The starkest evidence yet of
Nigeria’s despairing
circumstances could be glimpsed
in the fact that Minna and
Abeokuta have become major
destinations for a certain kind of
political pilgrim.

In the last two weeks, a number
of governors from the northern
part of Nigeria have visited two
former Nigerian rulers, General
Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida
(ret.) in Minna, and former
President Olusegun Obasanjo in
Abeokuta. Both pilgrimages were
seen, above all, as part of the
tactical maneuvers for the 2015
elections.

Yet, that the governors consider
Mr. Babangida and Mr. Obasanjo
worthy of consultation or
enlistment speaks to the
bankruptcy of their – and
Nigeria’s – project. Babangida and
Obasanjo are alike in several vital
respects. They’re big-time authors
of Nigeria’s misfortune, vectors of
the political, social and economic
crises in which the country is
mired, and eloquent examples of
failed leaders.

What does it mean, then, that all
political roads are leading to both
men’s doors? In a few words, that
Nigeria is in big, big trouble – if
not altogether doomed. The
voyage to the hearths of the two
men is akin to trusting that a
problem is the solution.

To cast both men in negative light
is not to suggest, however, that
anybody who came before and
after them was stellar. No, Nigeria
has been luckless in its leadership
and, in fact, in the quality of its
broader elite. But Babangida and
Obasanjo found ways to intensify
Nigeria’s malaise, their policies
and style helping to amplify and
entrench some of the most
debilitating symptoms of a sick,
floundering country.

Take Babangida. He became
Nigeria’s military ruler in 1985,
unseating the duo of Generals
Muhammadu Buhari and Tunde
Idiagbon that had imposed a
plastic version of discipline on
Nigerians. A charismatic man with
a ready, gap-toothed smile, Mr.
Babangida seemed the perfect
corrective to Buhari’s (and
Idiagbon’s) dour, cheerless mien.
Before long, however, it dawned
on Nigerians that real leadership
demanded much more than
personal charms.

It may well be the case that the
Structural Adjustment Program
(SAP), the centerpiece of Mr.
Babangida’s economic policy, was
both inevitable and the perfect
panacea for the country’s
indolent, over-regulated economy.
What was undeniable, however, is
that SAP almost overnight zapped
Nigeria’s fledging middle class out
of existence, creating two
veritable classes: the opulently
wealthy and the desperately
wretched.

It was a thoroughly painful
adjustment, an era in which civil
servants could not afford to buy
decent cars and some lecturers
took to driving cabs in their spare
time. Through it all, Mr. Babangida
preached patience, assuring us
that the gains of policy awaited us
at the end of the transition.

It would have been marvelous if
he adopted his own counsel. The
evidence, clearly, is that he did
not. While Nigerians writhed in
pain and did their inventive best
to scrape through harsh times,
their ruler was in plain view
accumulating riches for himself,
acquiring a hilltop mansion that
would provoke an Arab oil sheik
into fits of envy, and amassing a
huge cache of cash. In other
words, the man who asked the
rest of us to accept privation for a
period of time did not have the
discipline – the vision and
temperament – to take his own
bitter pill.

Babangida compounded his awful
statecraft when he announced an
ostensible program to return
Nigeria to a liberal democratic
culture. Unwilling to contemplate
his eventual withdrawal from
power, he turned the time-table
for democratic transition into an
expensive, deceptive scheme. In
the day, he pretended to be
committed to ending military rule;
at night, he and his cohorts
plotted to sabotage the process –
the better to perpetuate himself in
office. The culmination of this
charade came in Mr. Babangida’s
annulment of the June 12, 1993
presidential election.

That remains a defining part of
Babangida’s legacy. In some ways,
Nigeria is still reeling from the
aftermath of that act of perfidy

And then there’s Obasanjo. This
man may well be the luckiest
Nigerian, alive or dead. Born into
poverty, his childhood ambition
was to be a roadside mechanic.
Instead, he found his way into the
military, rose to be a general, and
made two tours as Nigeria’s ruler
– once as a military dictator, the
other time as an “elected”
president. His “election” in 1999
completed a script that had slight
echoes of the experience of
Nelson Mandela, the South Africa
sage who commands near-
universal admiration. Mr.
Obasanjo had emerged from
(Abacha’s) prison to become
Nigeria’s president.

Gifted with a unique opportunity
to become a true hero, Mr.
Obasanjo seemed determined,
instead, to surpass Mr. Babangida
in all the trivial ways. He may have
set up two anti-corruption
agencies, but his administration
was notorious as an enabler of
graft and money laundering. He
exhibited a shocking propensity
to dine with and empower all
manner of shady characters, the
exceptions being those who were
reluctant to massage his imperial
ego. For all the speeches he read
on accountability and
transparency, he ran a shop
where – under his very gaze – his
confidants and associates stole
Nigeria blind.

As I stated, Obasanjo’s one
obsession seemed to be to best
Babangida in some egoistic game.
He dwarfed his rival by becoming,
by far, the person with the
longest tenure as president. He
and his coterie acquired enough
riches to tower over the man
from Minna and his crowd. A slave
to imitation, he acquired his own
hilltop mansion in Abeokuta.

Obasanjo’s gravest crime was not
that he was a mediocre leader. In
the end, mediocrity in a leader is
forgivable. His greatest blemish
was to participate, actively and
fervently, in the devaluation of
Nigeria and the debasement of
the Presidency. How did he do so?
He empowered rustics like the late
Lamidi Adedibu and Chris Uba to
use police contingents to sack or
hijack two governors. He belittled
the judiciary by ignoring judicial
verdicts that went against his
government. He squandered cash
in the neighborhood of $10-16
billion on a scam announced as a
mission to offer Nigerians
“regular, uninterrupted power
supply.” He looked the other way
– and compelled the anti-
corruption agencies to do the
same – when his political friends
pillaged public funds. He
weakened the National Assembly
by constantly meddling in its
affairs, including dictating who
their leaders must be.

Instead of lending himself to the
goal of strengthening democratic
values, Obasanjo became an
apostle of do-or-die, a zestful
rigger of elections. Drunk with
power, he was willing to gut the
Nigerian constitution in a bid to
grant himself a third term in office
– and a virtual life presidency. As
Nigerians groaned for
infrastructure and livable wages,
Mr. Obasanjo mindlessly sank
billions in scarce funds to bribe
his way to a third term – all the
while denying that he wanted to
stay on. Denied his illicit third term
dream, he imposed Umaru
Yar’Adua, a feeble, dying man, and
Goodluck Jonathan, a nondescript
governor, as the PDP’s ticket – and
then imposed them on Nigeria

This architect of Nigeria’s
misfortune appears to cherish
some Nigerians’ proclamation that
he was a much better “leader”
than, say, President Jonathan.
Such flattery proceeds from a
short memory as well as a
profound misreading of
Obasanjo’s role in misshaping our
present. Properly understood,
Yar’Adua and Jonathan are part
and parcel of Obasanjo’s legacy. If
the current president’s
performance is subpar, perhaps
we should ask Obasanjo, again,
why he guaranteed to us that
he’d chosen the perfect team to
take over from him.

In a society where leaders are
held to strenuous standards,
neither Babangida nor Obasanjo
would be able to show his face in
public. That some northern
governors – and other politicians
– are flocking to both men’s
separate hilltop is a clear sign that
Nigeria will remain a mess for a
while to come.