Retired Obasanjo under probe
2008-04-08 10:38
Lagos - Following an eight-year stint as president of Nigeria and a 40-year career in politics and the military, Olusegun Obasanjo might have thought that after hand picking his successor he was in for a quiet retirement.
He could not have been more wrong, for since this born-again Christian withdrew to his chicken farm, not a day had gone by without him facing accusations of one sort or another.
The most virulent attacks were not from the opposition, which Obasanjo undermined during his two terms from 1999 to 2007, but rather from a parliamentary commission of enquiry and various state bodies investigating "the Obasanjo years" and various corruption scandals.
The bodies in question were going through a whole range of issues with a fine toothcomb: how Obasanjo managed his billions of oil money in the days when he was president and oil minister, how additional billions were frittered away on improving the power sector without anyone having anything to show for it and how companies were sold off to cronies on the cheap.
'Queen of Scandals'
Many of these sales had been revoked by the current administration.
One of the former president's daughters, the senator Iyabo Obasanjo-Bello, made the front page of The News, a weekly magazine, under the headline "Queen of Scandals".
Her name had been quoted in connection with money that disappeared from the health ministry and in relation to a $34m contract awarded to an Austrian company to build a power station, no stone of which was ever laid.
At the end of February two top ranking civil servants testified before a commission of parliamentary enquiry how Obasanjo in 2006 "inaugurated" a piece of waste land in the southern Cross River state, calling it a "power station".
OBJ, as Obasanjo was known, was making headlines again on Sunday in the leading Nigerian daily, the Guardian.
Nigeria 'produces less electricity now'
The paper said that the former president, now well into his seventies, might be called on to testify before a parliamentary commission investigating the some $13bn ostensibly spent on the power sector from 1999 to 2007.
Nigeria produced less electricity than it did eight years ago.
Former ministers had testified that Obasanjo authorised hundreds of millions of dollars to be paid out without respecting due process.
On Tuesday, the senate was poised to look into the sale of federal land and federal properties in Abuja during Obasanjo's time in office.
In addition to his supposed financial crimes - Obasanjo was penniless when he came out of prison in 1995 and today is sitting on a fortune - the former president is coming in for criticism for his political management. But he had not hit back at his critics while a debate over presidential immunity had been raging for weeks.