Political Intrigues, Devilish Scheming And The Reign Of Terror

For some time 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 labelled 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 titled 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 the 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 in which subject matter will be detailed subsequently. The PCG shall liaise with state governors, party chairmen at the 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 the 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 a 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 attempt 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 is 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 position himself to a much higher political office. However, the point must be made that 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 around 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.