OBJ's Legacy

For many Nigerians, the exit of Obasanjo is a good riddance to another visionless, corrupt and despotic regime that our nation has been cursed with. For eight years, the legacy of OBJ's regime would be remembered as one of the worst that any president has ever bequeathed to a nation - considering the fact that the modern Nigeria OBJ boasted he created is now rife with chaos, an enthrenchment of corruption, plagiarized infrastructures and shattered dreams! As we look forward to a new regime; albeit it was ill conceived, a sham and one borne out of illegality, Nigerians must hold our past rulers accountable for the injustice done to the Nigerian people.
The EFFC should be tasked to not only go after probing a selected few, but should bring the Obasanjo administration to justice. We should endeavour to probe the sale of oil blocks, the Port Harcourt and Kaduna oil refineries, and their surrogates in these shady deals. We should review the books of the sale of public companies; NITEL, NEPA, Ajaokuta Steel, National Arts Theatre, Tafawa Balewa Square and all other national infrastructures that the Obasanjo administration sold to himself and his apparatchiks under the guise of privatization.
Nigerians should bring the wrath of the law to bear on every past leaders that has stolen from the public coffers. Yar' dua should start his presidency on a clean slate, by ensuring that the regime before him was devoid of any corrupt practices. And this should be his number priority. The failure to be burdened by this honorable task will be regarded as being in acquiescence with corrupt Nigerian leaders that have now become the bane of our beloved country!

Moving on, and I will leave y'all with this article culled from SaharaReporters. Please enjoy it!

AS THE DAYS TICK FOR OBASANJO.

President Olusegun Obasanjo, the owner of the PDP and the self-crowned architect of a modern Nigeria is on rampage. The modern Nigeria he boasts he created is a chaos writ large where life has reached its lowest and most brutish best. His modern Nigeria is an amalgam of crises, hobbled infrastructures and crumbled dreams.

It is a pot pourri of shambolic policies and deliberately sabotaged aspirations. These days, his very last in a sad eight years on power, Obasanjo can hardly end any public show without issuing one threat or the other. When he was not issuing threats, he is sounding as one that have mastered the country so well that he need not lift a finger to impose his will on a conquered people. After eight years when the heavens opened up an unprecedented cash vault, Obasanjo still feels he has an unfinished business with Nigeria. He feels so because he is not quite sure of what the future bodes for him. It is so bad that Obasanjo now practically lives on hubris as to think he can commander the country to trudge along his vain paths. With the minutes ticking away, Obasanjo is fast becoming vegetables and ironically he demonstrates this uncertain posture by grandstanding and issuing feeble threats and innuendos.

At one time, he was blowing hot and cold on how he can’t be pocketed by anybody and you wonder why this feeling of invincibility should so obsess a person that says he has done so well for his country. In another instance, he would be desperately trying to provide a sneak review of the protégé he violated all known canons of decency to impose on Nigerians, as if we need him at all bends come to terms with the reclusivist fellow he forced upon the throne. Nigerians are not fooled by Obasanjo excessive obtrusiveness with the soiled processes leading up to the emergence of Yar A’dua and his obsession with what he would do with the stolen mandate kept in his custody. Like all rulers that are webbed on all sides by acts that threaten their future, Obasanjo is trying to buy protection from prosecution for the many acts of indiscretions that were so rampant in his eight years disastrous regime. He knows that he turns mere vegetable in just a few days time and would only hang on the impression he makes on his protégé to survive what could turn out the most scandalous inquest into his stewardship these past eight years. It is for this that he has coveted PDP and for which he has committed criminal electoral robbery to force the PDP and his protégé on the country, just like the way he was imposed on the country by a cartel of corrupt ex-rulers that saw in him avenues to escape from justice for their many sordid acts while in power.

In one breadth Obasanjo would be breathing fire and brimstone and in another, he would be trying out a very cunning mien of a fellow that was genuinely concerned about the many problems he had only exacerbated in an awful eight regrettable years in power. In another instance, Obasanjo, in a half-clever bid to shake off the bad patch and putrid tar the obnoxious third term put on him, would be boasting of how he would have stayed forever, if he wanted, as if the country is one vast estate under his manipulative thumbs. Yet in another case, he would seek to cut the picture of a contrite fellow that was genuinely concerned about the deepening plight of his people and not in worsening them as he succeeded in doing for the past eight years. But one strand weaving all these demonstrations of a fluid, wracked and troubled mindset is the image of man that is sorely troubled by the prospects of a very unpredictable future. He should be concerned about his future because he knows deep in his heart, as many Nigerians know, that he had greatly compromised the office of the president and has further opened it to abuse and ulterior use.

Truth is that Obasanjo is so troubled that he tries a complex mix of grandstanding and vain bluffing thinking that he would confuse the citizenry further by his antics. He wanders through the solitary lanes of puerile vanity to seek to further confuse a citizenry that endured his visionless and amoral reign for eight years and who are coming to terms with the reality that this evil cup, a sad and dreary chalice of unprecedented poison is passing us after eight strenuous years of unmitigated personalization of power and unbridled mediocrity. With the years ebbing away in minutes, Obasanjo is so troubled, so distracted and so confused that he seeks to hide in the many subterfuges his aimless commentary in recent times create for him. He demonstrates the most uncoordinated thought and the most distracted mindset at a time he would be at peace with the elements were he committed to lift governance beyond the petty corridors of self-aggrandizement and pursuit of naked vendetta. But Obasanjo has created a cult of predatory rich men and millions of poverty-ravaged citizenry. He had tilted state instruments and resources to create a cabal of rich men out of the privation and haunting want of many. He has made some few millions from Nigeria’s malfunctioning power sector, carved a cult of rich standpatters from the premeditated energy crisis, hewn out a sybaritic brood of buccaneers from the bankrupt state infrastructures he is leaving after eight years of uneventful rule. He has brewed social malcontent, spurred social upheaval and has provoked strife by the deliberate policies he pursued to rob the many and empower a few.

But one thing that Obasanjo has not imbued with some level of finesse in the last eight years of bizarre rage is his intrigues. With his entire knack for self-glorification, he looks like a peevish schoolboy in the many infantile intrigues he generously visited to governance in the past eight years. As he practices his trade for dubiety, he fancies himself as being so smart for Nigerians yet no Nigerian is fooled by the many adult pranks of Obasanjo. He is so readable and so predictable that most Nigerians always know where he would end once he launches on any of his pranks. The wonder is why he never sought to disappoint those that always predict his moves and their outcomes and this is not unconnected with the sparse endowments of the government he ran. Even as his antics rebound in his face, he makes a hell lot of job of his awkward smartness that even when all deride him for his half-wits, he fancies himself the next best thing God created for Nigerians after pure water. He plays the ostrich with so much relish and cares little that people equate him with a swimmer whose back flashes at those that watch from outside the stream. That explains the reason he can shamelessly boast that he would have had a third term if he wished. Just the way he tried to wash his hands from that dastardly plot only when the move had been killed by the senate and just as many Nigerians predicted he would. All these cases of cheapening intrigues and the hide-and-seek character of this president accounts for why Nigerians are almost completely united by the hate and repulsion of the person of Obasanjo and why everyone is just desirous that he disappears from our public scene, like the expired drug he has become. No president can be so cheeky!

He is behaving as if he was talking to breast-suckling babies that never witnessed the dirty maneuvers and the wholesome threats with which Obasanjo pursued the third term ambition. He was pretending that Nigerians never recalled the many acts of official bribery and the gargantuan social and political insecurity he provoked in the attempt to get the constitution fraudulently doctored to give him an open-ended term. He pretended Nigerians have forgotten the many manipulations he imbued in the system so as to continue staying in power. Obasanjo wanted Nigerians to believe that the blitzkrieg that attended the grand failure of the obnoxious third term fancies, which obtained in the deadly haunting of the opponents of that evil plot was a mere fluke; so also was the manipulation of most of the legislators that opposed the third term out of the present legislature and the rewarding of the running dogs among them that brazenly promoted that plot with another term. Obasanjo believes he has cowed all Nigerians into a permanent state of amnesia that they never witnessed the untoward deployment of all known state instruments of corruption and coercion to obtain for him another term when Nigerians are riled to the bones by his manifest shortcomings in power.