Beware of Obasanjo’s pieces of advice, Na’ Abba Warns Buhari:

Obasanjo played a big role in weakening the legislature. It is common knowledge that he did all he could to see to my impeachment and removal as the Speaker by my colleagues....


What he wanted was to install a puppet. In my own case and that of the House of Representatives, he did not succeed.

In the Senate, he orchestrated the impeachment and removal of my counterpart, CHUBA OKADIGBO. No doubt, this weakened the Senate in that his eventual successor Anyim Pius Anyim, was a confessed Obasanjonian. Together with Obasanjo, they engaged in doing a lot of things, too numerous to mention here, that eventually culminated in weakening the institution .

In 2003, Obasanjo colluded with the PDP to bring to the legislature people who should not be there, all in his effort to see the Constitution amended to accommodate his tenure elongation project. It almost succeeded but for the requirement that to amend any item in the Constitution, two thirds members of both Houses must to vote in the affirmative. If it were ordinary majority votes required, that anti-democratic project would have succeeded and he would have been enjoying his fifth term today.

He would of course never have allowed the APC to emerge. I can go on and on. The emergence of the Senate President in 2007 was no doubt because of the active support he gave to the tenure elongation project . Unfortunately for the country, he became the longest serving presiding officer of the Senate.

President Buhari seems to be very close to Obasanjo. Considering the adverse role you said he played in this democracy, what would be your advice to President Buhari about his closeness to Obasanjo?

I obviously would not want to come between Buhari and Obasanjo. They knew each other in the military. Buhari was variously a Minister and military secretary under him as well as a military governor. So Buhari knows him better than I do. So he knows how to handle him. However, in 1984, when Buhari became Head of State, he said his administration was an offshoot of the Obasanjo administration.

I was, therefore, baffled when, in 1999, Obasanjo, having become the President, became determined to embarrass Buhari over his headship of the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF). He instituted probe after probe to find faults with Buhari.

Unfortunately for him he did not find anything. Indeed, he personally harassed and interrogated Buhari. I was in the government, so I know all these. He went on to disband the PTF in spite of the important infrastructural projects being undertaken by the body, against the advice of some of us.

The nation lost so much to this singular misadventure in monetary terms that I personally called into question Obasanjo’s patriotic credentials. The other day, I watched on television Obasanjo’s emissary handing over documents to Buhari on power infrastructure developed by his think tank, an action that made me laugh profusely.

How could someone who spent $16b on power without achieving anything when he was President bring a proposal on that matter to anybody! While I would not advise Buhari to repay Obasanjo in his own coins, I would advocate that he should not allow him to be distracting him.

He hasn’t got any ideas to offer him. Of recent, he took some Colombians to Buhari and introduced them as experts on insurgency. Up till now, Colombia is battling insurgents. So I don’t see how the Colombians would help end insurgency in Nigeria.So, he should relate with him with some circumspection.

 It must never escape Buhari’ s memory that all the difficulties Nigeria is going through today are Obasanjo ‘s handiwork, including the fielding of the likes of Umaru Y’ar’adua and Goodluck Jonathan to be President and Vice President and subsequently the President in spite of the known condition and limitations of all of them.

 He did that with the sole purpose of continuing to run the government from Otta, which unfortunately for him failed. Both denied him that privilege and guarded their mandates jealously. This accounted for his hostility to Jonathan.