Former President Olusegun Obasanjo and his estranged former deputy, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, at their first face to face meeting in more than one year, taunted one another, yesterday, at the 10th year remembrance of their mutual political associate, Maj.-Gen. Shehu Musa Yar‘Adua.

The remembrance ceremony which was graced by President Umaru Musa Yar‘Adua had kicked off with an opening prayer by Chief Tony Anenih who prayed God to give President Yar‘Adua the courage to clear the rot he inherited from Obasanjo.

Before the jibes, Obasanjo and Atiku, who are respectively chairman and vice-chairman of the Shehu Musa Yar‘Adua Centre, met in the boardroom of the centre with other board members and had a brief handshake. Following the arrival of President Yar‘Adua, Obasanjo, Atiku and other board members proceeded to the lecture venue. Obasanjo sat between Shehu’s widow Hajiya Binta Yar‘Adua, and the president of the Senate, Senator David Mark, to the right of the president, while Atiku sat between Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan and Buhari Yar‘Adua, son of the deceased, to the left of the President.

In the Christian opening prayer, Anenih prayed “God to give President Yar‘Adua the wisdom, the courage and political will to clear the mess of the past and the rot he inherited.”. Obasanjo wasted no time in responding after paying his respects to Shehu Yar‘Adua. He praised him for his dogged fight to install the rule of law in the country, saying Shehu paid the ultimate price for the country. Obasanjo said that if not for the doggedness of Shehu, many of the people seated in the arena and who had held positions in government would not have been around and also had the opportunity to enrich themselves.

Acknowledging Shehu as a rallying point for many Nigerians, he said that it took his remembrance for many of the personalities seated in the audience to come together. In a seeming reference to events that preceded the incarceration of Shehu that saw some of his antagonists opposing his effort to truncate Sani Abacha’s regime at the Constitutional Conference, Obasanjo said that when “Shehu was incarcerated, some of his friends stood by him and many abandoned him”. Atiku, in his own remarks, noted that “the Yar‘Adua dynasty has been ruling Nigeria since 1999 no matter how imperfect it has been.’’

According to him, Shehu Yar‘Adua stood for good governance, popular democracy, credible elections, dialogue and consensus. Atiku affirmed that the late Shehu Yar‘Adua never used power to intimidate or oppress opponents, saying that he rather saw politics as a means of bringing people together for the common good. In his own brief remark at the ceremony, President Yar‘Adua congratulated Mr. Kigame, the Rwandan president, who delivered a lecture entitled, “The challenges of nation building”, as part of the remembrance, for what he described as a brilliant presentation.

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