Nzeribe: Back to his old ways
By CHIDI OBINECHE
Thursday, March 11, 2010

Nzeribe

Yesterday, acclaimed maverick politician, Senator Arthur Nzeribe dug back to his pathway of intrigues and controversies. His call for the intervention of the military in the political affairs of the country can only be viewed in the lens of a man swimming on a familiar terrain.

Since 1979, when he came into political limelight after he “donated” a jet to the late Owelle of Onitsha, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe for his use as presidential candidate of the Nigerian Peoples Party (NPP), his personality and politics have been woven around the elements of surprise, self-service, inconsistent schemings and injurious macabre dances.
After the collapse of the Second Republic in which he served as a senator, he re-emerged in 1992 to float the ill-fated Association for Better Nigeria, ABN, which he ingeniously deployed in the truncation of the political transition programme of the General Ibrahim Babangida regime, and ultimately denied the late Chief Moshood Abiola his presidential mandate through a badly cooked legal ambush.

Prior to the June 12, 1993 election, precisely on June 10, his ABN obtained an injunction from the late Justice Bassey Ikpeme of the Federal High Court, Abuja, stopping its conduct. That move failed, owing to a decree which empowered the National Electoral Commission, NEC to disregard such order once an election date had been fixed.
Nzeribe tenaciously waged a relentless war against the re-validation of the ‘June 12’ election to the end. In 1998, when General Abdulsalami Abubakar came to power following the death of General Sani Abacha, he participated in the transition programme which culminated in his becoming a senator under the All Peoples Party, APP.

Just a few months into the democratic regime of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, he again sent shockwaves across the nation when he allegedly initiated an impeachment motion against Obasanjo claiming he had 74 senators backing the project.
The plot backfired, and instead he bagged a suspension. Senator Jonathan Zwingina (Adamawa) who moved the motion for his suspension upbraided him for his “consistent and unchanging anti-democratic character.
After the impeachment hoax, and on the heels of the leadership crisis in the South-East caucus of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in the Senate, he sought unsuccessfully to exploit a loophole to jump ship by deciding to decamp to the PDP in a desperate bid to actualise his senate presidency ambition.

Swinging full circle, he became Obasanjo’s cheerleader and extensively mobilized for the ex-president’s second term in office. He scoffed at those calling for a president of Igbo extraction in 2003. To give more vent and impetus to his project, he established the Movement for National Accommodation and Consensus (MONAC) to persuade all the registered political parties to adopt Obasanjo as consensus presidential candidate.

He defended his action thus “The leadership of Obasanjo’s party, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP has emphasized several times that Obasanjo would be the party’s candidate for the 2003 presidential election; the governors of the Alliance for Democracy, AD, are more pro-Obasanjo that the PDP; if my party, the All Peoples Party (APP) was unable to produce a presidential candidate in 1999 presidential election- when the political situation was more favourable –what are the prospects of it being able to produce a candidate in 2003? So, you see that, objectively, the three political parties are on the way to to adopting President Obasanjo for the 2003 presidential election. All that MONAC is doing is to make the adoption process a smooth one by making it more self-conscious and convincing.”
Recently, Nzeribe told journalists in an answer to a question on why he likes being a spoiler, “I just like throwing spanner into works. I don’t like but in a bid to pre-empt a follow up question, he sums up the equation with “But does Nzeribe spoil for nothing.”

Throughout his sojourn in the Senate, he contributed in the leadership instability which led to the unprecedented emergence of four Senate presidents in eight years.
In 2007, he met his political waterloo, when his attempt to return to the Senate for the fifth time was thwarted by forces loyal to the then Imo State governor, Chief Achike Udenwa. He was humiliated out by youthful Senator Osita Izunazo, his former aide.
In a fitting epitaph to his political death, Dr. Stanford Nwankwo, leader of the Orlu Peoples Consultative Assembly(OPCA) said “Nzeribe has been forcefully “retired” from politics and “it will be worse for him if he contemplates going back into politics because he will be trounced in a very merciless manner.”
But how long can Nzeribe be kept in check? He answered the question on his 70th birthday recently at his Oguta, Imo State home when he boasted that he is the odd man that holds the key to the understanding of complex issues that shape Nigeria’s politics. For him, there is no going back on his stereotyped politics.
His new move encapsulates the straining of a man whose long political odyssey captures the essence of the good, bad and ugly. It rings of a sturdy leopard whose spots as they say, hardly change.
In the words of a former senator, he is “allergic to good reputation” But, perhaps, the most soothing cache to the call is in the fabled fox and the sour grapes.