It bears repeating that Intervention is still on a publishing holiday and will only make one concession or the other once a while till further notice. It is therefore still not receiving materials for publication, please.
Only a few days back was Intervention temporarily opened to publish a review of an interesting and new work by Mallam Ibrahim Muazzam. It was a concession to a philosopher.
Today, it is being temporarily opened again to, essentially, publish a piece on a political theorist, Prof Sam Egite Oyovbaire. Now, if concession to Muazzam was for philosophising, what is the basis in the case of Oyovbaire?
Prof Sam Oyovbaire
First and foremost, NPSA President, Prof Hassan Saliu’s practice of writing on notable political scientists on this platform made Intervention aware it is Prof Oyovbaire’s moment and a good moment to bring up the Oyovbaire entry on Obasanjo, a piece that has been on the card as one contemplated the similarity of Oyovbaire and the late Dr Ibrahim Tahir’s take on Obasanjo.
Two, Oyovbaire taught Muazzam at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. So, Oyovbaire is drawn into whatever Muazzam became, one way or the other.
But no less inviting of a concession to Oyovbaire as Oyovbaire is a statement he made. Intervention cannot provide a link to the statement now because the internet culture hadn’t developed then. It was Oyovbaire who said that if he were still a university teacher, he would have certainly convinced one of his PhD students to make Chief Olusegun Obasanjo the subject of his/her doctoral thesis.
The import of that remark might not have sunk in a traumatised nation but it was a crucial, patriotic problematisation because Nigeria does have a rarely acknowledged problem of lack of a hegemonic national sense of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s subjectivity.
For sure, Obasanjo is not the only living former president of Nigeria. General Gowon is very much around. Murtala is not physically here but very much active in popular memory.
But there is no such complexity around General Gowon, for instance. He found himself a war leader, framed the war correctly as a brotherly disagreement, a frame game with even greater significance today. When the war was over, he was ready with a peace paradigm as well as a framework for national development from a transformative gaze. Murtala is similarly not complex. He brought unparalleled speed and brilliance to exercise of power. Unique to him is the tradition of self-cleansing as a requirement for power. Not surprisingly, he could implant himself in popular memory within just six months of being in the saddle.
Obasanjo, on the contrary, is so complicated a subject. There is no debate about it that Obasanjo has so many good works to his credit but people associate him with too many puzzling attributes. The puzzles are such that disentangling them by going beyond anybody’s presuppositions and analytically situating Obasanjo is a challenge which has not been frontally acknowledged, much less addressed. Yet, it is a challenge which continuing failure to address denies Nigeria a very important point of entry into resolving the leadership question, if that question can still be resolved at this stage.
The late Ibrahim Tahir aka Talban Bauchi
Oyovbaire’s statement achieves the status of a scholarly score when it is noted that it is also the position of the late Ibrahim Tahir who, unaware of Oyovbaire’s, also said he wished he still had the energy, he would have personally undertaken Obasanjo’s biography. He was speaking in a mid-2006 interview with this reporter, an interview which has been republished more than five times, with the portion on Obasanjo intact.
Prof Isawa Elaigwu has also said something about the residual militarism and messianic complex that he sees to be acting as Obasanjo’s driving force. It is a slightly more peppery version of what Oyovbaire and Tahir were speaking to, none of whom is, however, about anything less than a book worth its name – a critical text to crack open Obasanjo as a case study in agency. Critical Discourse Studies has made agency a derivative of discourse unlike before when it resided in the big debate over Structure-Agency. Still, an agency approach to unbundling of Obasanjo can yield a lot from a creative re-interpretation of the subject, the one individual who straddles paradoxes as vast as the sample below, selected from the most commonly noted of such puzzles in both popular and informed circles:
(1) Nigeria has been a story in costly nation building at every juncture. Obasanjo has been a key actor in each juncture and even junctions so far, surviving it all.
(2) He did not just survive every crucial and dangerous moment, he also became the hero in each of them, be it the civil war, handing over to civilians in 1979, the Abacha juncture or the return of ‘democracy’ in 1999 under his watch
(3) Obasanjo remains the only Nigerian leader who has so successfully transformed his first time in office into an investment on the world stage. None has been able to do that on the scale he has.
(4) Obasanjo remains the Chief Superintendent of state interventionism in Nigeria as well as its dismantling. How might the diverse variables involved in this process be accounted for: ideological blindness, agency, institutions, imperialism, ethno-regionalism?
(5) A vastly popular view especially in informed circles outside Nigeria but even so within is that Nigeria has not had a leader befitting it since 1999. Alison Ayida has ever associated himself with a longer version of this position. Nobody more than himself is in a position to know. But Obasanjo has left no one in doubt that he handled things so expertly and differently between 1999 and 2007. Is this all messianism at work or a deeper disease?
(7) Obasanjo remains the only Nigerian leader who does not observe the protocol of criticizing his successors only through the back channel rather than doing so openly and very harshly. Abacha checkmated him up to a point but even Abacha himself was checkmated
(7) Only Obasanjo and Muhammadu Buhari have ruled the country twice. While Buhari ruined whatever was left of his own share of messianism in his 2nd coming to power, Obasanjo keeps enhancing his own.
(8) A week or so ago, Obasanjo took on the Tinubu Presidency, asserting the fact of state failure. For sure, Nigeria is completely crippled and reduced to a joke. There is no debate about that, given the clear absent presence of the Nigerian State in the field of safety, especially the complete fall of the rural areas to non-descript elements and the overall state of siege enveloping the country, it is to Obasanjo more than to Tinubu that more serious observers attribute the state collapse.
(9) Obasanjo is categorically held to be the most single important condition of possibility for the siege that has enveloped the country in all other realms, be it in corruption as in the sale of NITEL, electoral malfeasance and even the sort of successors that followed Obasanjo, almost all of whom he canvassed for.
(10) While Asian Tiger leaders were ridiculing and rebuffing the IMF and World Bank openly and throwing their faulty formula back at them, Obasanjo was preaching to his aides of the need never to confront the IMF/World Bank beyond cleverly refusing to do some of the things they insist upon.
(11) Obasanjo is broadly perceived to be servile to his friends in the West in whom he is well located but there are few African leaders who can berate the West or Western leaders as openly as Obasanjo does. Obasanjo’s tactic of berating the West, often very harshly, must suggest that he is nobody’s agent. The puzzle from this is why he endorsed/re-enforced the so-called market reform for a pre-industrial economy such as Nigeria when he could have sought and been granted rooms for manoeuvres and save himself from becoming an accomplish to Nigeria’s collapse. There is a huge paradox here, given that not a single example of an IMF/World Bank led success story in social transformation can be cited in history, something Obasanjo is about the only Nigerian leader who knew enough of.
(12) To the extent that there can be no rigging if a sitting president puts his foot down, Obasanjo is broadly implicated in the legacy of rigging that define the Fourth Republic. What people say is that all his successors learnt their rigging tricks from what was allowed under his watch.
(13) There are many people in this country who believe that Nigeria cannot collapse formally as long as Obasanjo remains alive
(14) Studying Obasanjo is simultaneously studying elite consensus and fragmentation since 1964, meaning a study of almost every other major players in Nigeria since independence. Some people wonder whether intelligence sources told Obasanjo that what would follow him would be so terrible for Nigeria and that he should experiment with self-succession just as others wonder if Obasanjo entertained the desire for paramount rulership or why were there no visible successors groomed by him at the time the Third Term project was dismissed. But how did he end up handpicking a conscious socialist as his successor? Accident of history or circuitous rebound?
(15) Obasanjo has once said that Apartheid could be dismantled using juju. At the time he made the statement, it sounded somehow. Today, that statement now has approval and coverage in the wake of the powerful campaign for epistemic justice. After all, what are the ‘qualitative research techniques’ that researchers are jumping about in excitement if not juju in epistemic terms?
What the above sample of the puzzles around, about and beyond Obasanjo establish is Obasanjo complexity as a theme in Nigerian politics. And the challenge of unpacking him, an assignment that neither those who love and adore him nor those who hate him are fit to undertake. Rather, it is a strictly scholarly assignment to be undertaken by the nation’s best and the brightest. Only such a set can locate the core of a signifier, contrary to Ferdinand de Saussure’s breakthrough. It is a national assignment only to the extent that no scholarship can be possible without the assistance of non-scholarly actors and even factors.
At the end of the day, this package goes beyond Prof Oyovbaire’s moment to Prof Gambari and an African trip report, all three of the items bearing the ABU, Zaria stamp. But death quickly compels us to move to the University of Calabar to mourn Dr. Bene Madunagu before returning to the North where a Northern governor is having a human rights crease with a citizen and we close this package with a mention of Comrade Abdulkadir Isa’s 70th birthday. A young man has obviously failed to produce a birthday synopsis on the comrade at press time!
The rest of the year seems to have been appropriated by the 70 – year old amongst us, beginning from Prof Jibrin Ibrahim’s 70th anniversary on December 2nd, 2024. The number of invitations to that effect is simply fascinating! Wa oh!
