By Pius Mordi
Aso Rock’s media team is in overdrive. Not with a flurry of messages to acquaint Nigerians with the sterling accomplishments of their principal, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
Apparently, they have no such story to tell. What has preoccupied the now expanded team is the scathing remarks attributed to Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, former President, in far away United States at a Chinua Achebe Leadership Forum. Obasanjo is not an inventor or social scientist to have said anything extraordinary.
He said Nigeria is teetering on the brink of chaos, expressing “deep concern” over the country’s worsening economic situation.
He blamed it on leadership failure, stating that “the more the immorality and corruption of a nation, the more the nation sinks into chaos, insecurity, conflict, and underdevelopment”.
Nothing new or special in what the former president said. In fact, many other prominent leaders and citizens had made even more damning statements. But coming against the backdrop of the recent verdict from the World Bank classifying Tinubu’s reforms as having performed below expectations in a statement that stopped short of calling the reforms a failure as well as the venue of Obasanjo’s lecture – Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA – it stung deep.
Obasanjo is a former president whose words are not taken lightly and commands global respect. There had to be a response from Aso Rock. And it came vociferously. Bayo Onanuga, the combative spokesman who recently won the fratricidal attrition battle with Ajuri Ngelale fired the first salvo. Afterwards, a coterie of associates and politicians have followed suit with a common theme: run down Obasanjo.
Onanuga chose to prove his contention that Obasanjo is more of a failure than his principal.
In his response, Onanuga equally had a scathing riposte for the first Fourth Republic president, accusing him of “brazen illegality and assault on the Constitution”.
Highlighting a litany of Obasanjo’s misdeeds, the presidential spokesman spokesman accused him of neglecting national infrastructure, leaving federal roads in disrepair, and failing to address the country’s power crisis despite spending $16 billion on electricity projects.
Sunday Dare, one of the people newly deployed to join Onanuga as presidential spokesmen, adopted the same strategy of strictly taking on Obasanjo. On account of what Onanuga listed as his failures and more, Dare said described him as a man with “tremendous capacity for mischief”. His parting shot is telling. “In this market called Nigeria, the man with the renewed hope agenda is the one that matters. Everything else is ariwo oja [market noise]”, the one-time Minister of Sports said.
And that is the tragedy.
In Onanuga and Dare’s responses, the common denominator was to show that Obasanjo was a poor leader as president. Dare summed up what matters to Aso Rock. In failing to address the issues raised by Obasanjo, they told Nigerians that Tinubu is president and everybody should simply accept whatever he does. Looking back at the charges of treason levelled against the over 70 young men arrested during #EndBadGovernance protests after being held illegally for over three months without trial, one begins to understand the mentality of aides within the corridors of power and the fact that they go to bed easily and untroubled.
As Dare himself put it, Nigeria is a market. The only one that matters is the man running the market, not the state of the market or the fortunes of other marketers. That is dangerous merchantilism. Neither Onanuga nor Dare showed sympathy for the ordinary Nigerians or address any of the issues raised by Obasanjo. That the people are hungry and largely unable to feed themselves and meet other family and personal needs are not consequential to the presidential spokesmen. Arranging a coterie of chorus singers, including ethnic-based groups is not a tough exercise.
It does not take a strenuous search to see the collateral damage being wreaked on the society by the incongruous outcome of the failed policies.
A cursory look in the various social social media platforms shows that numerous adverts of charcoal stoves now abound on Facebook. The astronomical cost of gas which is still routinely flared as associated gas in the Niger Delta where gas in abundance more than crude oil has added a new dimension to deforestation. The social media adverts logically illustrate why it pays to switch to charcoal for cooking at only a fraction of buying gas. The charcoal does not come from Enugu coal mines which are no longer in commission. The charcoal come from felled trees at a time saner climes are combating climate change.
Ours is more challenging. Desertification has been with us and steadily overrunning the North and creeping down south. With kerosene already out of reach, ecological devastation will become the lot of the country. Coupled with the pollution that came with the tactless exploitation of crude oil in the Niger Delta, Nigeria is on the cusp of unprecedented environmental disaster that will take decades after Tinubu’s time before remedial actions may be taken.
For now, the people have to contend with the pervading poverty in the land while future generations will have to deal with the inevitable environmental disaster that lies ahead. What matters now for Aso Rock is that Tinubu in charge and should not be disturbed.
