Former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, claimed while interacting with a delegation of National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) recently, that some Nigerians never wanted the 2015 election to hold. He also said that the same people believed that after that election, Nigeria will disintegrate; so they moved their families to safe havens abroad. He further stressed that he is one of the few patriotic Nigerians who believed in the country and stayed back.

Obasanjo is, unarguably, the most active and visible former president alive as well as the most outspoken. That, also, is beginning to earn for him the perception of a doomsday soothsayer. He is extensively internationally connected with tentacles spreading to organisations and security apparatuses in Nigeria and abroad. It was through some of those foreign contacts that he got to learn that the late head of state, General Sani Abacha, had plans to implicate him in a phantom coup. Those contacts are still very much intact and can still give him any information he desires for whatever purpose.

From the way he spoke with the student delegation, it was obvious he knows the unpatriotic Nigerians who plotted against the last election but failed. In our opinion, he will be doing the country a world of good by naming the saboteurs.

While he is at it, we hasten to point out that it was public knowledge that at the peak of the 2015 campaigns, he talked freely about an interim government. He may have hoped for an election crisis that would stalemate the process and he would then be invited to bail the country out as interim leader, a strategy to actualise his infamous third-term agenda which Nigerians roundly rejected in 2007.

Also at that meeting with the students, he extolled the qualities of President Muhammadu Buhari and how he will make a good leader. Nigerians already know that much; that is why they voted overwhelmingly for him in the last election. We are also aware that Buhari is beginning to ask questions about the unaccounted $16billion allegedly spent by the Obasanjo administration for power projects that failed abysmally to deliver the expected goods. There are expectations that President Buhari may add it to his probe list. Some could be tempted to see Obasanjo’s adulation of the president as self-preservation.

Statesmen everywhere, particularly the elderly ones who have had the privilege of running the affairs of their countries, often always speak in measured tones. They weigh their utterances because they know the implication of what they say. Obasanjo, we note, is without doubt in this class of personalities and is expected to behave like one. But his public conduct and his comments on issues are beginning to demean his status before Nigerians who have started seeing him as part of the nation’s problems.

Source: LEADERSHIP