FORMER President Olusegun Obasanjo and former military President Ibrahim Babangida on Sunday July 29, 2012 issued a joint statement in which they expressed concern about the pervasive insecurity and climate of fear and uncertainty in the country. They lamented that virtually all the citizens had been going about their day-to-day activities with anxiety and trepidation. They said the loss of innocent lives being experienced across the country was no longer bearable. Among other problems, they touched on the untold hardship being experienced in the country and counselled that the prevailing situation should not be allowed to continue. To confront the security challenges, the two former leaders called for intensive community involvement and promised to do whatever was possible to bring about peace and harmony. TWO major inferences can be drawn from the statement of the two retired generals. The first is that their disagreement on which the media feasted sumptuously some months ago has been settled. While the feud lasted, the two former heads of state provided free entertainment for the reading public as they traded abuses that made newspaper headlines. The second is that they are both displeased with the state of the nation and the way it is being handled.GENERALS Obasanjo and Babangida have every right to bare their minds on any subject of national interest because the right to freedom of expression is guaranteed in the Nigerian constitution. The pertinent question however is : how qualified and how morally justified are they to don the garb of critics and arrogate to themselves the roles of judges and counsellors in national affairs' It is interesting that the two men who now appear to be worried sick about the country's multi-faceted afflictions have, at different times, had the golden opportunity to put things right but they failed woefully to do so. It is unthinkable that any of them ' not to talk about the two of them in a joint statement ' could come out with a jeremiad on the hardship, agony and subsequent misery for which they laid a solid foundation when they held sway at the pinnacle of political authority. This, of course, is not an endorsement of the lacklustre management of the economy and the other critical areas of national life. What is obvious to any discerning observer is that President Goodluck Jonathan has taken his cue from the likes of Obasanjo and Babangida and has been building on the defective structures they left behind. THE two generals dwelt extensively on the issue of security in their joint statement but ended up saying nothing new. One would have expected that as military men, they would have offered specific suggestions on the security challenges. Their knowledge or competence in security matters did not reflect in the entire contents of their statement. It was as vacuous as it was vapid. Most of it was a virtual reiteration of the type of homilies that have been delivered by people who just wanted to say something. The objective of the statement also appeared suspect. If the two re-united friends had any advice for Jonathan, should it be communicated to him through the media' AFTER Obasanjo's exit from power as military head of state, he became a loud and constant critic of government policies. He seized every available opportunity to convey the impression that he was on the side of the people. He was always telling this same Babangida that his government's Structural Adjustment Programme should be given a human face. When he fortuitously found himself again in office as elected president, he turned against the suffering masses. He was increasing the prices of petroleum products at an alarming frequency and making life increasingly miserable for the same people whose cause he claimed to champion just a few years earlier. His record in globetrotting as president of Nigeria will be difficult to erase as he was more in the sky than at his desk. The money wasted on his foreign trips would have greatly improved the country's decrepit infrastructure. The tragedy of it all is that whatever he saw or learnt from his wanderings around the world did not reflect in his management of state affairs. During their comical exchanges, Obasanjo had no answer to Babangida's salvo that if he (Babangida) had access to the amount of petro-dollars that flowed into the coffers of the government during Obasanjo'a second coming, he would have changed the face of Nigeria. Obasanjo is simply in the process of being what he has always been ' a constant critic when out of office. BABANGIDA perennially carries a heavy baggage of credibility deficit. He is well known as a referee who deftly shifts the goal post when the match is in progress. He repeatedly altered his own transition programme and at the end of the day aborted the entire democratic process that reached a climax on June 12, 1993. He made matters worse when he came back in 2011 to offer himself as a presidential material in a democratic dispensation. Under Babangida's watch, corruption became a way of life while Obasanjo fought a self-serving war against it. One thing they have in common is that they both left the country worse than they met it. Nigeria, even Jonathan, will fare better without their homily. Their homily is a material for the trash can.
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