It’s a theatre of the oldies. On one side is a man with a paunchy stature and grey hair and fierce tongue. On the other side is a man with a paunchy stature but without hair but a shifty tongue. One has proclaimed his residency in a departure lounge. On the other side is the fellow who sneers at such a journey because he does not depart from trouble. One is Edwin Clark, the other of course is Olusegun Obasanjo.
The first, Chief E.K Clark, is a nonagenarian with a rebel in his blood while OBJ is, as he claims, an octogenarian with mischief in his eyes. These men fought over oil. But OBJ is the culprit here, trying to play mischief with Niger Delta resources.
The thing with OBJ is that he can say the truth without being truthful. If the constitution says the oil belongs to Nigeria, he forgets to say that if that is true it is because the oil belongs to Niger delta before it belongs to Nigeria. That is the spirit of a republican society, especially one that thrives in a federal state.
But what strikes the essayist is not the debate on hand, which is straightforward. It is the Owu chief’s penchant for war. He is a retired general but he always acts as though he is ducking shrapnel in battlefield trenches. I stated at The Nation’s editorial board last week, even before the Clark battle, that the man has a chip on his shoulders. He did not do well during the civil war, so he is fighting to compensate for his failures and stumbles as a war commander. My comment raised not a few highbrows at the meeting.
He is therefore afflicted with what I call a post-Biafran syndrome. Some say the man led the Third Marine Commando, and he received the surrender note from Biafra. That exactly is why the man feels a sort of whoozy feeling of incompetence. He did not know the war was over. The victor was not aware of his victory. He was away, far away from the conduit of action when men like Alani Akinrinade had browbeaten the rebels to paralysis, when Ojukwu had fled and his assistants were now mouse to the federal forces.
The brew was ready. OBJ was summed to his victory party. As the leader, he snatched the hour of glory. The real blaze and fury of the war was narrated by eye-witness accounts as well as the best book on the war so far, Alabi Isama’s The Tragedy of Victory. They show that the war had been fought and won, the big bear of Biafra had staggered and was falling under Black Scorpion Colonel Benjamin Adekunle. OBJ came to hear its thud and final fall. He did not even see the humpty go down.
Maybe that is why he obliterated the study of history. That is only one of his battles. What is going on in his psyche is a post-Biafran war.
Obj war will not end until he joins Clark in the departure lounge and catches that flight. He is not going to receive another formal surrender. So, he keeps shooting and blazing with rage. Since the real war ended, his has launched a series of ambushes. The main weapon in his arsenal is cunning. The great journalist and essayist, Stanley Macebuh, who was his adviser, described him as “crafty, very crafty.” If the war theorist Carl Von Clausewitz announced that “war is a continuation of politics by other means,” ObJ has the genius of turning it around. Politics, for him, is the continuation of war by other means.
But we have seen this since he returned from Biafra. Did he not do it to general Olutoye? The man had confided in OBJ about ethnic injustice in the army. He exposed him to his northern fellows. It was swansong for Olutoye as a soldier. OBJ defeated him. OBJ has been in this fight against those who hold no gun. Sometimes when he did it with gun-handed fellows like IBB, it was with cunning. He spoke of SAP without human face. Aikhomu paid him back in his sardonic coin, by saying they would have SAP with human leg and hand, etc. He did same to Buhari before IBB swept him out. That was when he was tarred with PHD, pull him down syndrome.
In this Republic, we have a long list of his acts. Simon Kolawole last week became a diarist of his iniquities and inequities. Some of them, though, you cannot hold him legally culpable. That is the enigma of the Teflon man. But was he not the fellow who ate with Okadigbo and danced with his wife and the next day the man was no longer the head of his legislative chamber? Did he not do same to Audu Ogbe as the leader of his party?
When he was president and got rejected by his Yoruba kinsmen at the polls, did he not play the same game of cunning? He is not too proud to stoop, so long as he conquers. He has turned upside down the words of novelist Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace: “It is always better to bow too low than not low enough.” Bisi Akande has demonstrated in this in his book, My Participations, and no one has countered him. Forget the nonagenarian bluster and empty fury of Ayo Adebanjo. Akande narrated how the man begged the Southwest governors not to perform local government polls and also not to endanger his second-term nomination. He stooped to Papa Adesanya, and had Adebanjo with him in his subterfuge. The governors tagged along. When he was done, the governors as well as Adesanya had an appointment with him. He stood them up for hours. When he materialised, it was to mock them. He played his earthy character, sat on the floor in his short, and started to mock. He conned them first, then swept them out of office, except Tinubu in Lagos.
We cannot forget when he was leaving office as president. He gave the country a president and vice president. One was weak in body, the other weak in mind. He wanted to be the only strong man. He was, however, defeated. He never controlled the so-called weak men. He started panting and ranting in his Ota farm until he made a bonfire of his party card.
The Odi and Zaku Biam massacres were evidence of the soldier triumphing over people without arms.
When Jesus met a soldier and told him, “Do violence to no man,” he did not refer to the battlefield. He meant civilians, unarmed persons like the Odi and Zaku Biam residents. Jesus himself said, “The kingdom of God suffers violence…” Old testament bleeds with battles and, of course, Armageddon looms. It is army versus army. OBJ has been doing violence to the vulnerable. He did not have a war story, except the fictions in his My Command, whose RIP was enacted in Isama’s book, a man he orchestrated with a court martial without a gazette.
OBJ still fights. He is unaware that he is scratching the air, has no electoral value today, but huffs about like a statesman. Only a history that lacks psychic perspective can afford him that perch.
