgency indicated that if allowed to
continue in power, Mr. Jonathan could fatally damage the country.
“Jonathan and his people turned Boko Haram into an industry for making
money. Rather than seek for solution, Boko Haram became an ATM machine
for taking money out of the treasury. Take the issue of the Chibok
tragedy. If he had acted within the first 48 hours, they would have
found most of the girls.
The CAN (Christian Association of Nigeria)
Chairman of the local chapter in Chibok was here to see me and he
explained how they were helpless with no reaction from the authorities
for several days,” the book quoted Mr. Obasanjo as saying.
The author noted that Mr. Obasanjo had advised early in the life of
the Jonathan administration that Jonathan, as president, needed to pay
more attention to the Boko Haram insurgency, a counsel that was ignored.
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