LIKE SADDAM, LIKE OBASANJO

Saddam Hussein is different thing to different people. He is to some a villain while to some others he is a hero of some sort. But whichever way one looks t the man the one fact that cannot be taken away from his personae is that he came to this world with a heart of stone. And he has not shown in any instance shown that he is ready to drop that barbaric coat of a terror. The man is simply unrepentant; but I know that some day soon, even members of his own family will begin to see him the way the rest of the world sees him.

For over thirty years he held his people hostage and the rest of the world, spellbound. He barked, jeered, bullied, threatened, kidnapped, arrested, detained, tortured and killed thousands of innocent Iraqi’s. He takes delight in seeing people groan and cry in pin. The closest word to sanity that one could describe him with is a ‘saddist’. He is also a dreamer and an adventurous man who delights in taking risks, big risks.

But even when the larger world sees him as a villain, there are still some die-hard followers who believe in him and would put their lives on the line to prove their loyalty to him. Most of Saddam’s men were more loyal to him that they were to Iraq. And this is quite understandable because, the man’s notoriety at pulling the trigger at the head of any opposition, even at the slightest provocation, is very legendary. Saddam had always been a sad man; and here one easily make out the correlation between his name and his mien. He remains one of the world’s most dreaded war criminal who took a passionate excitement in extra judicial killings.

I am one of those who still haboured a deep feeling of disgust and disappointment at the ease with which Saddam was apprehended by the American-led allied forces at the fall of his reign. One thing that came out of the gulf war is that the Iraqi people were really dying in silence in their country. Nobody dared cry out else the result obviously, is death. I have herd people advance the argument that the Iraqi people were happy with Saddam because, during his time the people were living well. Some people here who had not even ventured past Murtla Muhammed International airport are ready to put up robust argument that Iraqi’s had access to free accommodation, good jobs, medi-care, and even free cars for graduates; but its all lies. We only needed the pulling down of his government to see the poverty behind the curtains that shielded us from the real situation on the ground.

He has gone down from being a dreaded dictator to a prisoner undergoing trials at a special war crimes tribunal. And having realised that his rating has gone down pretty drastically, after his cheap arrest by American forces, he is trying to throw up every stunt to impress the world that he is not coward after all. Thus the stubbornness he is putting up at the trials can be understandable, he needs to prove that soldier is always a soldier. But too bad, nobody is fooled.

Like Saddam Hussein, our President, Mathew Aremu Okikiola Olusegun Obasanjo is also not one man I think Nigerians would describe as their hero. Not even in his first coming did our people consider him a wonderful person, it only happened that he took over from where Murtala left off and merely carried that mans agenda through. And by that he became the darling of the western world. The popularity OBJ enjoyed when he handed over power to civilians in 1979 was more like an inherited glory.

We can all see that too well now that he is playing politics all on his own. We can see that he would not have gone back to his farm so soon were the 1976 putsch his own plot. Like Saddam, Mr. President had his own record of high volume human rights abuses. Poverty level under his rule has also been on the rise since he assumed office as civilian president, and even now that Nigerians were supposed to be warming up to bid him fare-thee-well from Aso Rock, the Balogun of Owu is adamant. He wants to stay on for another term; he wants to sit-tight!

Like Saddam, he is unrepentant; like Saddam, he is stubborn; like Saddam our dear president is failing to look beyond the high walls of Aso Rock and see that Nigerians are tired, disgusted, and terrified of his rule. Like Saddam Hussein, President Olusegun Obasanjo is daring Nigerians. And he is also daring God!

I disagree that there should not be any basis to compare both men. Though OBJ might look hesitant in applying gas as a form of torture, he equally has the capability to inflict pain on any form of opposition. A good example is what he is doing to rubbish the name of any politician whom he considers threat to his third term agenda. Like Saddam, he is not a listening statesman else, the masses would not be finding it excruciatingly difficult to feed and he would be saying the economy is buoyant. That to me is the height of insensitivity.

But what is repulsive in all of this is that Mr. President thinks that he has friends and supporters who will put their lives on the line for him. Here sir, you are very wrong! In fact, he would be shocked by the time he leaves office that he has no friends after all. He would be amazed how his Ota home -which is today a beehive of political activities every weekend- will become a deserted enclave on his exit from the presidential villa. I expect Mr. President as a retired military man to know that he has no true loyalist in this game called politics.

He may stubbornly overlook this piece of genuine observation but, I can bet that starting from sometime in January 2007 he will begin to see that in deed, he has no true loyalist among the contractors and jobbers who swan around him today, as politicians, supporters, and political godsons.

Like Saddam, Obasanjo might spend his last days out of office a continual battle to want to be relevant and taken seriously.

SOURCE:- GLOBAL EXCELLENCE MAGAZINE