Former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo has criticised the administrations of President Bola Tinubu and former President Muhammadu Buhari, saying that Nigeria has descended into chaos, confusion, and corruption under their leadership.
Obasanjo made these remarks in a keynote address at the Chinua Achebe Leadership Forum, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA, over the weekend. He lamented, “As the world can see and understand, Nigeria’s situation is bad.”
In a press statement issued by his Special Assistant on Media, Kehinde Akinyemi, the former president, in his address titled “Leadership Failure and State Capture in Nigeria”, stated: “The more the immorality and corruption of a nation, the more the nation sinks into chaos, insecurity, conflict, discord, division, disunity, depression, youth restiveness, confusion, violence, and underdevelopment.”
Obasanjo, who was in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) but recorded a 25-minute video for the forum, compared Nigeria’s governance to that of Singapore.
He said, “The government [in Singapore] has also been responsive to the changing needs of its people and has invested heavily in areas such as healthcare, education, and social welfare.”
Reflecting on Nigeria’s current state, he remarked: “As we can see and understand, Nigeria’s situation is bad. The more the immorality and corruption of a nation, the more the nation sinks into chaos, insecurity, conflict, discord, division, disunity, depression, youth restiveness, confusion, violence, and underdevelopment.
“That’s the situation mostly in Nigeria during the reign of Baba-go-slow and Emilokan. The failing state status of Nigeria is confirmed and glaringly indicated and manifested for every honest person to see through the consequences of the level of our pervasive corruption, mediocrity, immorality, misconduct, mismanagement, perversion, injustice, incompetence, and all other forms of iniquity. But yes, there is hope.”
Drawing inspiration from Chinua Achebe’s 1983 treatise, ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’, Obasanjo acknowledged: “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example, which are the hallmarks of true leadership.”
He added, “In hindsight, this forty-one-year-old prescriptive analysis on the root causes of Nigeria’s leadership crisis is quite moderate and appropriate. It is at least not as desolate as the diagnosis provided by Robert Rotberg and John Campbell, two prominent US intellectuals – the latter a former United States ambassador to Nigeria to boot:
‘Nigeria has long teetered on the precipice of failure,’ they argued. ‘Unable to keep its citizens safe and secure, Nigeria has become a fully failed state of critical geopolitical concern. Its failure matters because the peace and prosperity of Africa and preventing the spread of disorder and militancy around the globe depend on a stronger Nigeria.’
“At least, they acknowledged that Nigeria – the most populous and economically viable country on the African continent – is, as the Americans will popularly put it, ‘too big to fail.’ Let us not fool ourselves; there is a lot to be concerned about, where Nigeria is concerned,” Obasanjo asserted.
The former president also referenced the World Bank and Transparency International’s definition of state capture, describing it as one of the most pervasive forms of corruption.
He explained: “It is a situation where powerful individuals, institutions, companies, or groups within or outside a country use corruption to shape a nation’s policies, legal environment, and economy to benefit their own private interests.
“State capture is not always overt and obvious. It can also arise from the more subtle close alignment of interests between specific business and political elites through family ties, friendships, and the intertwined ownership of economic assets.
“What is happening in Nigeria – right before our eyes – is state capture: The purchase of national assets by political elites – and their family members – at bargain prices, the allocation of national resources – minerals, land, and even human resources – to local, regional, and international actors. It must be prohibited and prevented through local and international laws.
“Public institutions such as the legislature, the executive, the judiciary, and regulatory agencies both at the federal and local levels are subject to capture. As such, state capture can broadly be understood as the disproportionate and unregulated influence of interest groups or decision-making processes, where special interest groups manage to bend state laws, policies, and regulations.
“They do so through practices such as illicit contributions paid by private interests to political parties, and for election campaigns, vote-buying, buying of presidential decrees or court decisions, as well as through illegitimate lobbying and revolving door appointments.
“The main risk of state capture is that decisions no longer take into consideration the public interest but instead favour a specific special interest group or individual. Laws, policies, and regulations are designed to benefit a specific interest group, often to the detriment of smaller firms, groups, and society in general. State capture can seriously affect economic development, regulatory quality, the provision of public services, quality of education and health services, infrastructure decisions, and even the environment and public health.”
On Achebe’s legacy, Obasanjo remarked: “The great author and writer has been known through his work and values for as long as our nation has been in existence. He was a great and distinguished Nigerian.
“Yale University would be correct in their belief that Achebe belongs to the world – and therefore to them as well – but I am here to tell them that he is an African icon that belongs to Nigeria first. The Igbo amongst us – his own ethnic people – will remind us that within Igboland, he is known as ‘the Eagle on Iroko’ – the ‘king of the birds’ perched on the tallest tree in Africa.”