SDP’s chairman Olu Falae and former President Olusegun Obasanjo are billed to meet in Abeokuta on Tuesday to firm up plans to unseat President Muhammadu Buhari in 2019.
Sources close to the former presidential candidate and Obasanjo have confirmed the meeting which might have been prompted by Buhari’s declaration last week for a second term.
The former president had advised Buhari to consider an honourable dismount in 2019, criticising him and his government openly for nepotism and bad management of the economy.
But Buhari has refused to back down.
His refusal has made Obasanjo seek an ally in the former SGF who contested against him in 1999, and had been critical of his eight-year government until the conspiracy against Buhari united them.
As part of the efforts to unseat the president, Obasanjo floated the Coalition of Nigeria Movement, a non-partisan group he said will produce a third force to wrest power from the APC and PDP he described as leprous.
Apparently, Falae’s SDP has become the political platform for the Obasanjo movement–and about 30 other coalitions, including the Nigeria Intervention Movement founded by Olisa Agbakoba.
Certain elements within the leprous APC and PDP, including Sen. Rabiu Kwakwanso, former Gov. Donald Duke, former Olagunsoye Oyinlola, most of them loyalists of Obasanjo’s, are already jumping on the bandwagon.
Many have, however, criticsed Obasanjo’s meddlesomeness, too, accusing him of the same thing he blames Buhari for.
Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, referring to some geriatrics suffering from “Messianic complex”, said these old politicians like to distort history in their desperate need to blur out their past roles in ruining the nation.
“They are adept at distorting history in order to acquire a false, sanitised identity,” he told the NIM coveners at a summit in Abuja last month, adding they will do anything to remain in power directly or indirectly.
“Judgment awaits them and the present should not grant them space,” he said.
Many believe the thickening conspiracy may have its own glitch when the time comes.
The new-generation politicians Obasanjo is massing up may not accept his foisting his own lackeys on them.