Nigeria’s former President Olusegun Obasanjo has come hard on President Goodluck Jonathan over the postponement of the general election.
Consequently, he has publicly endorsed the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, to unseat President Goodluck Jonathan.
According to a report by the London-based Financial Times newspaper, Obasanjo, who had said last week that he would not speak on the elections until after the polls, broke his vow of silence in Nairobi Monday, where he launched his 1,500-page autobiography which was highly critical of Jonathan, whose ascent to the presidency he helped to engineer.
The book has been banned in Nigeria pending libel hearings brought by Buruji Kashamu, an ally of the president.
“The signs are not auspicious” in the wake of the six-week postponement of the general election, said Obasanjo, who remains an influential, even contentious figure at home. “I don’t know whether a script is being played.”
Coming from a founding member of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), his public endorsement of the main opposition challenger underscores the extent to which Jonathan has lost backing from sections of the establishment.
The country was due to go to the polls this Saturday, with Buhari’s campaign gathering steam in what was expected to be the country’s closest electoral contest since the restoration of civilian rule in 1999.
But the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) last weekend postponed the vote until March 28 after security chiefs said they could not safeguard the polls while launching a regional military campaign to reclaim besieged territory from Islamist extremists. The delay should also enable biometric voter cards to be distributed to the millions of voters who have yet to receive them and who were at risk of being disenfranchised.
However, the hold-up has raised fears among civil society and opposition activists that the government might seek to use security concerns as a pretext to extend its mandate beyond a four-year term that ends on May 29, and risk plunging the country back into the hands of the military rather than tempt fate at the polls.
Jonathan and the army have publicly pledged to abide by the constitution.
But Obasanjo said in an interview: “I sincerely hope that the president is not going for broke and saying ‘look dammit, it’s either I have it or nobody has it’. I hope that we will not have a coup… I hope we can avoid it.”
Obasanjo was instrumental to Jonathan’s ascent from governor to the presidency. But relations between the two men have soured since he chose Jonathan as a vice-presidential candidate in 2007 and backed him as president when Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, the incumbent, died in office three years later.
Obasanjo continues to play an active international role but said he has no ambition to return to the political centre stage. “I am an old man and I’m enjoying what I’m doing now… And then you forget I am a farmer; I have to manage my farm.”
This is the first time Obasanjo has come out openly to support Buhari.
“The circumstances (Buhari) will be working under if he wins the election are different from the one he worked under before, where he was both the executive and the legislature — he knows that,” said Obasanjo.
“He’s smart enough. He’s educated enough. He’s experienced enough. Why shouldn’t I support him?”
He expressed the view that Buhari would be well equipped to combat corruption and restore the fighting spirit to an army that has struggled in the face of the onslaught by Boko Haram, which has seized a swath of territory in the North-east.
“It’s a question of leadership — political and military,” Obasanjo said of the crisis facing the army.
“I think you need to ask (Jonathan) how has he let (the army) go to this extent… Many things went wrong: recruitment went wrong; training went wrong; morale went down; motivation not there; corruption was deeply ingrained; welfare was bad.”
The former leader also expressed dismay at the extent to which billions of dollars in oil revenues had “all disappeared” since he left office, when reserves had reached $45 billion and the government had $20bn more in rainy day savings (Excess Crude Account).
Speaking ironically of the negative impact on tumbling oil prices on government reserves, Obasanjo added: “There’ll be less in the pot, for stealing or corruption.”
In a related development, Buhari has asked Jonathan and the PDP to come clean on the speculations in the public domain that there are plans by his government to scuttle elections and impose an interim government on the country.
A statement from the Buhari Presidential Organisation also decried what it termed embedded vested interests and sinister motives behind the postponement of the polls, warning that Jonathan should open up in order to avert unrest and possible civil disobedience that could scuttle the country’s hard-earned democracy.
The statement issued yesterday on behalf of Buhari by the Director of Media and Publicity of the APC Campaign Council, Malam Garba Shehu, frowned on the unholy alliance between the Jonathan government, the PDP and the military for the purpose of subverting the franchise of the people in the rescheduled presidential and other elections on March 28 and April 11, respectively.
“If the witch cried in the night and the baby died in the morning, it would not be a mere coincidence. Hence, the body of civilised and democratic people around the world believes that the security excuse used by this unpopular government to prolong the polls is untrue and pretentious.
“What type of democracy allows compromising security chiefs to determine when elections would hold or not? Now, the National Security Adviser (NSA) has become the megaphone for this government.
“He went to Chatham House in the UK to call for election postponement which he has now obtained. Next, he claims he would crush Boko Haram within six weeks. What if he can’t, will there be a further excuse to extend the elections and create a constitutional impasse? Nigerians are no fools and nobody can pull soiled cotton over our eyes anymore.
“We are inundated with information as to how this government wants to tamper with due process by discrediting INEC and even sack its chairman, raise false alarms, rig the elections with military connivance and eventually scuttle democracy, replacing it with an interim government.
“For all we know and can see, the contraption of an interim government has no place in the constitution as former President Obasanjo said on BBC Monday night.
“President Jonathan must come clean on these allegations. He is the Commander-in-Chief, and not the NSA. Hence he must, as a matter of urgency, speak to the nation and the world on these salient allegations.
“A refusal would make him the historic president who doesn’t give a damn while on national assignment,” the statement said.
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