Ismail Omipidan
Former Ogun State governor and chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Olusegun Osoba, has revealed how former president Olusegun Obasanjo, fooled the Yoruba socio-political group, Afenifere and the defunct Alliance for Democracy (AD) leadership to secure a re-election in 2003.
Osoba, a former managing director of Daily Times, made the revelation in a 341-page memoir, entitled: “Battlelines: Adventures in Journalism and Politics,” published by Diamond Publications Limited, which is due for public presentation on Monday, July 8, as part of activities marking his 80th birthday in Lagos, revealed how Obasanjo agreed to conditions placed before him by the leadership of Afenifere and AD to secure second term and later backed out.
He said among the conditions presented to Obasanjo include: the restructuring of the Nigerian federation, devolution of power, including moving some items from the exclusive to the concurrent list and ensuring fiscal federalism among others.
Obasanjo was said to have agreed to the terms and assured them that he identified with them.
The former governor, who listed several traditional rulers and prominent Yoruba leaders, who were privy to some of the meetings, noted that while they kept to their part of the bargain by not fielding a presidential candidate, Obasanjo betrayed them.
“It was later that we realised that we had been fooled. Obasanjo merely played along with us and ended up deceiving us by telling our leaders what he knew they wanted to hear but which didn’t come from his heart,” Osoba added.
The former governor noted that Obasanjo’s betrayal of AD/Afenifere leaders contributed to the implosion of the party and the Yoruba group at the time.
At the onset of the current democratic dispensation in 1999, the defunct AD took charge of the South West, while the defunct All Peoples Party (APP) was in effective control of nine of the 19 states in the North.
Following the move to impeach Obasanjo which literally hit up the polity in the build up to the 2003 elections, Obasanjo, who was often attacked for lacking a base back home, began subtle move to get the AD to support him during the presidential election, while he would in turn allow them retain their seats as governors.
Laying bare what transpired during the period, Osoba, in chapter 17 of the book, under the heading, ‘Obasanjo, Ogun State, and the 2003 elections’, said: “Apart from the D’Rovan Presidential Electoral College fiasco of Alliance for Democracy (AD) in Ibadan, one other factor that led to the implosion of Afenifere and the AD was the pact we had with (former) president Obasanjo over the 2003 presidential election. Contrary to the impression in some quarters that the AD governors were solely responsible for the support of Obasanjo in the 2003 election, the truth is that it was the collective decision of the Afenifere/AD hierarchy.
“It was the attempt by the House of Representatives under Ghali Umar Na’Abba in August 2002 to impeach Obasanjo that thawed the icy relationship between us and Obasanjo. That created an opportunity for Obasanjo to want to embrace us too. But, we didn’t have a meeting with him on this crisis just to support him. Out of our own volition, we decided that the democratic experiment in the country was too fragile for the kind of shock therapy that Na’Abba and the House of Representatives were planning to apply to it by impeaching Obasanjo. Our party caucus in the National Assembly and the leadership of the party decided to block the attempt at impeachment without any prompting from Obasanjo.”