More details have emerged from the book, Against the Run of Play, written by Mr. Segun Adeniyi, Chairman of the Editorial Board of ThisDay Newspapers as to what transpired between former Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan in the build up to the 2015 general elections.
It was revealed that Baba as Obasanjo is fondly called disclosed why he opposed the re-election of Jonathan.
The book, an account of what happened in the 2015 presidential election, is due for public presentation in Lagos on Friday.
The relationship between the former presidents, noted the author, had soured long before the election. Mr. Jonathan, whose political rise is widely credited to Mr. Obasanjo’s influence, had sought to make up with his presumed benefactor and keep him on his side for re-election. He arranged for a meeting with Mr. Obasanjo in his Abeokuta home.
Before leaving for the Ogun State leg of his campaign in January 2015 wrote the author, Mr. Jonathan had concluded plans to visit Mr. Obasanjo, who had agreed to meet him.
Mr. Obasanjo, however, gave a condition: Jonathan must come along with someone of sufficient credibility to act as a witness at the meeting. Mr. Jonathan agreed to bring one along.
He approached the hugely influential General Overseer (GO) of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Pastor EA Adeboye, who accepted to play the role of a witness.
But on the evening of 12 January 2015, the agreed date of the meeting scheduled for Mr. Obasanjo’s Hilltop residence in Abeokuta, Pastor Adeboye arrived in the company of Bishop David Oyedepo of Winners Chapel.
“It was only Pastor Adeboye that Jonathan told me was coming with him, but Bishop Oyedepo is a man I also know very well, so I had no problem with his presence at the meeting,” Mr. Obasanjo was quoted as saying.
The meeting, stated the author, was an unpleasant one for Mr. Jonathan, a man Mr. Obasanjo had assisted to become Vice President and then President. Mr. Obasanjo frontally told Mr. Jonathan that he was not going to support his re-election bid, saying he considered his performance as president sub-par and that he had acted less than honorably for reneging on the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) zoning arrangement, which prescribed that it was the turn of the North to produce the president.
“I told him in the presence of his witness that I was not going to support him for a second-term and I gave my reasons. Aside the issue of zoning on which he was reneging, his stewardship up to that point had also shown very clearly that he was not up to the job,” Obasanjo reportedly said to the author in December 2016.
Mr. Obasanjo, according to the author, claimed to have nothing personal against Mr. Jonathan, explaining that his disagreement with him was based on certain principles on which he was not prepared to compromise.
“My decision was based on what would be for the good of Nigeria and since I didn’t consider Jonathan god enough, I told him to his face. What would I be afraid of?” asked Obasanjo.
The outcome of the meeting was a huge blow to Mr. Jonathan, who was initially billed to be on the ballot in February 2015 before the eventual postponement of the election. Mr. Jonathan, expectedly, left Abeokuta dejected.
The outcome of the meeting was the culmination of years of disdain, initially muted, with which Mr. Obasanjo held the Jonathan presidency. Signs of his irritation first manifested on 3 April 2012, when he resigned his position as chairman of PDP Board of Trustees.
Two months later, he delivered a wounding assessment of the Jonathan’s administration’s capacity to confront corruption.
On 15 June 2012, at a debate organized by the club De Madrid (an independent, non-profit organization comprising 80 former democratic presidents and prime ministers from fifty-six countries) in Geneva, Switzerland, Mr. Obasanjo laid into the Jonathan administration with full force.
“I haven’t seen that will of persistency and consistency in Nigeria because the people that are involved in corruption, they are strongly entrenched and unless you are ready to confront them at the point of even giving your life for it, then you will give in, that is the end of it,” he told BBC
Ritula Shah, moderator of the debate. Clever sniping by an accomplished verbal sniper. From then on, Mr. Jonathan was a sitting duck.
A year later, Mr. Obasanjo abandoned sniping for an all-out shootout. His first major target was the oil pipelines protection initiative of the Jonathan administration.
“This morning, on my way from Abeokuta by road, I was listening to the radio. I heard that the Jonathan administration said that they are going to set up an agency for pipeline protection. Now, what are the police there for? What are all the security agencies doing? This is another chop-chop,” Mr. Obasanjo said in Abuja during a thanksgiving ceremony to mark the 50th birthday of Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, a former Minister of Education.
He sustained his attack with details of how he thought the Jonathan administration was not interested in accountability, noting that its handling of the Boko Haram insurgency indicated that if allowed to continue in power, Mr. Jonathan could fatally damage the country.
“Jonathan and his people turned Boko Haram into an industry for making money. Rather than seek for a solution, Boko Haram became an ATM machine for taking money out of the treasury. Take the issue of the Chibok tragedy. If he had acted within the first 48 hours, they would have found most of the girls. The CAN (Christian Association of Nigeria) Chairman of the local chapter in Chibok was here to see me and he explained how they were helpless with no reaction from the authorities for several days,” the book quoted Mr. Obasanjo as saying.
The author noted that Mr. Obasanjo had advised early in the life of the Jonathan administration that Jonathan, as president, needed to pay more attention to the Boko Haram insurgency, a counsel that was ignored.
In November 2012, the author stated, at a ceremony marking the 40th anniversary on the pulpit of Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, the then CAN President, Obasanjo suggested that the Jonathan administration was mishandling the challenge posed by the insurgency.
“My fear is that when you have a sore and you don’t attend to it early enough, it festers and becomes very bad. Don’t leave a problem that can be bad unattended…if you say you don’t want a strong leader who can have all the characteristic of a leader, including the fear of God, then you have a weak leader and the rest of the problems is yours,” he said at the occasion.
Mr. Obasanjo also accused Mr. Jonathan of clannishness and promotion of a form of Ijaw triumphalism, which he described as “sickening”.
“I once asked him: ‘What is this Ijaw thing all about? Can the Ijaw people make you president?’ I remember when he granted pardon to Alamieyeseigha (Diepriye, the former governor of Bayelsa State convicted for corruption) and it became an international embarrassment. I also asked him: ‘Why did you do it?’ He started by offering a lame excuse that it was a Council of State decision before I reminded him that Council of State was merely advisory and that the decision was his. After a while, he said if I was at the meeting, he probably would have acted differently because nobody opposed him on what he could do to address the problem. But it was either because he didn’t have the courage to broach the issue with Alamieyeseigha or he didn’t think it was important. he did nothing afterward,” Adeniyi reported Obasanjo as saying.
The author also noted that the public conduct of some Ijaw men such as ex-militant, Mujahid Dakubo-Asari, and a former Federal Commissioner for Information, Chief Edwin Clark damaged the image of Jonathan and that of his administration.
Mr. Adeniyi observed that the fact that Mr. Jonathan did not restrain them created the impression that he supported what they were saying and doing. For instance, in May 2013, recalls Adeniyi, Dakubo-Asari said Niger Delta militants would throw the country into chaos if Mr. Jonathan was not re-elected in 2015. Again, on September 9th, 2013, he declared that Jonathan’s presidential ambition in 2015 was already settled.
“The way things are going, there is no sitting on the fence in the battle before us… All of us will have to be in the ring and fight. 2015 is already a settled matter. Goodluck Jonathan would be president in 2015,” Dakubo-Asari declared.
A few days later, Chief Clark did the same, saying Jonathan would remain President in 2015 because it was not yet the turn of the North.
“In the Constitution of Nigeria, every president has two elections to be contested. (Alhaji Shehu) Shagari did it in1979 and 1983. In 1999, (Chief Olusegun) Obasanjo did it and 2003. In 2007, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua of blessed memory did it and if he had remained alive, he would have done it again in 2011. So, Jonathan has the right to contest again. This is an incumbent that has not done a second-term. It is not yet the turn of northerners. They have the right to contest as Nigerians. Yes, but in other parties,” said Chief Clark.
At the same occasion, the late Alamieyeseigha bragged: “Aso Rock is not vacant. The northern agitators will all, at the appropriate time, join the moving train. They may have their opinion, but I can assure you that President |Jonathan will remain as President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria come 2015.