This is the subject of a discussion that has been
taking place for quite some time now but which has
reached a frenzy since former president Obasanjo’s
letter-bomb to President Jonathan. It is a discussion
or an argument that I have been reluctant to
encourage. As the reader will have noticed, the
question is not who is better between Obasanjo and
Jonathan but who is worse. This presupposes, quite
correctly, that both of them are bad for Nigeria. Only
God knows why He afflicted Nigeria with both of
them, but God is always right. Nigeria would have
been a much better place without them as
presidents. The answer to the question is not that
easy. Anyone who wants to answer the question –
who is worse between Obasanjo and Jonathan? –
must first be ready to answer the famous question:
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
The truth is that every bad thing Jonathan is doing
today he learnt from Obasanjo. Jonathan has only
done them all bigger than his teacher. And why
should Obasanjo, the teacher, complain? Is it not the
wish of all teachers that their students should outdo
them?
General Abdulsalami Abubakar handed over power to
General Olusegun Obasanjo on May 29, 1999, in an
election that was generally regarded as credible. But
that was the last credible election that Nigeria has
had till date. All the elections since then have been
massively rigged, sometimes by Obasanjo, the
president himself. The elections Obasanjo conducted
as president, in 2003 and 2007, have been the worst
in the history of elections in the country. Obasanjo as
president personally supervised the crime of election
rigging, many times very openly. So far, Jonathan has
supervised only the 2011 general elections. And even
though he would have won the presidential election
anyway, because the opposition parties were not as
organised as they are today, Jonathan still went
ahead to rig the elections badly, using the same
methods and tricks as Obasanjo did. He proved to be
a very good student of Obasanjo because Jonathan
showed, by his conduct of the 2011 election that
even if he was the only candidate standing in that
presidential election, he would still have rigged the
election. Rigging obviously runs in the family. If
Jonathan insists on contesting the 2015 elections in
spite of the promise he made to his party men in
2011, it is because he saw what Obasanjo did with
his own promises. There was also a tacit
understanding that Obasanjo was going to do only
one term from 1999. He nonetheless contested and
rigged the 2003 election massively. Before then, Bola
Ige had to be killed to make the rigging easier in the
south-west which Obasanjo thought he needed
badly. In 2006, Obasanjo started sharing bribes to
the National Assembly members to get a third term.
Jonathan saw all that, so why should he keep his own
promise? What is wrong in Obasanjo’s student
wanting his own third term? Let someone else
complain, but not Obasanjo.
The Jonathan government is the most corrupt
government Nigeria has ever seen. But before the
Jonathan government came into being, Obasanjo’s
government was the most corrupt government
Nigeria had ever known at the time. If Obasanjo is
screaming about the magnitude of corruption today,
which he correctly said is about to ground the
Nigerian state, it must be because he didn’t think
anyone would ever beat his record of corruption and
impunity. Jonathan’s government steals in trillions,
Obasanjo’s government in billions and a few times in
trillions. The $12 billion Obasanjo squandered on
fake electricity supply was N1.4 trillion at the
exchange rate when the money was stolen. Both
governments are governments of thieves and crooks
and both have been very detrimental to Nigeria’s
development.
And talking about corruption, how can anyone forget
so soon how Obasanjo squandered N300 billion on
roads with nothing to show for it? Many of us talked
on this issue ad nauseam when he was in power but
got no response. And how can anyone forget so soon
how Obasanjo also squandered $12 billion on power
generation and all we got was a change of name from
NEPA to PHCN? What about COJA and the several
companies like ALSCON Obasanjo privatised into his
pocket? What about Transcorp, the Aso Rock
company which he shamelessly used in cahoots with
other crooks to corruptly capture NITEL and several
oil blocks? Obasanjo shared more oil blocks than all
his predecessors and successors put together, most
of them dubiously.
In all of President Obasanjo’s eight years as
president, there was no single year he implemented
the national budget according to the appropriation
law, yet, by law and conventions of democracy, one
single budgetary infraction was enough to impeach
and remove him from office. So, if President Jonathan
has become notorious for not implementing budgets,
it is Obasanjo that emboldened him.
During Obasanjo’s days, the price of oil went as high
as $147 per barrel. Under General Sani Abacha,
Obasanjo’s nemesis that he loves to deride, it was
barely $20 per barrel, yet Abacha had more to show
for his five years in power than Obasanjo’s eight
years in office. Abacha stabilised the naira at N80 to
a dollar throughout his days. Under Obasanjo, it was
N120 or more to a dollar. Gwarimpa Housing Estate,
one of Abacha’s footprints, was considered the
largest estate in Africa at the time it was built. No
one remembers any such edifice that Obasanjo put in
place. The PTF which Abacha created remains the
most outstanding achievement of any government in
the last 20 years. Abacha was courageous enough to
talk his senior, General Muhammadu Buhari, into
accepting to head the PTF. With just N2 from every
litre after a fuel price increase, the PTF used less than
$2 billion to virtually change the face of the country.
Obasanjo increased fuel prices as many times as he
desired with nothing except the suffering of the
people to show for it. The PTF showed how very little
money could achieve so much. Obasanjo likes to talk
about how he created the GSM revolution. He should
also tell Nigerians how much of Nigeria’s money he
used to achieve that. The GSM revolution would still
have happened at the time it did in Nigeria as it
happened in every other country on the surface of
the earth even if there was no president in place. It
was a global phenomenon. It’s like a Nigerian
president claiming credit for the coming of the
internet into Nigeria.
In terms of security, while Obasanjo’s people killed
every Nigerian they saw as a stumbling block – Bola
Ige, Marshal Harry, Aminasoari Dikibo, Chuba
Okadigbo and a lot more – Jonathan simply allowed
us to kill ourselves. Obasanjo’s era was marked by
political assassinations and cold-blooded murders.
Governor Orji Uzor Kalu escaped death but he knew
exactly who sent the assassins. Audu Ogbeh escaped
death and he too knew exactly who sent the killers.
But Jonathan has not been personally associated (so
far) with any political murders the way Obasanjo
was. I hope it remains so, but if Obasanjo said
snipers are being trained, that leaves many of us
worried because Obasanjo has the capacity to know.
The main difference between Obasanjo and Jonathan
is that Obasanjo was a competent president who was
a crook, while Jonathan is totally and completely
incompetent but found himself president by
Obasanjo’s designed accident. Obasanjo knows
government and how government works but
deliberately chose to destroy the system. On the
other hand, Jonathan, not equipped for the job
should not be president in the first place and would
not have been president but for Obasanjo’s
crookedness.
If President Obasanjo had allowed free and fair
primaries in his own PDP, there was no way a
terminally ill Umaru Yar’Adua and a clueless Jonathan
would have emerged the presidential candidate and
running mate respectively. Obasanjo did what he did
because he wanted to continue to be the de facto
president even after leaving Aso Rock. At least that is
what he told Nasiru el-Rufai, as revealed in el-Rufai’s
book, The Accidental Public Servant.
Obasanjo was competent, Jonathan is not; but
Obasanjo was also a crook and Jonathan is arguably
not. For instance, Obasanjo would not have retained
Stella Oduah up to this point. He knows the kind of
terminal damage this does to a government. He
would have dismissed her with ignominy, if to boost
his fake anti-corruption credentials. Obasanjo would
have reshuffled this cabinet a long time ago. He
would not keep this kind of cabinet. And, unlike
Jonathan who dropped several ministers months ago
and still has been unable to replace them, Obasanjo
would not be that incapacitated. Obversely, Jonathan
is unlikely to change his party chairman by putting a
gun to his head as Obasanjo did when he wanted
Audu Ogbeh to resign as PDP chairman. And
Jonathan is yet to send his cronies to kidnap a sitting
governor as Obasanjo did with Chris Uba kidnapping
Governor Chris Ngige.
So, the answer to the question — who’s worse
between Obasanjo and Jonathan? — I don’t know, but
what I know is that Nigeria would have been a better
place if both of them had not been presidents.
Having said all that, Jonathan must still respond to
everything Obasanjo said in his letter. What he has
given so far as a response is more embarrassing than
Obasanjo’s letter itself. For Jonathan to think that
because the CBN governor has recanted on his $50
billion missing money means he has no question to
answer on corruption only confirms everything I have
said about him. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, his finance
minister, said $10.8 billion is still missing. Or, didn’t
the president hear that one? We are still waiting.


EARSHOT
Did Iyabo Write That Letter?
Iyabo Obasanjo’s purported letter to her father,
thoroughly insulting him, was the main subject
matter last week. The editors of Vanguard, which
exclusively reported the story, stand by their report.
But Obasanjo’s associates insist the letter was fake.
Iyabo on her own has neither claimed nor disclaimed
the letter. But the truth should not be that elusive. If
Iyabo did not write the letter, she would have come
out screaming fire and brimstone and threatening to
drag Vanguard to court by now. Also, the Vanguard
would have been profusely apologising to her by now
and not standing by their story. Besides, Vanguard is
a credible newspaper.
Many colleagues of Iyabo when she was in the Senate
believe Iyabo wrote the letter because the contents
bear similarity to what she told them a couple of
times when they were in the Senate together. A few
of them recalled a meeting some of them, including
the then Senator Iyabo Obasanjo, had with the then
newly-sworn-in President Goodluck Jonathan at Aso
Rock. When it was Iyabo’s turn to speak, she told
President Jonathan that she was going to address
him as Iyabo Obasanjo, not Senator Iyabo. She then
advised the president not to listen to any advice
coming from her father because the man was “evil”.
She said she was speaking to Jonathan as Obasanjo’s
daughter. She went on and said so many terrible
things against her father. Jonathan, I was told, was so
shocked that he almost fell off his chair. The other
senators present were clearly scandalised by her
vituperations against her father.
My guess is that when Obasanjo sent that letter-
bomb to President Jonathan, the latter must have
quickly recalled what Iyabo said about her father in
that meeting and might have sent some of his
cronies to her, with a promise of a handsome payoff
of course. Iyabo probably could not resist the
temptation of getting her own share of the
unremitted oil money and therefore caved in.
Considering the kind of dysfunctional family that
Obasanjo has raised and the grave immorality that
runs in the family (remember Gbenga, Iyabo’s
brother, also accused Obasanjo of sleeping with his
wife), no one should be surprised that Iyabo could
write that kind of letter to her father. The question
we should be asking is: how did we get such people
to be our leaders in the first place?
———————————-
This post is published with permission from
Abusidiqu.com

http://www.ynaija.com/opinion-obasanjo-or-jonathan-who-is-worse/?utm_source=&utm_medium=twitter

Jonathan has spent only 3-4years as president yet he has achieved a lot... To me OBJ is worse when it comes to infrastructural and capital developments, but when it comes to other things such as international relations, corruption, security and such, GEJ is d worst presido a country can ever have!