Can you recall anyone you lost?
I think it was the democratization process itself; it’s true that I didn’t want Obasanjo to be the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and there was no doubt about that. I lost that one; I didn’t want him. I didn’t want to see him at all from inception.

Why?
Because anybody who has worn the uniform described as camouflage has learnt the art of deception and that’s the way I see Obasanjo. He had meetings and meetings with MKO Abiola. I was with him, I believe four of us including Dele Alake, and we had ‘amala’ and vegetable soup with hot pepper in Abiola’s house. Everybody was yawning, sweating and looking for water with MKO Abiola and Obasanjo behaving as if it wasn’t as hot as we made it seem; behaving as if they had this deep understanding. Then, not up to two weeks after that, Obasanjo went away to Zimbabwe and announced from there that Abiola was not the messiah.

Haba! After that, I developed that mistrust on him; I couldn’t believe that a man could do that. Stand by some principles, stand by some integrity, stand transparently and honestly on matter of facts and as you lead other people to believe you and support you as a key pillar. Then, I start to think whether this man came to Abiola and collected information; information that we had heard that he wanted to be Shonekan; he wanted to be an interim leader and not Shonekan. So, when they presented him that he was going to be the candidate of the other party, I said that Nigeria was in for trouble. Can I believe this man? No, I cannot trust him.

Is that one of the reasons why you have not congratulated him on his 75th birthday?
I didn’t even remember his birthday. I opened the newspaper and saw it. There are so many problems confronting us. I won’t blame anybody who doesn’t read my birthday greetings. I won’t blame them if they say they didn’t see it, there are so many problems confronting the nation. There are so many news items that are seriously more newsworthy than to be looking for Obasanjo’s congratulatory messages in the newspaper. A man who had great opportunity to put Nigeria on the right path and failed to do so; failed to do even the Otta road, not Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. What am I celebrating about him? That’s the truth. He deceptively dealt with the country and he handed over to a man who knew he was ill. Obasanjo is a leader that could not find another successor capable of driving through his vision for the country.

From where the nation stands now, do you see hope; do you see things getting better?
We must see hope even when it is opaque, otherwise we are all doomed. If we stop searching for hope and for any improvement, then we have stopped thinking and it means we have stopped breathing – we are all dead. So, we must challenge all our intellectual capacities to bring about that hope and discuss or chart a new course for the country because right now, we are drifting. Now’s the time that we should harp on industrial and economic policies. We should be building on a stable democracy. This is the time we are using to confront myriad of problems that are domestically and externally dangerous for the country such as religious division- a Boko Haram not Boko Halal; promoting division and intolerance among the tribes. We are still solving that problem but we have not seen the cause of our problems and we are addressing ordinary symptoms; we are not seeing that it is poverty, neglect and lack of good economic policies and programmes that is leaving people more destitute.

There is the creation of violent reaction; we are not seeing electricity or power generation and supply to various homes and villages and for industrial use in our industrialisation but that is the most critical discovery of humanity in the last 1000 years. We have been searching for alternative in the last one century; we have not developed one and we have not even achieved any goal. So, if we have not done that, we must give hope to our new generation; we can’t give up on them. Do away with these tyrants by strongly opposing electoral malpractices in this country, by getting leaders to do away with deceptions; by mouthing and making noise about good governance without putting it to practice. Call on the judiciary to wake up and do what is right and adhere to liberty, freedom, democracy and justice for all. That is where all our efforts must lie, otherwise we will neglect those areas at our own peril.

In 2011, you tried to provide alternative platform by mobilizing like-minded people to have some form of coalition but at the end of the day, it failed. Can we have an insight into why it failed?
Why would everybody want to know why it failed? Or why it should succeed?
Why it should succeed is because the way you led it, there was so much hope. Everybody felt that at last we had an alternative. You were talking to people that the progressives were coming together again and there was a glimmer of hope. As a person who motivated all these, why do you think it failed?

That was silver lining then. We were going along with majority of Nigerians. So, if that is the case, let’s look back at what happened. I had wanted not to address that issue again but sincerely, I took away from the episode the fact that Nigerians must be led and led right. However, some political leaders in the country lack the understanding for political victory. They lack the give and take in the democratic setting. They might not be sincere until after they discover that they have failed. I don’t want to apportion blames but why it failed was because we were not committed sincerely to giving and taking; to compromise; to accommodate one another; even to take risk. To me, what would have been wrong with Muslim-Muslim ticket in the country; it had been done before; Abiola/Kingibe ticket was there. But did we rigidly hold on to that? No, we did not. As a political party, you cannot negotiate with your arms behind your back. If you go to a doctor to check your ankle and he says that your two legs should be amputated without providing you a wheelchair to move with you can’t be comfortable with that.

They wanted us to surrender everything; our candidate to withdraw; no vice-presidential slot and nothing. And if you look at it, we have more governors in ACN. So, all of that unfortunately played out. We all learnt from it; I don’t want to apportion blames. Now is the time to start early, to start building that understanding, that cohesion that can really provide a strong alternative. That to me is what we should do at this moment and we are working hard at it. We are still talking; you will have some people behaving like house rats immediately they are given some little fund. They’ll go out and abandon the ship. They never progress in their calling anyway but engage in political prostitution to gain something for themselves. You equally have scavengers around corridor of powers that will not make it possible but I won’t blame the other party not wanting to get together anyway. It is their prayer and it makes efforts to destabilize and sow seeds of discord among you. They must have their destabilizers; they must have their surrogates one way or the other; if you are not conscious of that, you are doomed to fail. So, going forward, we will. We will find apples and apples, not apples and oranges. That is the difficult part.

Read more http://www.sunnewsonline.com/webpages/news/national/2012/mar/25/national-25-03-2012-1.html

Obasanjo is a shape-shifting chameleon. This is very obvious!