Obasanjo And The Haunting Ghost Of His Third Term Agenda

 By Olu Fasan

Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria’s former military ruler and former civilian president, is a bundle of contradictions. One could write a book on Obasanjo’s strengths, and another on his flaws. Of course, Obasanjo is his own hagiographer. He has written many books on himself, with such self-referential titles as My Command, Not My Will and My Watch. But as the biographer Lytton Strachey said, discretion is not the better part of biography. And so, most of Obasanjo’s books are an exercise in self-glorification, with highly disputed narratives. 

For instance, Obasanjo’s My Command, an account of his role during the civil war, was so controversial that it provoked General Godwin Alabi-Isama to write his own book, The Tragedy of Victory, to correct what he described as “Obasanjo’s Tissues of Lies”.

Have Nigerians Truly Suffered Enough?

 By Ikechukwu Amaechi

In the twilight of the Olusegun Obasanjo administration, a drama played out in the Red Chamber of the National Assembly as senators squared up in a crunch tenure elongation. The day was May 16, 2006, one year before the end of Obasanjo’s constitutionally guaranteed maximum eight years of two terms. But Obasanjo didn’t want to leave, hence the need to amend the Constitution with an open ended-tenure. 

As pro-tenure elongation senators plotted their third term agenda, anti-Obasanjo forces also arranged their cards.

On the day of the second reading of the Amendment Bill, the Senate President, Ken Nnamani, called out his colleagues one after the other and his predecessor, Adolphus Wabara, became the starboy. 

Ken Nnamani: The Man Who Sold His Conscience

 By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

Kenechukwu (Ken) Nnamani, trustee of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), and leader of the party in South-East Nigeria is about to embark on a book tour with a story about how he, as Senate President in 2006, stood between a rampant President Olusegun Obasanjo and a constitutionally impermissible Third Term.

                   *Ken Nnamani (2nd left) greets President Buhari 

His book is impressively titled Standing Strong. The story would ordinarily be a bestseller if its release was not timed to coincide with the Anambra State governorship election in which Ken Nnamani leads the charge on behalf of Andy Uba, the candidate of the APC, who was coincidentally Obasanjo’s bag-man for Third Term. What Ken seeks to do is plainly grubby and disreputable and he needs to be told so in clear terms.

From Buhari To Adeosun: The Ethical Question

By Sufuyan Ojeifo

The resolution of three episodes of corruption between 1999 and 2005 in the federal legislature and the executive arm of government under the presidency of Olusegun Obasanjo had initially indicated the seeming gravitas of that administration.  But, to be sure, it was not Obasanjo’s persona or the magnitude of his philosophical swagger that gave fillip to the seriousness attached to the anti-corruption actions, which fatally extinguished the luminous epochs of some politicians and public office holders at the time.

*Kemi Adeosun 

The soberness, in fact, derived from the interplay of the unfortunate tomfoolery in government and the collective appreciation as well as interrogation by Nigerians of the universal concepts of good and bad or right and wrong that defined public perception of governmental interactions in the ecology of the nation’s prevalent cloak-and-dagger politics. The whiff of that political correctness had conferred on the administration a false garb of propriety in official conducts and public finance management.