An interesting development is brewing in Nigeria - again.
Back in late-January 2001, Chief Sunny Odogwu, Kaduna-based multi-millionaire businessman, the Ojise of Asaba (not to be confused with Chief Sonny Okogwu, the Ide Ihaba of Asaba), and brother-in-law to General Ibrahim Babangida dropped a bombshell which has set political tongues in Nigeria and abroad wagging. He alleged the existence of a political power pact (an "executive agreement") between politicians and military known only to a select few, particularly the pioneer chairmen of the three political parties.
The content of the purported secret agreement as he explained it in an interview was to the effect that the nation's political power was to rotate among the three political parties with APP and AD following the current PDP in that order, AND between the South-West, South-East and South-South geo-political zones in that order for the next 12 years, with each doing ONE TERM each. The clincher, according to Okogwu, was that failure to respect the agreement would see the military return to power.
See: 'I Am Not Lying' - Okogwu, Newswatch (Lagos) INTERVIEW March 19, 2001
Everybody - and his mother - has since denied such a pact: VP Atiku, former (?) AD vice-chairman Ayo Adebanjo, Barnabas Gemade (PDP), Alhaji Abdulkadir Ahmed (AD) and Chief George Muoghalu (APP); Director, Defence Information, Brig. Gen. Godwin Ugbo, Lt.-Gen. Victor Malu, Nigeria's Chief of Army Staff and Dr. Olusola Saraki, to mention just a few.
This has been reassuring to a few people, but to others, not so fast: they simply believe that you cannot deny what you were not called to be a party of. You can simply say that you don't know about it, but cannot swear that it does not exist.
The strange thing of course is that President Olusegun Obasanjo has kept mum about it, so has former head of state Abdusalami Abubakar and a few others who could probably know. And of course IBB.
Enter Prof. Omo Omoruyi, one-time Center for Democratic Studies chairman in Nigeria and a one-time close adviser to IBB. Digging into his memory archives, and writing in an article titled: "There was a One-Term Pact: President Obasanjo should tell Nigerians the truth" he expressed no surprise at the Okogwu's disclosure, stating inter-alia:
"GO BACK TO POST EXPRESS OF MARCH 2, 1999.
I wish to refer to a newspaper account credited to one Senator-elect, Alhaji Ibrahim Kura Mohammed of Kano State in the POST EXPRESS of March 2, 1999 that General Obasanjo promised to serve for only one term. And he added the blackmail to the bombshell, in my view, that he would honor his pledge as he did it in 1976"
This (minor?) bombshell of its own appeared as a typical throw-away Omoruyi line, but if true - and noting that this was BARELY FIVE DAYS AFTER THE FEBRUARY 27, 1999 presidential election contest between Obasanjo and Falae - there would be much credence given to such an unsolicited
disclosure.
So I went looking for the reference, and indeed I found it:
Category: Politics
Date of Article: 03/02/99
Topic: Obasanjo is a Democrat, says Mohammed
Author: Bassey Inyang, Kano
[Excerpt:......A SENATOR-elect in Kano State, Alhaji Ibrahim Kura Mohammed has dispelled the rumours that a government headed by General Olusegun Obasanjo would scuttle democracy in Nigeria.
Kura told The Post Express in Kano that the fact that General Obasanjo was backed by some retired Generals would not make his government a military one....read the entire article]
One would therefore like to ask from this rather colorful Senator Kura Mohammed: what did he know, and when did he know it?
So what is my own verdict, reading the tea-leaves?
I believe that this informal pact does exist, because I am convinced that President Obasanjo could not, at the time he agreed to become president at the insistence of his backers so soon after Abacha's gulag, REALLY have had the stomach to be thinking of a second-term of presidency. I strongly believe that he felt that what needed to be done by him for the country could be done in one term and he would clear out for those more ambitious in politics than himself. I do not believe that THEN he had much stomach for re-election politics.
But that was then and this is now. President Obasanjo, seeing the monumental task that he took upon himself, and smelling failure after just a one-term presidency, may now be re-considering his options, and hoping to tear up whatever informal gentleman's agreement that he had back then. As a compromise, I also believe that he is negotiating a new agreement to extend his term by at most two years - hence the move to have forced through a constitutional amendment, to have a five-year or six-year one-term provision made re-troactive to when this present administration started. Strange - but stranger things have happened before in Nigeria!
If that is done to avoid re-election traumas that we had in 1964/65 (leading to the coup in 1966) and 1983 (leading to Buhari's coup in December 1983 that toppled Shagari), it would be merely postponing the evil day. The fact of the matter is that it was not just the RE-ELECTION
of incumbent persons that was the problem, but the RE-ELECTION of incumbent parties. Without electoral reform, and with the existence wide scope for rigging, that problem will not go away with one-term presidencies or governorships.
Stay tuned for further interesting developments.
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