A LOT has been said and written about the exchange of letters between the national chairman of the PDP, Chief Audu Ogbeh and President Olusegun Obasanjo but I believe more has to be done in order to drive home the point that what we witnessed was a big anomaly that should not be allowed to rear its ugly head again. And in so doing, we need not equivocate under any guise as some commentators have tended to. I was not comfortable with the view among some party members that both the president and the chairman erred. I am afraid such a middle-of-the road approach does not put the party in a good stead to ensure that next time, that is beyond an Audu Ogbeh and an Olusegun Obasanjo, a ruling party does not again find itself in such an unethical and morally reprehensible situation whereby its chairman engages the nation’s president publicly.
There has been this semantics about leakage, with Chief Ogbeh denying responsibility. I do not think the party should entertain such a debate because it amounts to playing on the collective intelligence of party members for Ogbeh to suggest that he should be exonerated from the leakage. Yes, it is possible that he was not the fellow that caused the leakage of the letter to the public but he should take responsibility once that happened.
In the first place, he should have taken every necessary step to ensure that not even a word of that letter was read by a third party before it got to the president. But assuming or agreed that such an error–proof situation was not achievable, the least the national chairman should have done would have been to accept total responsibility and never been seen canvassing his innocence. I even find the debate (on leakage) academic because I believe that the idea of letter-writing, even for the president’s eyes only, is wrong; moreso given the language and the use of needless analogies that clearly offend the sensibilities of Nigerians.
To have chosen to, in the first instance, write a letter of such magnitude presupposes that Chief Ogbeh was squarely prepared for any eventuality. But let’s take a look at the main substance of his letter to the president. The thrust of the chairman’s letter was simple: The President should, in the view of Ogbeh, be held entirely responsible for sundry problems in the country, in general and, Anambra State in particular. Ogbeh was short of stating that the PDP government under Obasanjo has failed and even tried to exonerate himself from the failure. Take the Anambra matter. If I were Chief Ogbeh, I would hate to admit publicly that I am such a weakling. He has all the power to get the matter sorted out long before now.
His problem was that he has a vested interest on the matter and as such found it difficult to accommodate the view of others, including that of Mr. President, on the matter. I can state without any fear of contractions that had Chief Ogbeh gone about looking for a solution to the Anambra problem in a neutral manner, he would have since found one.
In any case, I need not dwell so long on this particular point because quite a good number of other commentators, especially in the media, has told the chairman in plain language that his travails of today are a result of his equivocations and proclivity for double standards in the past. He should take some time to go through the avalanche of literature in the print media since the letter-writing matter broke out: and he would discover that in the real sense, Nigerians are not in a haste to forget the fact that he, as chairman, has been probably the major cause of the problem of the party and, by extension, our practice of democracy.
Did we even have to get to this level to realise that Chief Ogbeh’s PDP is not the idea of many of a ruling party? PDP is bedeviled with crises all over the country: Anambra today, Imo tomorrow, Lagos next tomorrow. Many of the problems arose from the sheer tardiness of the national chairman and his - decision making process coupled with his penchant for changing rules midstream. We have had a situation where different lists of candidates, duly signed by party executives, are sent out from the National party headquarters to electoral bodies for the same election. Up till now, there are still unresolved election disputes which were as a result of no other thing than that the party fielded more than one candidate for the same seat.
Beyond electoral problems, I am afraid the national chairman has failed to conduct himself in a manner expected of a chief executive of a party controlling not only the federal government but also as many as 28 out of thirty six 36 states; and which has an absolute majority in the National Assembly. But even so, I discovered that part of Chief Ogbeh’s problem is that he probably has not been able to realise that even as chairman of the ruling party, he is not the chief executive of the country.
He also seems to have failed to realise that his inputs or, indeed, that of the party into what goes on in government is essentially advisory. The truth is that once an executive president emerges under the type of arrangement we currently have, the sheer details of his administration becomes his prerogative provided that what he does are within the ambits of the party’s manifesto, as President Obasanjo has been doing in our own case.
In any case, President Obasanjo has never given the impression that he is afraid of taking responsibility of any action taken by him. A Presidential system of government, particularly of the version we practice, is by no means a collegiate system. Even the constitution currently in operation gives the president enormous responsibility.
This (1999) constitution is certainly not the best but I believe its over all strategic thrust is to ensure that an executive president of an immediate post - military Nigeria has enough leeway to operate, in order to give the country the much needed direction. To be sure, he has to do this with people but the fact remains that it is his own ideas of how to govern that matters.
This is what has made it possible today for President Obasanjo to tenaciously pursue his economic reform agenda, which may not immediately sound populist, but which the rest of the civilised world has adjudged as the only panacea for poverty and economic retardation. Every where in the world, the leadership of a ruling party usually brings itself to terms with the strategic vision of the person on the driving seat, that is the President or Prime minister. But here, what we have is a situation where party stalwarts, in a bid to gain cheap popularity, become the first to publicly castigate the government on the slightest excuse.
In Chief Ogbeh’s letter to the president, I see this attempt to wash off his hands over the set backs suffered by the administration in the pursuit of its policies, especially those that are causing temporary discomfort on Nigerians. This is both cowardly and unfortunate because it is an attempt to blot out his own name from the historical giant strides being taken by Obasanjo to reposition the country.
The generation I belong to is ready to exercise more patience because the future belongs to it. It sees some silver linings in the horizon. It does not share the pessimism of Ogbeh’s generation, which has refused to quit the stage. My generation believes that political stability, which can only be guaranteed through the practice of democracy, is the only thing that would enable it take its rightful position to make its own contributions into the building of modern Nigeria. Therefore, it would not fold its arms to watch tendencies that are capable of impairing this much-needed stability.
Chief Mbadiwe is the immediate past Nigerian Ambassador to Congo Brazzaville
