Goodluck Jonathan was Trading with Boko Haram Insurgency...Turn Nigeria To His ATM - Olusegun Obasanjo

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.