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Author: Dimgba Igwe
Posted to the web: 7/8/2005 5:44:31 AM

'You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.' That is lesson six in Collin Powel’s Leadership Primer condensed from his autobiography, My American Journey, by Professor Oren Harari into another book, The Leadership Secrets of Colin Powell.In Powell’s book, the above lesson is intended to stimulate positive initiative in potential leaders at different levels and spheres—corporate, politics, military and what-have-you. But the Nigerian political actors appear to have twisted the lesson into a licence. You can do anything you like, as long as you can try. Those who are promoting either the extension of President Obasanjo’s tenure by two years or asking him to do another term of six years which may ultimately, logically, snowball into a Robert Mugabe model of life presidency, appears to have been schooled in the perverted version of this leadership precept. If at all they still read any edifying books in spite of their purported learning, and in spite of their political chicaneries, then they had read Powell’s book upside down and learnt the wrong lessons. But as always, they are bad Nigerians who deserve all the invectives on their head.What is amazing is that there are always such bad Nigerians capable of dredging up ultimate mischief to truncate our political process at various milestones of the nation. And, as an Igbo, it is a matter of great lamentation that whenever they need a bad guy to do a dirty job, they always turn to the East for a bad specie of our noble race. Perhaps, it is such conspiracy that throws up the Nzeribes of Association for Better Nigeria fame, the Daniel Kanu of YEAA fame and now the new kid on the bloc, Greg Mbadiwe. Let’s back up a little into the memory lane. Our journey through political perfidy did not start with the regime of Ibrahim Babangida, but he elevated it into a high art which inexorably led to the June 12 disaster. Today, neither the nation nor Babangida, despite all his bold face and grandstanding, is any better for it.Yet, despite the lesson of Babangida’s folly in bold prints, Sani Abacha got it into his slow head, or as some argued, was talked into believing that he has conquered Nigeria and was then the only solution to Nigeria’s problems and without him, the nation was doomed. The surprise was that even the West bought this fallacy and ran with it both in their media and official orthodoxy. But that was until the witches Abacha served so faithfully did him in with those luscious apples. The lesson of the apple metaphor is that in a country of 130 million with many first class brains in different areas, it is the height of presumptuous folly for anybody to think of himself or herself as indispensable. In fact, it has become a received wisdom that whomsoever the gods want to destroy, they first convince that they are indispensable! You would have thought that after IBB and Abacha, nobody would be foolish enough to hawk or drink from this witches’ brew that lures incumbents into grandiose dream of indispensability and eternal power. But man is fickle, foolish and greedy. And the witches know this, hence we easily fall back into the selfsame trap and cycles of futility. But, at the weekend, for the first time, President Olusegun Obasanjo finally said what we have been arching our ears, waiting to hear from the horses’ mouth: He won’t run again for presidency in year 2007 or seek for an extension of his tenure by another two years to enable him complete the beautiful reforms he has started. As you know, he spent six years planning for these reforms and with the next two years, beginning the implementation. Which explains why, in the view of his political apologists, two years would be too short to finish the good work he has started. So, give him another six years or at the least, extend his tenure by two years.If you don’t know, that by the way, is an argument being hawked in the media by the son of the late Igbo political icon, Dr. K.O. Mbadiwe, a man of timber and caliber, the caterpillar of Nigerian politics. Greg Mbadiwe, Obasanjo’s new political magician, is a former Ambassador to Congo—where else would you send an illustrious Igbo political whizkid? He is currently one of the president’s nominees to the national political conference, where like the fabled and infamous Daniel Kanu, he is representing Nigerian youths! Poor youths! So, one day, from the blues, we are asked to believe, an angel whispered into his ears that President Obasanjo is the messiah Nigeria has been waiting for. Therefore, it would amount to an ultimate political tragedy if after the expiration of his second tenure in 2007, Obasanjo retires to his highly lucrative Ota farm, now a conglomerate of nationwide farms spanning various geopolitical zones of this country, to tend to his chickens, eggs, piggeries, fishes and seedlings, I hope. Nigeria’s destiny, it has been written in the holy writ, is tied to the pulse, breath and heartbeat of this one man, forget the 130 million others. Nigeria without an Obasanjo is dead, period.With a heart bursting in patriotic zest, the great Mbadiwe’s son, Greg conjured a solution: Allow Obasanjo to do another six years or at the very worst, extend his tenure by another two years. Out of the manifold grace of his good heart, bless him, Greg extends the same gesture to all the governors—evidence that his advocacy is not motivated by selfish considerations! Greg, we must understand, is merely a visible symbol of vicious and greedy masquerades, behind the scene, orchestrating the tune for the errand boy to dance. Greg is ultimately a metaphor for these power merchants who are in it for self-aggrandisement—in cash and kind.Here is the logic, according to the great Greg Mbadiwe: 'What we are saying is that it is a six-year tenure for the governors and six-year tenure for the President. One of our problems is how the presidency would go round every part of the country. Everybody wants his or her area to have this power. So, if it is a six-year tenure, it will make it faster for this power to move around the various components of this country.'As usual, in this game of sophistry according Mbadiwe, only an Obasanjo can kick-start the new constitution, even though one has not even been fashioned by the confab. Perhaps, Greg is speaking faster than the script he is supposed to act in. Even if we will not endorse a full stretch of another six years for Obasanjo, the gracious Greg has a solution obviously brewed from the mind of a political genius: 'First of all, we have to accept a six-year tenure. When we do, the President may decide okay, you take first slot but we can add two years to the four-year tenure of his second term and make it six, so that we would know that the programme has taken off in earnest.'Apparently, the only time a political process takes off in earnest is when President Obasanjo kick-starts it! In other words, the new political contraption is designed to unravel if a South-East or a South-South candidate for that matter kick-starts it, seeing that these zones have been robbed of the political leadership of this country all these years. What Greg is saying is that twelve years of an Obasanjo in the nation’s political leadership is not enough for any sane person to spend the rest of his days thanking God for His mercies. Pray, is it just a coincidence or a well-choreographed orchestra, that Greg is coming with this brilliant idea at the same time a new draft constitution now owned up by the President, thank God, was sneaked into the secretariat of the political confab, also advocating a six-year presidential tenure?I sincerely sympathise with the frustration of Mr. President when it seems that no matter how much he denies interest in the third term agenda, people seem to believe the worst of him. For a leader of the greatest nation in Africa and a highly respected international statesman, it must be frustrating that your subjects don’t believe your words. Does that say something about absence of trust which is the most vital ingredient of a leadership contract? Or that at times, what you are doing is so loud that we cannot hear what you are saying? As the headlines quoted the President as saying, all the talks about third time for him are annoying. But the President is exactly correct. If he is annoyed by the third term talk, he can imagine that we are boiling when his appointee, a Greg Mbadiwe and other political jobbers, try to push such nonsense down our throat in the name of freedom of speech. Somebody should warn them to stop such provocations! Is it possible such individuals are called to order to stop embarrassing the president? In any case, can an Obasanjo pull through a third term or an extension of term as some hirelings are flying about? The lessons of Ibrahim Babangida’s failures despite his dribblings and N40 billion down the drain in transition programme scream louder than voice that such an ambition is merely a pipedream that fades like the yawning of a hungry man. The fate of Sani Abacha, despite his brutality and intimidating armada deployed against opponents of his self-succession bid confirms the futility of such a vaulting ambition. In the end, it is for man to dream dreams and for God to bring them to pass or naught.