Obasanjo And His Futile Desperate Revisionism
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo came out last w eek in his predictable and readable best to blame the present regime for all the woes besetting this country. In his characteristic best, he furled out as the ostrich he had become since his disastrous feel at governance ended in 2007. As usual, he was self-righteous, sanctimonious and infallible in his heavily jaundiced eyes while Buhari is the latest victim of the bile and malediction that have become his second skin since he was frustrated from his brash, obnoxious quest for perpetuity in power.
Yes, it was Obasanjo at his well known self-righteous best. Buhari is the latest fall guy in his desire for self deification while he (Obasanjo) remains the vintage saint that ran an ecclesiastical regime that transformed Nigeria to heaven on earth. To Obasanjo, his era turned Nigeria to an Eldorado where life was so abundant and every other leader that ruled Nigeria failed. That is a dedicated position to Obasanjo and to him only Mathew, Aremu, Okiliola and Obasanjo deserve positive mention among all those that have ruled Nigeria.
Besides all his huffing and puffing however, Obasanjo is terribly afflicted by a huge pathological shamelessness. This has endowed him with such abject feeling of self delusion that makes him sustain such an ostrich tendency which fuels his annoying penchant to pretend that the egregious failed regime he ran for eight years is the best that Nigeria has ever had. His penchant to pretend that the abhorrent leviathan and grandiose failure he ran for eight godforsaken years is our best as a nation makes him wallow in a borderless haven of self deceit where he enjoys lying to himself to sustain a heavily dented but elephantine ego after he reluctantly vacated power after his third term gambit was roundly trounced. His pretentious tendency to hawk his macabre urn as quintessential governance gives him off as a sly, self-duplicitous troubled soul that is always eager to write his own report card in such flattering fashion that belies his historical failures as president. Obasanjo is a restless soul in a futile search for the flattering verdicts of history; far from the sordid one he earned through his miserable performance in power. Such flattering testimonial could only be given to himself by himself which is why so late in his life, Obasanjo still revels in constantly dancing naked in the public square; in a bid to tell us how wonderfully he performed and how every other leader failed. If Obasanjo isn’t shameless, he would have allowed Nigerians to judge him and not strain his weak muscles to praise and flatter himself as he keeps doing. He would not be trapped so badly in a ditch of revisionism if indeed he performed better than the sordid act he put up for eight years as president.
But in Obasanjo’s laughable desire to play the ostrich and flatter his humbling record lies the relics of his failure, which, try as he does, bear dark imprimaturs on our nation today. Sadly for Obasanjo and his penchant to pretend as if we have forgotten his egregious failures,he left no indelible imprints to support his funny efforts at self-recreation and revisionism. Bad for him. the relics of his humongous failure still trail us. Perhaps, one such reminder of his failure is the fact that the giant billboards he placed on Lagos-Ibadan expressway while the road decayed out of use, are still standing today, as Buhari is completing the rehabilitation of that road. Sad for Obasanjo and his desperate attempts at revisionism, Obasanjo, in eight whole years, left no achievement that survived his macabre era, to sustain his mischievous efforts. Faced with such humiliating record, the resort to self-glorification, sanctimonious flattery and acidic condemnation of every other leader apart from himself through his puerile letters has become a fad Obasanjo employs to re-write his messy records.
Obasanjo is afflicted by such self narcissism that he sees the world solely hinged on himself and himself alone. He sees success solely from the warped prism of his bloated and flattered self and was wont to poke this pejorative viewpoints on every one. He is obsessed with that annoying petulance to self-promote and self-advertise himself despite the popular sentiment that greatly disfavours this futile effort.
Beyond all these obtrusive nuance however, Obasanjo knows that he is viewed by majority of Nigerians in very negative lights in terms of achievement in governance. Obasanjo pretends he commands the moral high ground when he is an archetypal moral destitute. He feigns ignorance that he commands no political relevance as over and over again, he has failed to muster credible political following even in his homestead. It is an egregious shame that despite all his pretensions of controlling the political grid of the nation, Obasanjo had failed woefully, over and over again, to win his polling unit in almost every election in the country he annoyingly ruffles with his incurable political meddlesomeness. Obasanjo knows that his endorsement for any candidate amounts to practically no political value yet he continues to embarrass himself with noisy, worthless political endorsement when he should have maintained a stoic, mature political mien that befits the high office he once occupied. His political dereliction was so bad that he even lost a. chieftaincy election in his Owu village. His political restlessness has continued to expose the fact that he is a lonely, desolate political invalid yet he lacks the maturity to maintain the dignified neutrality expected of any person that had occupied the presidency of Nigeria.
Obasanjo’s abject record as Nigerian President still looms in the fact that despite his desperate efforts to flatter his embarrassing record as president, no credible landmark or project survived his disastrous and woe-ridden era. I won’t devote this space to dwell on Obasanjo’s terrible record but the fact remains that Obasanjo set the tone for the downward spiral the country experienced in the ruinous 16 years PDP rule of the country. Obasanjo was the ignoble author of the PDP disastrous urn that ruined Nigeria even in the face of monumental oil windfall. The ostrich he is, he jumped the PDP ship when it became obvious to him that PDP was headed for the rocks! But he scripted the disastrous template the flattened the country and trapped its political, economic and social sectors in cyclical crisis, which Buhari is frontally dealing with.
But in Obasanjo’s many letters that tow one single and predictable course of flattering and white-wash his woe-ridden record and damning every other leader, lies a troubled soul that is riled by his damned place in Nigerian history. Truth is that even as Obasanjo freely lies to himself on his record in office, he is so worried and troubled that nothing supports his self-propelled ego trip. He fears, each passing day, that he hasn’t done enough to reverse the dawdy verdict Nigerians have of his regime so his latest posturing is certainly not going to be his last. Obasanjo will keep struggling to flatter himself and alter the real verdict of Nigerians on his regime. But Obasanjo is struggling in vain. He is wasting his efforts because the verdict of Nigerians was written and sealed between 1999 and 2007 when his disastrous era lasted. He is merely trying to bolt the stable after the horse had long escaped. No letter, no epistle, no revisionism can alter the fact that Obasanjo ran a regime that deepened the rot in Nigeria and that Obasanjo left a record of woes, decay and rot from which Nigeria, under Buhari is trying to recover. He will live with that verdict, which will trail him for ever despite his desperate but futile efforts at revisionism.
Peter Claver Oparah
Ikeja, Lagos.
