General Olusegun Obasanjo, erstwhile president, is so predictable, one could almost set a watch by it! The country goes through crises phenomena; people and governments are looking for the most suitable solutions, the man smells an opportunity, and he strikes! Obasanjo has done the same thing over and over, that his predictability is one that all of us have become familiar with.
He went for the Shagari administration, when Nigerians began to complain about the economic situation; took the Babangida military regime to the cleaners in the days of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP); he did same to the Abacha regime, but ended up in jail, for the crime of accessory to treason; he hand-picked the late President Umaru Yar’Adua, but was shocked to find that the man was not going to be a Quisling; and the last time he expressed his messianic delusion, was against his ‘boy’, President Goodluck Jonathan, in the lead to the 2015 elections.

There are basic threads running through the actions of the former military ruler. Obasanjo has messianic delusions! In his troubled soul, there cannot be any leader of the Nigerian state greater than himself. He is the beginning and the end of all that is good about leadership here; the ultimate point of embarkation and the terminus! This complex is related to several factors that animate the soul of the man. His years in power were filled with controversies. These range from the privatization policy to the massive issues of corruption exemplified by the wastage of $16billion in power projects that yielded wattages of talk but no electricity. It was ex-president that used state power to enter ‘Nolle Prosequi’, in the corruption charges against his cousin, Permanent Secretary Makanjuola, in the Ministry of Defence, who had pilfered money and was exposed by General TY Danjuma!

Obasanjo’s greatest fear is to be exposed for his duplicity in corruption cases. So the first thing he does is to ensure that he burrows permanently inside the entrails of the nation’s power complex; he must be the main manipulator of the process, and thus securing the vintage place to shield himself from scrutiny. That explains why in every government, he makes a deliberate show of his entrances and exits in the seat of power; he adroitly exploits the photo-ops and drops hints about his strategic value to the governance structures in place in the country.
Obasanjo exploits that proximity at two levels. First, he offers the impression of care about the state of the administration and the country; and he then buys extra time to deepen forgetfulness in the nation’s political and social spaces. And aren’t we a very forgetful lot?

Obasanjo’s most recent outing last week surprises no right-thinking citizen. It was a perfidious, but not surprising effort to exploit another moment of national crisis. There are controversies around killings in clashes between nomads and sedentary farming communities; there is an increasing polarization of the country, as we descend into the season of politics; and there are determined efforts by the political forces that lost out in 2015. They have been out of the loop of power for a few years; have resided in political wilderness since, but are determined to find newer routes to access public money-access to which has been blocked by TSA. They are fighting back furiously and these forces have substantial interest in media and in social media. 2018 offers the most serious preparatory point for an onslaught on the Buhari administration. But these forces suffer a credibility issue with the Nigerian people, who have not forgotten what they made of power in the previous 16 years, before they lost it in 2015!

So when Obasanjo spoke glibly from both sides of his mouth, that “I will consider no sacrifice too great for the good of Nigeria at any time”. The discerning Nigerian would be obliged to ask where the evidence was of that pledge of sacrifice, considering what mess he made of the eight years that he administered a civilian regime
It is the consequences of his actions and inactions that have collectively haunted every administration since his Third Term Agenda was defeated in parliament.
The former general is behaving true to type. He is desperately exploiting a moment of national pains to claim a bona fide of patriotism. And as is his wont, he also wants to damage the credibility of the government of the day, to further his own personal agenda. He ranged over several issues but in the long run, the agenda was very personal even when clothed in the garment of patriotism.
General Obasanjo fancies himself as the best thing that happened to Nigeria. We can walk the shores of hindsight, to the days when sidekicks like Chief Olabode George described him as the ‘architect of modern Nigeria’!

The verbiage might be plentiful and the times might seem opportune for him to be perfidious as usual, but the sense we have is that President Muhammadu Buhari will not be distracted!
There is too much work to do to fix the Nigeria that Obasanjo and his PDP destroyed! It was the Obasanjo era’s PDP, which the unforgettable Chief Sunday Awoniyi described so brilliantly as ‘a basket of scorpions stinging themselves to death’!
Olusegun Obasanjo cannot accept that Nigeria has moved on.

By striking at this moment in our national history, he hopes to take advantage of adversity to pursue a new political project. The platform that he eloquently describes today which unfortunately, he refused to provide a basis for its emergence when he ruled the roost for eight years. And typically of Obasanjo, he has stoutly refused to take any responsibility for the rot that he claims afflicts Nigeria. Yet for eight years, he had all the opportunity to do better than the personal enrichment and rogue politics that defined his era. It is the consequences of Obasanjo’s failures that government and Nigeria have continued to deal with in the present.