Travelling through Nigeria recently, Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem remembers how he was stopped by a crowd of people warning him that bandits has set up an ‘operation’ and were looting passing motorists. Abdul-Raheem assesses the state of lawlessness in Nigeria and the rule of Olusegun Obasanjo, who is moving ever closer to a third term bid and the possibility of becoming a “lame duck president with everything imploding around him”.

These days I have been spending more time in Nigeria. ‘Home', as they say, is indeed the best, but for most Nigerians it must be tough love. It is often difficult for one to say if things are getting better or if one is just getting used to it and lowering one's standards - while increasing one's tolerance levels of unfair situations and injustices on the many fronts of the multiple obstacle race that the country has become. Just when you think things are never going to get worse, Nigeria and Nigerians combine their unique capacity to find ways of digging deeper and sinking further.

The general insecurity across the country has proven so insurmountable that Nigerians seemed to have resigned themselves to it and put themselves on a permanent state of alert, hoping that lady luck, miracle prayers, or some voodoo or witchcraft or a combination of all these will see them through.

In addition to these, those who are rich buy themselves militias. Armed robbery, hired killers, political killings, and other forms of gratuitous violence are perpetrated both privately and officially by the police and other security agencies charged with public safety. The Inspector General of Police recently publicly apologised and promised to take action about a number of serving police men accused of 'hiring' their guns to gangs of armed robbers. And the Police write boldly on their vehicles ‘to protect with integrity and honesty’, either as a sick joke or as a mockery of Nigerians.

Not long ago I had a personal experience of the lawlessness. I was travelling home to Funtua, which is about 75 kilometres north of the University town of Samaru Zaria, at around 8pm. At a small town called Giwa we saw huge crowds of people lined up on the road and a row of different vehicles parked by the roadside. Everybody was shouting that we should stop. We did and we were told that 'there was an operation' ahead of us. This operation was not a security sweep or road check: armed robbers had mounted a road bloc and were taking whatever they could find from their victims. Confidently we were told the 'operation' was going to be over in about an hour. We were advised that once there were cars coming from the opposite direction it meant the road was clear. And within an hour, as we were advised, 'the road opened' and we drove home safely.

You will be forgiven for asking a number of obvious questions: Where were the police? If everybody knew where they operated and even the time and also the days (usually market days in surrounding trading towns) why were the police not doing anything about it?

Very legitimate questions but only a stranger will ask these kinds of questions in Nigeria. Everybody knows that the police and the army, if they are not doing the 'operations' themselves, are aiding and abetting the crimes because they share in the booty. It is not only their guns that they rent out - they also regularly parcel out sections of the federal highways so that these nefarious 'operations' can take place with impunity. Once they are done you will see siren blaring police vehicles rushing in at break-neck speed to the scene after their comrades in crime have bolted with the loot!

Yet this is a country in which Obasanjo and his acolytes delude themselves into believing the people have never had it so good. That is why they are orchestrating a constitutional reform that will make it possible for Obasanjo to stand for a third term like his good friend and ex-Comrade, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, in Uganda.

Obasanjo does not seem to have learnt anything from his previous experience as a military head of state, his stint in civil society as founder of Africa Leadership Forum and his horrible prison term under Abacha.

A friend who was present at a meeting between General Ibrahim Badmasi Babangida when he was head of state and General Obasanjo as a coup-plotter-turned NGO-activist narrated an interesting exchange to me that is relevant to this matter. Obasanjo had fallen into an armed robbery ambush on his way to a scheduled meeting with the smiling dictator, Babangida. Being the cautious general that he was he did not play any hero with armed robbers. He knew he was outgunned and saw no rationality in resisting so he surrendered the money he had and they let him go. They did not know and could not have cared who he was. If they had known it was Obasanjo they probably would have even killed him anyway. He became a victim like any other innocent Nigerian whose only crime was driving on the road. In narrating this experience to Babangida, citizen Obasanjo told him that he had no doubt that there was no political motivation to the crime. But if it had leaked out to the public immediately many would have jumped to the conclusion that - because Obasanjo had been openly very critical of Babangida’s policies - the government had a hand in it. Therefore he asked Babangida to take the issues of public safety and security seriously, otherwise the government was going to be held responsible for everything and anything.

It is a shame that the same Obasanjo cannot allow himself similar wisdom since he became President seven years ago.

As the tussles for power intensify at all levels of government, a spate of killings and fear of more violence has gripped the country.

By no means would all of the violence be politically motivated, but so bad are things now and so polarised has the country become that everything is blamed on Obasanjo and his government. The recent brutal murder of the wife of the 'former radical' governor of Kano State, Alhaji Muhammadu Abubakar Rimi, was immediately suspected to be politically motivated because Rimi is one of the most vocal critics of Obasanjo’s third term bid. The available evidence so far from the investigations suggest that to the extent that politics was involved in the murder it had local dynamics rather than anything to do with Aso Rock. But who cares for such empirical details in a leader-centric system where the President is God?

It is not only killings that are blamed on Aso Rock. Many of those being investigated for corruption now claim that it is because they are opposed to Obasanjo's third term bid or because they are supporters of Obasanjo's estranged Deputy, Atiku Abubakar. The whole governance system is grinding to a halt so that even the good things that Obasanjo's regime has done and is doing are lost in the controversies. He is losing control of the machinery of the state and on his way to becoming a rogue President.

Yet he can retreat from the abyss and leave a more positive legacy by making a broadcast to the Nation renouncing any intention of amending the constitution to facilitate his self-succession in 2007. This will immediately drastically bring down the overheated political atmosphere of the country. It will also destabilise his many enemies who have built a coalition of convenience around anti-third term campaigns. More than that it will give him the opportunity to regain credibility for a lasting legacy in the areas of public safety, economic reform, the war against corruption and even more leverage in deciding who succeeds him. Failing this he will remain a lame duck president with everything imploding around him but travelling all over the world to fix everybody's problems without a clue on what to do about those he was allegedly elected to solve.

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa

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