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POLITICAL INTRIGUES,
DEVLISH SCHEMING AND THE REIGN OF TERROR
By Jide Ayobolu <jideayobolu@yahoo.co.uk>
Nov 4, 2006
For sometime now, a 24-page document prepared
by a group that is working very closely with President Olusegun Obasanjo
is now in the public domain. The document contains very well documented
plans by a cabal to manipulate the 2007 elections and install staunch
believers in the government’s economic reform agenda, as president, vice
president and governors of most states of the country. The document is
labeled confidential, the presidential advisory team (T6), this document
suggests strategies that would systematically coordinate the use of
police, SSS, EFCC, ICPC and other state organs as per their respective
roles before and during elections based on new approaches. Among others,
the document entitled Nigeria 20-2020: From 2006 to 2020: Sustainability
and Succession Plan (Draft for Discussion) contains strategies for
selecting those that would rule Nigeria for the next 25years on the
platforms of the PDP, mounting a national and global propaganda,
restructuring and strengthening the PDP, as well as neutralizing the Arewa
Consultative Forum (ACF). According to the document Nigeria’s continuous
rise among countries with seeming manifest destiny of greatness owes much
to President Olusegun Obasanjo’s implementation of this Administration’s
Economic Reform Agenda (ERA). This agenda could be undermined unless the
elections taking place in 2007 provide for the emergence of a leadership
that believes in the compelling necessity to preserve and expand the ERA.
There are disturbing signs in the polity that some of the leading
political gladiators who feel threatened by the reform see the elections
as their final chance to actually reverse the economic reform instead of
carrying it far into the future. If indeed the economic reform programmes
are so good, why can’t it sell itself? Why must it be foisted on the
people at all cost? In any place in the world, there can never be one
economic model as solution to economic problems.
Therefore, the
document claims that to maintain the present scheme of things, the
following steps must be taken, namely the preservation and entrenchment of
President Olusegun Obasanjo’s Reform legacy; sustenance of the Nigerian
project and its corollary dream of world class greatness; maintaining the
PDP as the ruling power at the federal level and majority of the 36 states
and FCT amongst others. On the funding of PDP the document suggested
encouraging and accepting corporate donations, mobilizing offshore funding
and internal re-organization, it detested a situation in which PDP failed
to rally its majority in the National Assembly to support Mr. President’s
legislative proposals, annual budgets and desirable constitutional
amendments, PDP failed to get its principal officers in the Senate and the
House of Representatives to abandon the opposition agenda which fact made
the latter’s key members to play larger than life roles in the two
chambers, PDP failed to get its elected majority members in Plateau and
Anambra States House of Assembly to deal with governors whose conduct in
office left much to be desired, PDP’s subservience to those perceived as
immoral power brokers particularly in Oyo and Anambra States, the
inability of PDP governments at all levels to win the propaganda war(media)
war or the hearts and minds of Nigerians as to rely on the party’s
performance to return them to power, hence everything must be done to
reposition the PDP to eliminate these encumbrances and also be able to
remain in power for the next 25 years at all cost.
To be able to achieve
this feat therefore, the document suggested that, the president should
maintain the size of Team 6, but create a president’s core group (PGC)
that will not exceed 10 in number. The PCG should have a chairman at
large, namely. Mr. President. However, a vice chairman who would be its
formal leader must be somebody with unhindered access to the chairman at
large. The vice chairman assists the president in overseeing the zonal
coordinators. But it bears logic that when PDP’s presidential candidate
emerges, he or she would automatically become the vice-chairman to be
assisted throughout the campaigns by his predecessor. The function of the
core-group is to systematically coordinate the use of police, SSS, EFCC,
ICPC and other state organs as per their respective roles before and
during elections based on new approaches which subject matter will be
detailed out subsequently. The PCG shall liaise with state governors,
party chairmen at state and LG levels, and key political leaders in the
state to ensure unity, collaboration and PDP’s success in the 2007
elections. The zonal facilitators will oversee the effective
implementation of targets and operations in the states taking cognizance
of need for varying these in line with peculiarities of their respective
states. Where the police, SSS et al have zonal structures, zonal
coordinate will relate to them, they would also be responsible for
assisting weaker states under their domain reinforcement from within the
zone, or undermining the opposition’s ability to secure outside support
for its weaker states. The zonal coordinators must enjoy the confidence of
the president and have preexisting relationships of trust with members of
the Core Group. The Zonal coordinators shall be based in Abuja, regularly
commuting to their operational areas in a discrete but effective way.
To this end the
presidential core group according to the document has resolved to engage
with rather than withdraw support from hostile media houses, as well as
intensively patronize friendly ones. There is need to urgently convert a
not so hostile paper like The Punch into a friendly one and revive
The New Nigerian, and The Reporter newspaper if the late
Yar’Adua family would be agreeable. The use of the unprecedented federal
electronic media in the propaganda war is unavoidable, being a weapon that
is readily available in the arsenals of the ruling party and therefore all
obstacles to its deployment must be anticipated and removed immediately. A
strategy should also be evolved to snatch away the international wire
services from the opposition. Equally important is the need to cultivate
FM radio stations for effective deployment against the enemy whose dirty
deals and shameful conducts the print media has been largely paid to
conceal. All stringers of the international wire services resident in
Nigeria and their editors abroad should be identified for engagement,
neutralization or deployment against the enemy that has used these
effectively.
Without mincing words the
document is a wicked and calculated attempted to systematic rig elections
in Nigeria by the PDP for the next twenty five years as well as impose
people that are opposed to the will of the electorates into power. It an
attempt, to ensure that, the will of the people and the votes of the
electorate amounts to nothing at the end of the day. If indeed the reason
for public service is to serve the people, if the reason for going into
public office is for the greatest happiness of the greatest number, while
not neglecting the interest of the minority, then there would have been no
need whatsoever for this kind of document or what can be aptly termed PDP
elite conspiracy against the Nigerian people. It is imperative to
underscore the fact that, the Obasanjo led government has started to
implement the sinister agenda contained in the document piece-meal. The
EFCC, ICPC, SSS AND Police have all been politicized, they have all become
willing tools in the hands of the present government to foist a reign of
terror on the people, and this too is a very corrupt act, in fact, the
entire impeachments saga are part of the ploy to tenaciously hold on to
power against the wish of the people and the constitution of the country.
The document is said to have been prepared by el-Rufai, because of his
desperate and inordinate ambition of wanting to be president of Nigeria
next year. A close look at the document shows in a very sly and somewhat
covert manner various methods through which el-Rufai wants to eliminate
contending power within the PDP, and strategically positioning himself to
a much higher political office. However, the point must be made that he
his working in sync with the president, as the president is not ready to
relinquish power come May next year, but at the same time el-Rufai is
running rings round the president without the president knowing, in other
words el-Rufai is setting up the president in a very sinuous manner and
there is even a proposal in the pipeline to the effect that the handover
date should be shifted from May to October 2007, and this is just to buy
time in the desperate bid to continue to hang on to power at all cost.
Okey Ndibe captured the
rottenness of the Obasanjo led government which is the reason for this
document, in a memo to the National Assembly, he said, “under this
presidency, what used to be called the Nigerian Police Force has
degenerated to a farce, a veritable tool in the execution of
illegalities…..Nigeria may not be the most corrupt nation on earth, but it
seriously lays claim to the patent for primitive transfers of public funds
into private pockets. Far from abating, that practice has metastasized
under Obasanjo’s presidency. He has handed out the nation’s oil blocs to
his friends, empowering some truly disgraceful men and women in the
process. There is a real war, an urgent war, to be fought against
corruption, but this president lacks the ethical credentials and moral
wherewithal to declare, much less lead it. In his hands, the effort
against graft has become more theatre than a focused campaign. He has
turned the war into an instrument for savaging his corrupt personal foes
(while coddling his often more corrupt friends), a petty tool for bringing
his critics and political opponents brutally to heel, the lesson? That a
man deeply embedded in vice and highly invested in corrupt enrichment
cannot be entrusted with galvanizing a true crusade against corruption”.
It is for this reason that it is very important that all the civil society
groups, human rights organizations and all well meaning Nigerian should
work hard together to get out these groups of political scavengers and
nonentities from power, they have become a curse to the Nigerian State.
By
Jide Ayobolu
No 19 Gongola Street
Garki 2
Abuja
Nigeria
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