Buhari Takes The Heat Off Jonathan, Trains His Guns On Obasanjo
The Oasis Reporters
May 23, 2018
BOTTOM LEFT: Jonathan, Buhari.
Some temporary respite from everyday sledging by the Buhari camp may have come the way of Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria’s former president who handed over to Muhammadu Buhari, the current president. Hitherto, it was a presidency of ‘blame Jonathan everyday’ while the Buhari government sat still, took six months to appoint a cabinet and tactlessly plunged the economy into an unprecedented recession.
Tact prevented Jonathan from responding to all the slur on his dignity and legacy. Everyone feared the combustible nature of a former military dictator, now turned civilian democratic president.
Anger and anxiety over the trenchant and unrelenting criticism targeted at him ahead of the forthcoming election year billed for the first quarter of 2019 has propelled President Muhammadu to jettison the army’s Espirit d’corp, such that he is throwing open garbs at his former boss, Olusegun Obasanjo under whom he served as Petroleum Commissioner and NNPC managing director.
Obasanjo later became Nigeria’s democratically elected president for eight years starting from May 29, 1999.
President Muhammadu Buhari praised late military dictator Sani Abacha for his work in building infrastructure. Under Abacha who was his subordinate in the army, Buhari was appointed the Presidential Task Force chairman to intervene nn infrastructural deficit.
Curiously, Buhari neglects to mention his uninspiring 20 month stint as Nigeria’s military dictator. It was noted for cancelling the Lagos metro line project, jailing Musical icon, Fela Anikulapo Kuti who was travelling to London for a musical concert that would have brought the much needed hundreds of thousands of foreign currency into the economy. It was said that the military strongman simply wanted to deal with Fela, once and for all. Nigeria lost, over the ego trip of two avowed antagonists of each other.
The current spat between Buhari and Obasanjo is over the lead by the latter to see that Buhari loses his reelection bid. Obasanjo has recently met with Afenifere, the pan Yoruba socio – cultural organisation to form a Yoruba resistance against Buhari, the northern Fulani man the Tinubu Yoruba faction helped to bring to power to spite the oil rich south south region and hope to get their son as vice president while picking fat offerings from the economy largely depended on crude oil earnings.
Their hopes have been dashed so far, and Fulani herdsmen militia are eyeing everyone’s ancestral lands. This is making the Yoruba a bit jittery, so they dread Buhari’s reelection knowing the massacres ongoing in the middle belt, next door to the Yoruba tribe.
Speaking at the villa on Tuesday when he hosted the Buhari Support Organisation (BSO), led by Hameed Ali, Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), Buhari said that regardless of what anyone thinks about Abacha, it must be remembered that subsequent civilian presidents spent billions of naira on infrastructure yet have had little to show for it.
That comment by Buhari is an undisguised garb aimed at former president Olusegun Obasanjo.
Buhari added : “You know the rail was killed and one of the former Heads of State between that time was bragging that he spent more than 15 billion American dollars not Naira on power. Where is the power? Where is the power?”
“I have to repeat what I want public to know here. Some of you may not have heard it. Either there is no power in your place or even in the television, I said and I challenge anybody to check from Europe, Asia and America. Between 1999 and 2014, Nigeria was getting 2.1 million barrels per day at average cost of $100 dollars per barrel,” he said.
“It went up to $143. So Nigeria was earning 2.1 million times 100 times 16 years seven days a week. When we came, it collapsed to $37-38 and it was oscillating between 40 and 54 sometimes. I went to the Governor of Central Bank; thank goodness I did not sack him; he is still there! I went with my cap in my hand but there were no savings, only debt.
“And you know more than I do the condition of the roads and some of them were not repaired since PTF days. No matter what opinion you have about Abacha, I agreed to work with him and the PTF road we did from here to Port Harcourt, to Onitsha, to Benin and so on… On top of other things in the institution, education, medical care and so on.
“You know the rail was killed and one of the former Heads of State between that time was bragging that he spent more than $15 billion, not naira, on power. Where is the power? Where is the power? And now we have to pay the debts and this year and last year’s budgets I took to the National Assembly were the highest in capital projects: more than N1.3 trillion.
“Let anybody come and confront me publicly in the National Assembly. What have they been doing? Some of them have been there for 10 years. What have they been doing? So, really, this country, luckily for me, I said it about eight years [ago] that we have no other country than Nigeria, we should remain here and salvage it together no matter what you have outside.”
In all these, President Muhammadu Buhari did not state what projects he too has started and completed in three years beyond dwelling on past regimes.
In like manner, it must be noted that there is no regime after Obasanjo’s military regime which ended in 1979 that he did not make a spirited attempt to bring down. He wants to be seen as the main builder of modern Nigeria. In recent years, Obasanjo has shown how petty he can be.
