Bringing Obasanjo out here now is a very brave thing to do but something that someone has to do, said a former Villa intellectual when he heard that the former President was being expected on a working visit to Jigawa State. The visit is clear a manifestation of the kinds of cross-cutting dynamism that made former American President, Bill Clinton, confess that they cannot quite understand Nigeria. What their Desk and the intelligence reports are saying are almost always contradicted by what actually happens on the ground. Nigeria has no centre of gravity that when you pull, it collapses. Instead, it has so many centres of gravity, a cross-cutting network that oils a nation-state where, in the words of a colonial officer, neither the best nor the worst happens.

The visit was a subject of emotive and speculative analysis but the visit is an innocent story that could have happened since and in circumstances that nobody could have read any meanings into.  That would have been the case if OBJ had been able to attend Lamido’s daughter’s wedding last January. But he couldn’t because he was on his way to the DRC then and had said in his reply that he was willing to visit at any other opportune moment.

This is though not to say that Obasanjo is not a very important person to Sule Lamido. Lamido leaves no one in doubt about that. But it is not such an unproblematic relationship. In any case, it is the story of the most abrupt relationships as they come, starting only around mid-May 1999 when a President-elect set about constituting his cabinet. He sent words to the comprehensively defeated PDP gubernatorial candidate from the North-Western state of Jigawa to ready himself for the position of Minister of Foreign Affairs. The candidate felt somehow, complaining to the messenger that he had no prior preparation for the position. The President-elect disagreed, saying there was nothing to worry about. He said he would teach the minister-to-be if the need arose.

That was how, like joke, like joke, Sule Lamido became Minister for Foreign Affairs in late June 1999, shattering all permutations. His qualification was whatever in OBJ’s head that held that Lamido was the ministerial material for foreign policy.

Many thought and concluded that Lamido came to be Foreign Affairs Minister only because OBJ wanted someone who would be a figure head. For an OBJ whom the late Joe Garba, Foreign Affairs Minister during his first time in power wrote as believing that foreign policy resided in Dodan Barrack, this was a plausible reason for his selection of Lamido. But those who actually observed foreign policy in action between 1999-2003 do not talk of a figure head Foreign Minister but of “a situation of perfect congruence between OBJ and Lamido” arising essentially from Lamido’s own view that OBJ was truly deserving of respect because he was rejected by his own people. It was such that Lamido’s rebelliousness found direction in OBJ’s over bearing persona, somebody that Lamido would have no qualms praise-singing “because he felt, on behalf of OBJ, that his own people did not accept him which means the man is not a tribalist”.

That was the sense in which the joke about the lucky pair developed about the President and the Foreign Minister. Lamido was lucky in finding someone whose nationalism and sixth sense created room for him to bloom after having been blocked from power for so long and, therefore, someone to whom he deferred automatically such that the idea of a rebellion did not arise at all, much less cutting loose, for whatever reasons. OBJ ‘s luck in this analogy was that, unlike Abacha against whom Lamido revolted in spite of government appointment, he did not have to contain the embarrassment of his Foreign Affairs Minister walking away on whatever grounds. 

Robin Cook, the late British Foreign Secretary, might have unintentionally added to the mystification of OBJ in the eyes of Lamido. At their first meeting in September 1999 in London, Cook asked Lamido how long and how well he had known Obasanjo. Lamido replied that it was a matter of months. Cook’s body language suggested that OBJ must be crazy to give the Foreign Affairs top job to a stranger as it is because, in few words, the job is given to the most trusted hand. Cook had, by implication, suggested to Lamido that OBJ had done him such a great favour.

And so, for four continous years, Lamido was at the helms. Public perception of him as not being in control of foreign policy was contradicted at every point by the strong, unambiguous positions he took at every ministerial for a in the foreign policy process, confusing his audience the more as to the correctness or otherwise of the perception of a Foreign Affairs Minister who was not in control.

Then in May 2003, he was out of the cabinet. OBJ had bought the principle that all those who had served full four years in power should not return to the cabinet. Lamido had served full four years and the principle caught up with him. However, almost all his colleagues who suffered the same fate were re-absorbed when OBJ appeared to believe that the acceptance of the principle had robbed him of his own right hand men in such one fell swoop. Whether or not this is the correct interpretation of what happened will remain a subject of informed speculation until OBJ chooses to speak but the fact that he promptly re-appointed those he had sent packing into the cabinet as Special Advisers points to something. Anyway, Lamido was not back in the cabinet.

While some say now that Lamido was lucky to have been eased out of the cabinet by then and to be unsullied by the subsequent tremors from 2003 to 2007, life outside the cabinet created room for friction between the teacher and the student. And but for providence, OBJ might have been sent Lamido to cool his feet somewhere in one notorious detention centre or another. 

There was to be the local government election towards the end of 2003 and for which the PDP had a budget for each state. Initially, OBJ directed that the budget be released to Lamido’s faction of the PDP, probably considering that Lamido was out of government and, therefore, with no patronage capacity and the responsibility of not only fighting the ANPP opponent in Jigawa but the internal faction within the PDP would be too much a burden for one man if the budget was not given to Lamido’s faction of the PDP. This was more so that the new minister from Jigawa belonged to the other camp aside from their connection with the then Vee-pee. So, the money was given to the Lamido faction. Later, some forces in the Villa linked up with the powers that be and made OBJ to have a change of mind. He said Lamido should return the money. Lamido argued against returning the money because with the money, they had renewed the onslaught on the opposition, including taking the Jigawa State Governor then, Saminu Turaki to court and getting judgment which quashed his immunity as far as spending local government allocation. If he thought that OBJ would be impressed with any story of expanding the PDP frontiers in Jigawa, he was mistaken. At a point, there were sharp exchanges and the next action of the big man in the Villa could have been a different story if someone who could restrain him did not intervene and get the two to come back to themselves.

Then came the third term controversy. For a long time, Lamido managed to keep quiet and leave everyone guessing. However, one morning in the heat of the controversy, he appeared on AIT and declared that there was nothing like third term, that it was the agenda of some people who wanted to use OBJ. Whether it was Lamido’s own independent mindedness or OBJ’s parallelism of trafficating to the left but branching right, no one now knows.  What it suggested was a serious division in OBJ’s camp between the home based players, (the Lamidos, the Jerry Ganas, the Kanu Agabis, etc) and the away camp of Okonjo Iweala, Oby Ezekwesili, el-Rufai and co who were being seen as hijackers of a process which they did not understand. There was the sense that these people had hijacked the then President into a policy line that had alienated him and the government considerably. Above all, as technocrats, they were not in any position in terms of the skills to sell such a costly programme as tenure elongation.

Again, whether this is the correct interpretation of Lamido’s AIT pronouncements is open to debate but considering that this was about the same time or shortly afterwards that OBJ asked Lamido to bring a nominee for ministerial appointment suggests that OBJ personally didn’t mind what Lamido had said on AIT. For, there was no way OBJ wouldn’t have heard or been told what Lamido had said on AIT. It might interest observers to connect this to Nasir el-Rufai not getting OBJ’s nod for the Presidency, which must have been his greatest shocker in life so since he, in particular, had gotten OBJ to acquiesce to virtually everything he brought to the table in government, especially the unlettered and ill-advised sale of federal property in Abuja. Instead of him, Umaru Yar’Adua got the nod, another OBJ sixth sense perhaps.

Matters would have remained like this but for an encounter between Lamido and editors in Lagos in February 2008. It was Louis Odion, now of National Life newspaper who asked the ‘mischievous’ question at that session. He wanted Lamido to explain how he could be a friend of Dr. Abubakar Rimi and OBJ at the same time without contradicting principles of comradeship.

In answering the question, Lamido said Rimi and OBJ were adults who should be able to manage their relationship. And that he, as an individual, had no alternative than to continue to relate with all two of them because repudiating any of them would amount to repudiating himself.

There would have been no controversy if the governor had stopped there. Instead, His Excellency went on to challenge the vilification of the former President, saying it went against the grains of recent history. He dismissed any perception of the former president as a disaster as being out of sync with Nigeria’s recent history, insisting that Nigerians should look at OBJ as Nigerian President. “In 1999, after our experience with June 12 and Abacha, the Nigerian soil could take only one seed. We could only plant one seed that could germinate. In those days, we could only put a Yoruba seed on the Nigerian soil. All others would not have germinated. But because the North had interests, even though they conceded power to the Yorubas, it could not be just any Yoruba seed but a particular seed. That seed could not have been an Afenifere seed whom we knew by their utterances. So, it had to be OBJ. And the task of restoring Nigeria was accomplished after the first four years. In that case, the sense of aberrations we feel now is evidence of that healing under OBJ’s leadership. What happened afterwards is a different story”.

Lamido, therefore, argued that the important thing to look at or be more concerned with was “the role the former President played outside in our first four years. What happened after that should be understood as part of the Nigerian crisis. It is not just OBJ acting all alone and alone”.

Upbraiding former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar in particular for turning his back on OBJ, the Jigawa Governor contended asked “minus OBJ who was highhanded, who breached all norms to impose Atiku on Nigeria, where was he? Therefore, what Atiku represents is the aberrations of OBJ. So, if there is anybody who benefited from the evils of OBJ, he is Atiku”.

Putting himself at the centre of the analysis, Lamido said “I know what OBJ went through in making me Minister of Foreign Affairs. There were all sorts of petitions against me, some of them saying I was a drop out, that I could not speak English, that I am not even a Fulani man. Some others said I was too primitive and too uncivilized. In fact, two days ago, someone was alluding to my crudity in a newspaper, saying a legislator had to upbraid me for contravening protocol in the United States as a Foreign Affairs Minister. Still OBJ made me his Minister of Foreign Affairs and, for four long years, I was there. OBJ was my boss. I learnt so much under him. For me, I look at things which made Nigeria great by his advocacy and standing firm for Nigeria”.

Illustrating his claim of OBJ’ as a great advocate, Lamido gave the instance at an EU-Africa Summit in Cairo in 2000 where OBJ declared Western banks and their governments as frauds and thieves because, according to OBJ, the thief and whoever accomplished him or her, were regarded as criminals in the African culture.

According to Lamido, at the EU-Africa Summit, the European leaders were saying that their laws forbade them from confiscating looted monies taken into European banks. Relying on the native paradigm, Obasanjo’s intervention was that in Africa, the thief and whoever assisted him are, both, criminals, wondering why European culture, laws and morality never frowned against an African Lieutenant Colonel President coming up to a bank with so much money, something which is not possible in the same West but when it comes to repatriating such loot, the West would invoke legalities. For Lamido, this was a profound way of demonstrating the hypocrisy and double standards of the West and he likes OBJ for that.

Beside a weekly newspaper which gave prominence to what Lamido said, nothing comprehensive came out of the session in the papers other than that Lamido had defended OBJ or attacked Atiku in favour of OBJ. When I complained to an editor, he told me that it must take a Lamido to come from Jigawa to tell them in Lagos how to look at OBJ.

From that moment, even myself could have equally said bringing Obasanjo out to Jigawa would be a very brave thing to do because there is still no definitive scoring of the Obasanjo phenomenon in Nigeria. There are only pockets of opinions.

At the Emir of Dutse’s Palace last Wednesday, both Lamido and the Emir, Dr. Nuhu Muhammadu Sunusi clearly took the position that OBJ captures Nigeria in its most succinct way. According to Lamido, Nigeria, in 1999, was not looking for a President of Nigeria’s Yorubas but a Yoruba President of Nigeria. To that extent, OBJ was the ideal and unique seed that could germinate and blossom, he said. Stretching this argument, Lamido said it was OBJ who dignified Nigeria in 1999 with his moral authority, history, experience and network, not the other way round. He said OBJ being the one who laid the foundation for democracy in 1999 was an appropriate person to call to bear witness to the process of democracy in Jigawa State where the governor said democracy is about benchmarking humanity.

The Emir of Dutse took note of the fact that OBJ was the first military ruler to hand over to a democratically elected President (in 1979) and the first civilian President to hand over to an elected successor. These, he said makes OBJ a man of history. Interestingly, OBJ’s visit this time coincided with the 202 anniversary of the Fulani conquest of Dutse in 1807.

Then came the clincher from the Emir. He said, “Two years ago, you had an adopted son in the Government House; today, you have your real son in the (Jigawa) Government House”. It was a sharp Emiral distinction of the relationship between OBJ/Saminu Turaki, (Lamido’s predecessor) and OBJ/Sule Lamido.

When OBJ got up to speak, he started by saying that the last time he was in Jigawa State, he knew that even the state capital lacked many things. “What I didn’t know at that time was that to move the state forward, you need somebody who knew the needs of people and who will be dynamic enough to provide those needs. So, we must thank God for giving us this governor that we have today”.

Confessing that he did not know Sule Lamido very well “except by reputation that he is a socialist”, OBJ said it was either that it was truly that he didn’t know him well or Lamido has gotten wider knowledge “because I can see that he has transformed from being a socialist to a traditionalist”. While in the car on our way here, said the former President, Lamido told him a number of things and one of them was about paying a courtesy call on the Emir and “I was surprised because some traditional rulers were apprehensive that Sule would become governor”. Until you see somebody very well, don’t judge him, OBJ cautioned no one in particular, emphasizing that he did not see how anyone from the North-Western and South-Western Nigeria could trample on traditional rulers.

Following on the applause this drew, OBJ declared that that everything Lamido had said about him were true. In 1999, he said, Nigeria was not looking for a President who will provide roads and water but also hold Nigeria together. According to him, he said it then that what he had to give was leadership. His verdict now is that “Sule was close to me in giving that leadership, internally and externally”.

Continuing, OBJ said that in 1999, some people said to him that he was going to be the last President of Nigeria; that after him, there would be no Nigeria again. I said, what did that mean? Today, those who predicted doom and failure have been proved wrong, he said.

Turning to Lamido, OBJ said while trying to hold Nigeria together at home, the external work had to be done. “In this, Sule Lamido was the arrow head for that exercise. Sule is tough and soft. But he has a way of dealing with people that makes him loved. When I travel now, people ask me, how is that your foreign minister. If it is men who asked me, I tell them. If it is women who asked me, I say umh, (a reference to Lamido’s aloofness from extra-marital relationships).

Describing Lamido as a man who had both passion and courage, OBJ said the governor was, indeed, his true son, saying those were the core attributes of success and leadership.

Watching OBJ speak at every moment of his Jigawa trip, one came away with the impression that, apart from a very shinny babanriga and the aristocratic shoe he now wears, nothing else about him has changed. Those same speech mannerisms, foot works and same attitude of worshipping only at his own altar are all there. Only History will tell his place in History.