18th October, 2017
By Nelson Ekujumi
Can anyone decipher the problem with the medulla oblanganta of our politicians? A former President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria who had the esteemed honour of a double 4 years term of 8 years in all in office, courtesy of the platform of your party, tore to shreds his membership card in the glare of the whole world of which some persons who witnessed the act, were not even aware of when he became a member, yet you went to beg the same man privately to return to your party? What manner of short memories and lack of a sense of history people are these?
Don’t these people have any shame and sense of history? It was late Chief MKO Abiola who said in the days of the struggle to reclaim the peoples mandate that when same Chief Olusegun Obasanjo led a retinue of 32 traditional rulers at the prodding of late Maximum ruler, General Sani Abacha to come and plead with him in detention to forgo the June 12, 1993 Presidential mandate, according to late Chief MKO Abiola, he told Chief Olusegun Obasanjo off in unspeakable terms that he and his retinue of traditional rulers had to flee with their legs in between their tails.
Late Chief MKO Abiola said, he asked chief Olusegun Obasanjo and his team of traditional rulers about the wisdom of unclothing someone in public, only to clothe him in the privacy of the room? They had no answer.
According to Chief MKO Abiola, he was angry and felt betrayed that he asked them that, how can Nigerians vote in the sun and in the rain, only for some people to come and be begging him to trade off a public mandate, privately. As far as he is concerned, the June 12 1993 Presidential election mandate doesn’t belong to him as an individual, but to the Nigerian people of which, he is just a mere custodian?
Chief MKO Abiola said, he told Chief Olusegun Obasanjo and his team that the bases on which he will be ready to discuss any issue about the June 12 1993 mandate are the following:
1. He must be released unconditionally from detention.
2. Discussion about the mandate must be made a public affair and not a private one, since it was procured publicly.
3. That other than the Nigerian people saying so, only death will make him surrender the mandate.
Chief Olusegun Obasanjo and his team having met a brick wall in the resoluteness of a man whom they expected his spirit to have been broken by long period of solitary and harrowing confinement in the gulag, went home disappointed that their job of helping to scuttle the June 12 1993 mandate had failed.
One suspects that the anger of that failed project must have infuriated Chief Olusegun Obasanjo and propelled him to make that infamous Harare Zimbabwe declaration of 1994 that “MKO Abiola is not the Messiah we are waiting for”.
Well, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo for that infamous statement received serious tongue lashing from patriotic Nigerians and groups including yours sincerely and one remembers succinctly an article about his alledged treacherous way of life written by no other than our own Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, titled, “What manner of man” which was an intellectual masterpiece on a man who assumes that he is God, of which he cannot and will never be.
Well, the rest as they say is history, but the lessons which one had hoped our political class would have learnt about life and man is that, only those who refuse to learn from history, end up being consumed by history and that has again played out in the recent fiasco of a private visit to lure OBJ back to PDP by the Ahmed Makarfi committee.
A word is enough for the wise.