Former presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan have been cautioned against jeopardizing the country’s existence in a bid to propagate their selfish agenda.
Some Concerned Nigerians gave this counsel in a letter signed by Rev Musa Fomson and Prince Raymond Enero, Convener and Secretary respectively and addressed to the former leaders.
According to the group, the inciting and derogatory public comments of the pair has reached the head and can no longer be condoned.
Read full letter below:
Your Excellencies, please permit us to extend our heartfelt and warm greetings to you. And may we also congratulate both of you on the June 12, 2019 Democracy Day celebration. We believe President Muhammadu Buhari, GCFR took the appropriate steps by redefining and normalizing Nigeria’s most suitable date for the commemoration of our democracy day.
We all celebrated in grand style, as we fondly remembered our struggles for the entrenchment of democracy in Nigeria with the Late Chief MKO Abiola as the national and international symbol of this historic date .
And we pray God Almighty to bless and protect every Nigerian leader who has either benefitted from democracy or have had the opportunity to lead us under a democratic government.
We specially salute you, our former leaders for the rare privilege to lead Nigeria, a nation of over 200 million people. Leadership is a great burden and whether you discharged your responsibilities to the Federal Republic of Nigeria (FRN) responsibly as the exigencies of the time demanded or neglected it, we cannot say more than to thank each one of you for the service to fatherland.
We as Concerned Nigerians have therefore welcome all of you and indeed, all Nigerians to the beginning of the journey to the #NextLevel under the stewardship of President Buhari. And as concerned citizens, we respectfully welcome you aboard this ship of state to the Promised land.
However, we have certain observations to make publicly about your senseless loquaciousness on national issues in a manner that is unbecoming of former Nigerian leaders.
Sirs, you can understand that many former leaders of Nigeria are dead; but many more are still alive . But they are not famed for flippancy, intolerant of their successors and the eagerness to criticize as has become the favourite past time of the two of you.
We have observed that you often plant landmines directly or indirectly on the path of the incumbent Presidency through inciting and derogatory public comments. It is becoming unbearable for the rest of us to bear and we thought it wise to let you know.
Both of you had the golden opportunity to lead Nigeria, and in Chief Obasanjo’s case even twice. But we did not see any significant impact on the prosperity or fortunes of our country. So, we cannot discern why both of you should decide to gang-up either overtly or clandestinely to ensure that President Buhari is not allowed to also use his wisdom in the leadership of this great country and be held accountable for his actions or inactions?
Had you remembered to transform your great vision or ideas when you held the office of President of Nigeria, this illusory and caustic thinking that outside of the same office, you have better ideas on how to move Nigeria forward would not suffice at the moment.
It means you never moved Nigeria to any level of development or prosperity despite the enormous resources at your disposal. To begin to think that out of office your policies and programs are better or the incumbent is so wrong is not only disingenuous, and distractive, but also inherently a faulty inclination which should not be aligned with former leaders of any nation.
We wish to remind both of you of consciously pulling Nigeria back while in Aso Rock either by acts of omission, negligence or inactions. If you were genuine leaders, with any modicum of character worth the names you answer or flaunt anywhere today, your betrayal of Nigeria would have shut up permanently and silently watch President Buhari do the things you could not do for us as a people and a nation.
Your Excellencies, again, permit us to remind of a few things you did to drag this country to the Golgotha. And we will start with Obasanjo, the self-acclaimed father of Nigeria, professional letter-writer, an elder statesman who neither respects his age nor utterances, the apostle of hate speeches and irremediably corrupt leader.
Sir, lets ignore your tenure as Nigeria’s Military Head of State. But theLate Gen. Sani Abacha spotted the evil in you and jailed you. Thereafter, you came out to preside over the affairs of Nigeria for eight years as democratic President. But what can you point as your legacy or the selling point of your Presidency?
We might be considered blind. But what we can see is that at the expiration of your tenure , you left Nigeria with the poorest electricity supply, after your administration claimed to have invested $16 billion on power generation. The administration you headed actively encouraged corruption by fully paying companies awarded the power contracts which never bothered to execute.
We cannot forget how you scandalously blackmailed Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) to donate public funds amounting to over N4 billion towards your personal library project. This institution which remains your private property forms proceed of a stolen goods which Senator Joshua Dariye and Rev. Jolly Nyame are currently serving various prison terms.
We recognize recognize your special talents and penchant for letter-writing. However, we are worried at the consistency of your doublespeak on national issues. Nigerians cannot trust your actions anymore hence you reverse yourself too often and easily. And this is because of your empty egoistic feeling of being the author of knowledge. The feeling that you an island of knowledge in Nigeria clearly makes you a jester before your contemporaries and hence they have learnt to take you less serious.
It is funny that you today excitedly talk about the Islamisation and fulanisation of Nigeria under the Buhari Presidency and complain about the deteriorating security in the country. But in your usually selfish manner, you forget that your administration created Boko Haram insurgency, which you rather supervised to fester. What was your motive for allowing Boko Haram insurgency to blossom?
Throughout your eight years in power, ethno-religious crises engulfed most parts of the country, with Kaduna and Jos as the outstanding examples. You had every opportunity to tackle the crises at the embryonic stages, but you reneged. We remember you publicly insulting the Chairman, Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) Plateau state chapter Rev. Pam as an idiot and CAN your foot.
Sir, you had the privilege to lay the solid foundation for Nigeria’s multi-party democracy by developing strong and virile democratic institutions. But you rather built monsters in the system and taught everybody the art of arm-twisting. Today, much of the impunity in the system is credited to your administration.
And Your Excellency, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan; you presided over the affairs of Nigeria at a period considered as Nigeria’s era of oil boom, but you could not translate the resources into wealth for all Nigerians. Rather after six years, you left Nigerians in severe poverty, misery, suffering and a totally collapsed public infrastructure.
Today, all of you prefer to chorus the pathetic insecurity situation in the country, while ignoring the efforts of the Presidency just to spite President Buhari. Let us quote a reference to you by the Gen. TY Danjuma-led Nigeria Christian Elders Forum (NCEF) in a recent paper they delivered to the UK Parliament. A part of it expressed your helplessness in containing the Boko Haram menace thus;
“The case of an arms dealer, a Nigerian who lives in Egypt was reported to the Department of State Security (DSS). The DSS did not carry out the directive of President Jonathan that the suspect be arrested and interrogated. Intelligence report in 2010, found (former governor of Borno) personal involvement in the recruitment, training and dispatch of Boko Haram fighters. During the period of Jonathan, the Islamists consolidated and the result is what is taking place presently in Nigeria.”
The narrative above has expressed the depth of your incompetence to handle the insecurity challenges during your stay in the Presidential Villa, Abuja. But we wonder what gives you a voice of sanity outside of government to vomit the jargons you spew intermittently.
Sir, you colluded with your appointees to mindlessly loot and plunder Nigeria. You legalized corruption and classified it as “mere stealing,” while defending those who dubiously cornered public commonwealth.
We the concerned citizens wish to quickly remind you of the relics of your administration ranked the worse in Nigeria’s recent political history. While prices of crude oil went as high as $140 per barrel, you deflated Nigeria’s foreign reserves rather than saving for the rainy day; you emptied the vaults and shared monies in the Excess Crude Account (ECA) and Sovereign Wealth Fund at the detriment of Nigerians.
And in spite of the huge resources at your disposal, you rather borrowed to fund recurrent expenditure, encouraged oil subsidy scam, and increased local contractual indebtedness running into trillions of naira from where Obasanjo left it.
We wish to further note that by May 2015, when you handed over power to President Buhari, your administration owed federal civil servants months of unpaid salaries and pensions. And the scenario was replicated in at least 27 out of the 36 states of the federation. This was after you dragged the economy into recession in the midst of wealth. Is this record of a President who should be proud to speak out of office?
Sir, you proved to every Nigerian the extent you are unconscionable undermined the lives of Nigerians by approving the sharing of $2.1 billion voted for arms procurement to battle Boko Haram in Northeast to your party chieftains and loyalists.
It told Nigerians that you were mindless, inhuman and unsympathetic to the plight of those killed every day by insurgency and the millions of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). A leader in your mould should be ashamed of public comments on issues of leadership.
Therefore, Your Excellencies, your atrocities or sins on Nigeria are too many to be exhausted. But let it be known to you that we are aware that the reason both of you have reunited today is to scout for ways to destroy Nigeria. And this plot is now well known to the citizens and the people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
As former leaders, you have unashamedly rendered yourselves as agents of destabilization being used by vested foreign interests to destroy a country, the two of you once ruled with an iron fist. Nigerians are the least surprised at your motives or that of the veiled sponsors.
Sirs, may you know that the “Operation Destroy Nigeria,” which you have been covertly executing against our country is no longer hidden. But do not think this satanic agenda is executable by veiling our faces with your instigated hatred for President Buhari. And we urge Nigerians to keep an eagle eye on your movements and actions.
We are sensible enough to refuse to agree with leaders like you tending to portray themselves as saints after your many sins against our country. In most parts of the world, leaders of your ilk, who have committed such sins against their nation are being held in endless detention . Let it be known to you that the case in Nigeria cannot be different and this is what Nigerians will demand in the days ahead.
Thank you for your audience.
