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Obasanjo's 2007 End Games
Durojaiye, a journalist, writes from Lagos, Nigeria
If there is one issue that has dominated Nigeria 's political space in the last few months, it is the one that has come to acquire the sobriquet of ‘Third Term'.
As Muhammadu Buhari, the man he defeats in the 2003 poll puts it, even a school boy in Nigeria now knows that President Olusegun Obasanjo is scheming to stay on in office after the end his current second four-year tenure in year 2007. What is still in doubt is whether he wants an elongation of the current to six years, or a fresh four-year tenure.
Even though the President, as expected of any astute politician, has not come out to declare his intention, no one who has been watching the nation's political videotapes would fail to hear the sounds of applause from Obasanjo's heartbeats for those beating the Third Term drums.
But what are the signs that Obasanjo has indeed caught what can only be termed the African Leaders disease? How could this ‘project possibly be actualized? What would be the likely role of Babangida in all of these?
Indeed, the very first sign, and the most clear that Obasanjo is angling for a Third Term came a few months ago when he blasted his Vice, Atiku Abubakar, describing him as a lair and disloyal deputy.
Obasanjo made this statement during one of his monthly media chats, which are transmitted live on National Television. Atiku, who nurses an ambition to succeed Obasanjo and has never hidden this, made the mistake of telling a newspaper, in an interview, that Obasanjo swore to him that he would leave office by 2007.
The President not only upbraided Atiku during the live broadcast, but had since moved to whittle down completely the Vice President's enormous influence within their Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), while also targeting Atiku's associates and allies for political victimization.
The second obvious sign of Obasanjo's desire for more years in Aso Rock, is the so called PDP Reforms. This initiative came after Obasanjo's upbraiding of Atiku. We all read the reports of how a fresh membership registration exercise was embarked on, with the intent of weeding out some members, especially those in the hitherto powerful camp of Atiku. Of how new party executives were picked at ward, local and state levels with the President and the PDP National Executives, which he controls, firmly planting their men in the positions. And how the National Executives were returned to office through ‘affirmation', rather than election at a stage-managed National Convention.
Anyone who understands politics would know that the person to whom the executives are loyal wields enormous power within a party. And that party conventions are of immense importance, since they are the venues where party executives and flag bearers emerge.
Obasanjo's strengthening of his hold on the PDP and the stage-managing of the National PDP Convention can be another clear signal of his third term bid.
A third signal would be adoption of electronic voting machine by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). This is the most obvious sign that the PDP is planning the devious trick against voters in the 2007 elections, in which Obasanjo may again be its candidate.
We all know how the use of electronic voting machines helped rigged current US President George Bush back to power for a second term. One writer Sandeep Atwal who did an expose, entitled “How Bush Won the 2004 Presidential Election” as far back as July 2003, likened the use of voting machines to “electronic coup d'etat”.
Atwal described electronic voting as unreliable and unverifiable.
He wrote in his article: Dr. Rebecca Mercuri is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Bryn Mawr College and has been referred to as "the leading independent expert on electronic voting technology." Shortly before the 2000 Presidential election, Mercuri defended her Ph.D. dissertation on the subject of "Electronic Vote Tabulation: Checks and Balances" at the Engineering School of the University of Pennsylvania .
Mercuri's website is an astonishing checklist of the lack of safeguards and other failings that plague the current crop of electronic voting systems. One of Mercuri's primary concerns is that electronic systems provide no way for a voter, or election officials, to verify that a cast ballot corresponds to the vote being recorded. As Mercuri notes on her site, "Any programmer can write code that displays one thing on a screen, records something else, and prints yet another result." There is no known way to ensure that this is not happening inside of a voting system.
Even as recently as November 3, 2005 , the international news magazine, Newsweek , carried a report with the headline: Black Box Voting Blues : Electronic ballot technology makes things easy. But some computer-security experts warn of the possibility of stolen elections .
In the report, the unverifiable nature of these machines rang through. The first three paragraphs of the reported, reproduced below, speak volumes.
“Nov. 3 issue - After the traumas of butterfly ballots and hanging chad, election officials are embracing a brave new ballot: sleek, touch-screen terminals known as direct recording electronic voting systems (DRE). States are starting to replace their Rube Goldbergesque technology with digital devices like the Diebold Accu-Vote voting terminal. Georgia uses Diebolds exclusively, and other states have spent millions on such machines, funded in part by the 2002 federal Help America Vote Act. Many more terminals are on the way.
Unforunately, the machines have “a fatal disadvantage,” says Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey , who's sponsoring legislation on the issue. “They're unverifiable. When a voter votes, he or she has no way of knowing whether the vote is recorded.” After you punch the buttons to choose your candidates, you may get a final screen that reflects your choices—but there's no way to tell that those choices are the ones that ultimately get reported in the final tally. You simply have to trust that the software inside the machine is doing its job.
It gets scarier. The best minds in the computer-security world contend that the voting terminals can't be trusted. Listen, for example, to Avi Rubin, a computer-security expert and professor at Johns Hopkins University who was slipped a copy of Diebold's source code earlier this year. After he and his students examined it, he concluded that the protections against fraud and tampering were strictly amateur hour. “Anyone in my basic security classes would have done better,” he says. The cryptography was weak and poorly implemented, and the smart-card system that supposedly increased security actually created new vulnerabilities. Rubin's paper concluded that the Diebold system was “far below even the most minimal security standards.” Naturally, Diebold disagrees with Rubin. “We're very confident of accuracy and security in our system,” says director of Diebold Election Systems Mark Radke.”
Is it not obvious that the PDP has a hidden agenda with the adoption of this unreliable and unverifiable system of voting for the 2007 elections?
Having established the Third Term agenda as real, the next question is ‘How can this possibly be actualized?'
To borrow a phrase from Buhari, even a school boy knows how this would be done. The National Assembly would pass a constitutional amendment to make it possible. It is too obvious that President Obasanjo can get whatever he wants from the present crop of national lawmakers. Besides, some of the leaders of the national Assembly are in the forefront of the Third term Campaign.
To the question of what likely role Babangida would play in all of these, I believe he may not come out in the open to support it, but he would NEVER join the ranks of those kicking against it.
This is based on my earlier canvassed position that Babangida's so-called aspiration is driven by fear. That he needs power in his own hands or those of his surrogates to assure himself of safety and escape prosecution for countless crimes, disgrace and years in prison.
In fact, Babangida may become a Third Term campaigner, given that he would continue to be secured for as long as Obasanjo, who has elevated him to the rank of an untouchable continues to be in power.
To my mind, the Third Term project has a high probability of succeeding. Forget the politicians who are coming together under various names as Movement for the Defense of Democracy (MDD) and Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD). At the end of the day, they are likely to make little or no impact even after transforming to a political party. It would take hard-fighting opposition party several years to take power from the PDP. Not a political party formed one year to election.
Other reasons why the Third Term project may succeed include the fact that Nigeria's Organised Private Sector are strongly calling for many more years for Obasanjo, as evidenced by the arguments of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN) who are wary of reversal of the current economic reforms and anti-corruption crusade.
Also to my mind, politicians from the South would rather support more years for Obasanjo than allow power to slip back to the North so early in the day.
But the most importantly reason, as Nigeria 's Nobel Laureate Professor Wole Soyinka noted recently, is the perceived support of foreign powers who have always have a hand in who emerges the nation's leader.
However, the Obasanjo and those in support of his Third term agenda would have a formidable opposition in the Nigerian media. If anyone or group can stop the President from extending his tenure beyond 2007, I believe it is the press.
And Aso Rock might find this opposition insurmountable indeed. Should this turn out to be the case, then Obasanjo would have to opt for Plan B. Whatever that might be.
Also by Biodun Durojaiye
Audacity as Babangida’s Ultimate Strategy
IBB and mercenaries
An Aspiration Driven By Fear
Email: biodun@againstbabangida.com
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