Former president, Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo who once relished in his self-confessed contempt and snub for Nigerian newspapers claiming that he does not read them, is currently in the thick of steady newspaper headlines. It is doubtful now if he still does not read Nigerian newspapers. Obviously, he would be feeling what the Jamaican Rastafarian community call ‘irie’, a state of jubilant and ecstatic happiness at the media frenzy of his deliberate and calculated high velocity tirades designed ostensibly to stay in the media spotlight. Most of former president Obasanjo stomp tirades are highly toxic and ostensibly aimed to substantially vitiate and stymie the integrity and reputation of those he clearly targeted. Most of those, Mr. Obasanjo have openly thrown mud at, are responding or have responded and one therefore, does not intend to hold brief for any them.

However, former president Obasanjo seemed to be casting his heavy and deadly stones from a high moral pedestal, but examining his action and inactions in the eight years of leadership of the Nigerian state, it is clearly beyond doubt that Mr. Obasanjo does not possess the moral high ground from where he is seemingly pontificating. His easily most pilloried person and who is obviously not in a position to offer any response or defense is the imprisoned former governor of Delta state, Mr. James Ibori. But perhaps there is no living single Nigerian that Obasanjo as president, placed with more responsibility to get his personal preferred choice of former president Musa Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan into the presidency than the former Delta state governor. Mr. James Ibori served his two terms at the same period he perpetrated the massive fraud for which he was convicted, along the same time of Obasanjo presidency and it sat well with him. All intelligence and security agencies are federally controlled and were therefore, then answerable to Obasanjo, and he therefore would have been well acquainted to Ibori’s infractions. Why did the former president do nothing to bring the then governor to heels? It is well known that the governors who were in his political bad book like Messers Jousha Dariye and Dipreye Alamisiegha of Plateau and Bayelsa states were summarily dealt with, using the same federal agencies under Mr. Obasanjo control.

Raising hue about Mr. James Ibori and the fact that the crimes he could not be convicted in Nigeria were the same that he was convicted abroad speaks volume of Obasanjo’s own legacy. Therefore the James Ibori saga that Obasanjo like to mention at every public forum with sarcastic glee is actually his political albatross.

Former president Obasanjo, was at his imperial worst, when his associates masterminded the kidnap of a seating governor in Anambra state, and he notoriously quipped that the kidnapped governor failed to settle with his political benefactors, who asked for the state treasury to be turned over to them for helping the governor to win fraudulent election.For the duration of Obasanjo presidency, the felons who masterminded the kidnap remained his formidable political backbenchers and were key arrow heads in his desperate but aborted third term ambition. With the growth of the kidnap crimes and its menacing rise now, it is almost forgotten that its origin was its potency as a political weapon and the Obasanjo-led federal government soft accommodation to it.

Using the institution of the Nigerian presidency, Obasanjo has railroaded political office holders and well known government contractors to donate generously to his private pet project of a presidential library. The alleged financial infraction for which France former enigmatic president, Mr. Jacques Chirac was hauled to the court and convicted, which was using his earlier position as Mayor of Paris to enrich his party, paled into insignificance to former president Obasanjo’s serial infractions, and yet not only did he get away with all these, but looms so provocatively large on the public space with sanctimonious pretensions. Having made a dubious career of quoting the Bible in most of his public utterances, including the infamous denial, that had he wanted third term, God would have given him, he should have known that the Bible admonished that those with heavy log in their eyes should first remove it, before asking those with mere specks to remove theirs.

Before his hurried exit from the presidency following the humiliation of the aborted term elongation, former president Obasanjo auctioned Nigeria’s most prized national assets, the Warri and Kaduna refineries to Aliko Dangote and Femi Otedola. It took the rare courage of late President Musa Yar’Adua to listen to the national outrage trailing the auction and reversed it. This was following the nearly dozen licenses granted by the Obasanjo presidency to private investors to built refineries. As at the time, Obasanjo left office, not a single site was cleared for the purpose of building a refinery.

The public parliamentary inquiry on privatization of public assets, which was the extant paradigm of former president Obasanjo economic policy, was revealed to have been a maggot’s paradise and a haven for state-directed corruption. The former National Electric Power Authority, NEPA, which was serially unbundled and re-bundled, with several changes in nomenclature, remained the most inept and perennially dug in the mud of graft.

In recent times, former president Obasanjo has found a ‘worthy’ political vocation of ensuring equity, whereby he insists that President Jonathan must forgo his ambition in 2015 and cede power to the North. However, the question is: has the former president succeeded in his desperate bid to abolish term limits, would he have bothered at all if the North or any other region is entitled to the top job? Obasanjo’s opportunism is cruelly offensive to common sense or to any decent person, except for those who would not mind political power and good life even in hell. Former president Obasanjo, the author of our contemporary national travails and decline, should show respect to his badly bruised compatriots by excusing himself from the public stage.

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Red this article in the Leadership Newspapers