by Richard Akindele » Fri May 19, 2006 4:46 am
"We announce with deepest relief the death of our beloved third term, after a protracted and terminal illness. We sincerely mourn with the bereaved family who fought a gallant battle and spent billions of naira to keep Chief Third Term alive. Funeral rites as announced by the immediate and extended family. Chief Mourner, Rt. Honourable Chief Doctor Engineer General Matthew Aremu Okikiola Obasanjo" - Text message.
I spent the better part of Tuesday afternoon receiving telephone calls from people from around the country. These have been congratulatory calls in the wake of the decisive defeat of the third term project by the patriots in Nigeria's Senate. It was in the same effusive mode that the text at the head of this piece was also sent by an equally elated compatriot.
The past two weeks must surely go down in Nigeria's recent history as some of its most incredible; Nigerians lived through the desperation of the Obasanjo clique to swing their way the obviously dead-on-arrival constitution manipulative process in a most indecent, grotesque, illegal and brazen manner. The media was awash with the ill-concealed and elaborate machinery of bribery by a regime that is allegedly fighting an 'anti-corruption war.'
The bribery stake was raised to N150 million per legislator when it became obvious to the discredited Obasanjo clique that they had lost to the Nigerian people, thanks to the courageous decision of Senate President Ken Nnamani and House Speaker, Aminu Bello Masari, to conduct the hearings in an open, fair and transparent manner. This was a STRATEGIC defeat for the conspiratorial agenda to manipulate, adopt secret ballots, ban the live telecast of the proceedings by the Africa Independent Television (AIT), and get the rules of parliamentary procedure changed once it became obvious that the machinery of bribery, stealth, intimidation and blackmail had been so decisively defeated in the public sphere.
The Nigerian people DECISIVELY DEFEATED the Obasanjo clique, because the coalition of the patriotic legislators, the media and the people proved far more powerful than the bullying tactics of Obasanjo; the area boy politics of the PDP leadership and all the 'Ghana Must Go' that had been primed to subvert our country just for the interest of a thoroughly incompetent president, whose isolation from reality has become almost irreversible. At the end of it all, Mister Fix-It became an irrelevant schemer, used to the dark recesses of political intrigue, but unable to stand up in the limelight of democratic debate conducted in a transparent manner with a firm and fair National Assembly leadership that took a decision to be true to their oaths of allegiance, their consciences and a patriotic resolve not to betray the longsuffering people of Nigeria.
From the beginning of 2006, I had written very consistently on this page that the National Assembly would become the arena of a life-and-death struggle between the Nigerian people on the one hand, and the Obasanjo clique on the other. It did not need a crystal ball to see that the decisive defeat that the third term agenda suffered at the National Political Reform Conference underscored how determined the Nigerian people were to ensure that they were not subverted by a President Obasanjo whose messianic delusions were also intertwined with the cold fear of a comeuppance for the crimes he has committed against the Nigerian nation and its people.
Some of our colleagues had thought that the best thing was to boycott the Reform Conference, but I had argued that we should encourage attendance in order to be able to defeat the hidden agenda that pushed the dictator to call the conference in the first place! Though handpicked, the delegates were mainly patriots who have lived through the hell that has been the Obasanjo period of the past seven to eight years; they knew that the regime is discredited, it is unpopular and for most Nigerians, the Obasanjo name has become a byword for sorrow, poverty, incompetence, loss of jobs, insecurity at home, at work, in the streets, on the highways; there was therefore no way they would become pawns in the hands of Obasanjo.
The conference helped the Nigerian people to catch a whiff of the desperation of the Obasanjo clique to subvert our country. It became a platform where Northern delegates discovered the unity to transcend the 'divide and rule' politics that Obasanjo had perfected against its people since 1999, and the consequence of the newfound unity helped to provide a solid base for the eventual construction of a nationwide political process that would be conveyed into the haloed chambers of the National Assembly. The outcome seemed almost inevitable, that Obasanjo and members of his clique would suffer a decisive defeat, as we saw this week at the Senate.
The distinguished senators spoke for Nigeria, unfettered by the threats issued from party headquarters; they did not succumb to the greed which money, a huge amount of money, can induce. In the full glare of AIT's historic live telecast, the patriotic senators chose to stand on the right side of history by refusing to re-write the constitution to suit an egoistic dictator whose main problem is the fear of life AFTER May 29, 2007. But it has become clear that Obasanjo will still get his day in the court of the Nigerian people. It is just a matter of time.
But we must temper our jubilation because the days ahead will be very difficult for the country. Now that they have suffered such a crushing defeat, you can expect the Obasanjo clique to go for vengeance in the days, weeks and months ahead. Every Nigerian knows that Obasanjo is an unforgiving and a very vindictive person. Let us therefore be very vigilant.
The regime is quite capable of mischief and I have no doubts in my mind that the press, the opposition parties, legislators who voted against the third term and the broad masses of the Nigerian people will be visited with the sour grapes of wrath by a badly bruised, isolated and desperate regime and a president whose only exit strategy was to continue in power for another twelve years.
It must truly be a very painful defeat for a man who must wake up these days with a new jet plane in tow, wondering that he has conquered Nigeria and would do with it what he liked! He bids for Commonwealth Games, imagining that he would declare it open; etc. Yet it is this absolutely incompetent regime that will tell Nigerians that we shall not get electricity until 2056!
I believe that it is important for Nigerians to cherish the victory that we won against Obasanjo's clique; it is a step forward in our effort to deepen the content of democracy. The open and transparent manner of the debate in Parliament helped to put the media at the heart of the democratic process in consonance with our obligations under the Constitution. In this context, AIT came out in flying colours, and the courage of Dr Raymond Dokpesi (whose house was burnt by agents of darkness) and his staff must be praised. In the same vein, we must ask where Tonnie Iredia kept NTA at this important historical juncture in our nation's life. It is this irresponsible use of our national public service broadcasters, the NTA and FRCN, that make it important for us to interrogate the public broadcasting space, post the Obasanjo dictatorship.
If we intend to deepen the content of our democracy beyond the opening that the anti-third term debates have shown to be possible, we must also beam our searchlights on the electoral process; we must ensure that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) become a genuinely INDEPENDENT body, not one dedicated to doing the biddings of Obasanjo and the PDP. Some of its actions have left a sour taste in the mouth, in a manner of speaking.
INEC did not come out as an independent body in respect of the recall processes in Plateau State. It was a zealous body in the effort to recall the Speaker of the Plateau State House of Assembly, but became lost in a dubious legalese when it came
Daily Trust.