Nigerian ex-president under investigation in retirement
LAGOS (AFP) — Following an eight-year stint as president of Nigeria and a 40-year career in politics and the military, Olusegun Obasanjo might have thought that after hand picking his successor he was in for a quiet retirement.
He could not have been more wrong, for since this born-again Christian withdrew to his chicken farm, not a day has gone by without him facing accusations of one sort or another.
The most virulent attacks are not from the opposition, which Obasanjo undermined during his two terms from 1999 to 2007, but rather from a parliamentary commission of enquiry and various state bodies investigating "the Obasanjo years" and various corruption scandals.
The bodies in question are going through a whole range of issues with a fine tooth comb: how Obasanjo managed his billions of oil money in the days when he was president and oil minister, how additional billions were frittered away on improving the power sector without anyone having anything to show for it and how companies were sold off to cronies on the cheap.
Many of these sales have been revoked by the current administration.
One of the former president's daughters, the senator Iyabo Obasanjo-Bello, made the front page of The News, a weekly magazine, under the headline "Queen of Scandals".
Her name has been quoted in connection with money that disappeared from the health ministry and in relation to a four billion naira (21.8 million euro/34 million dollar) contract awarded to an Austrian company to build a power station, no stone of which was ever laid.
At the end of February two top ranking civil servants testified before a commission of parliamentary enquiry how Obasanjo in 2006 "inaugurated" a piece of waste land in the southern Cross River state, calling it a "power station".
OBJ, as Obasanjo is known, was making headlines again on Sunday in the leading Nigerian daily, the Guardian. The paper said that the former president, now well into his seventies, might be called on to testify before a parliamentary commission investigating the some 13 billion dollars (8.4 billion euros) ostensibly spent on the power sector from 1999 to 2007. Nigeria currently produces less electricity than it did eight years ago.
Former ministers have testified that Obasanjo authorised hundreds of millions of dollars to be paid out without respecting due process.
On Tuesday, the senate is poised to look into the sale of federal land and federal properties in Abuja during Obasanjo's time in office.
In addition to his supposed financial crimes -- Obasanjo was penniless when he came out of prison in 1995 and today is sitting on a fortune -- the former president is coming in for criticism for his political management. But he has not hit back at his critics while a debate over presidential immunity has been raging for weeks.
Two anti-Obasanjo books came out last week: one called: "How President Obasanjo corrupted the Nigerian federal system" and the other "How President Obasanjo perverted the rule of law and democracy".
The author of one, lawyer Ben Nwabueze, received support from everyone who is anyone in the anti-Obasanjo ranks starting with former vice president Atiku Abubakar, who fell out with his former boss.
"The aim is not to punish Obasanjo, even if that's what he deserves, but rather to draw the attention of Nigerians to the lessons that can be learned from his presidency," Nwabueze said last week.
Even if Obasanjo did in the end stand aside to make room for the successor he picked himself -- Umaru Yar'Adua, many Nigerians have not forgotten that in 2006 he did try to have the constitution changed to enable him to run for a third term.
And Yar'Adua sooner or later is going to have to look into the slew of accusations of wrongdoing facing the previous administration, particularly since his buzz word since he came to power has been "the rule of law" and that his entourage likes to repeat that no one is above the rule of law.
