Elder statesman Chief Edwin Clark yesterday said that former President Olusegun Obasanjo was worth only N20,000 before he was elected in 1999.
He also questioned Obasanjo’s moral right to oppose the Jonathan Administration.
He said this during the 2014 induction/inauguration of the Board of Trustees (BOT) of the South-south Elders, Chiefs and Leaders, in Abuja.
Clark, a former Federal Commissioner for Information, said: “In 1999, they said because of what they did to Abiola, they would compensate the South-west, and Obasanjo was brought out from Yola prison, and was only having N20,000 in his account, and today, he is one of the richest men in Nigeria. And today he is claiming to be innocent.
“I think one of the problems facing us in this country is the issue of settler and indigene. In this country nobody is superior to the other. Abuja does not belong to anybody, it belongs to all of us.”
Clark, who is also the grand patron of the group, said the elders were solidly behind President Goodluck Jonathan to run for the 2015 election.
“How many of the Northerners came to me to say that Jonathan should step down and allow the North to finish their four-year term, and I told them, ‘you are not well?” he queried rhetorically.
“People thought that we, from South-south, are second-class citizens, and we say ‘no’. When we reply critics, they say we are enemies of Jonathan,” he added.
The South-south Leaders, Elders and Chiefs also mandated its BOT, headed by a former Inspector General of Police (IGP), Mr Mike Okiro, to drive the process of mobilising support for President Jonathan.
Speaking at the event, the coordinator of the group, Chief Bello Premier, called for the integration of the South-south community in Abuja into the mainstream of socio-political dynamics of the Federal Capital Territory to accord it appropriate recognition as is the case with other regional groups.
Speaking on the issue of security, a former Assistant Inspector General of Police (AIG), Mr Felix Oguado, called on Northern elders to emulate South-south elders’ ability to “convince the militants in the Niger Delta to drop their arms”.
He said: “If the elders in the Niger Delta can go to the creeks and speak to the militants and they dropped their arms, why can’t the elders of the North do same?
“We should stop blaming the government and do something. It is not the best to apportion blame on the government each time something happened. People talk of sharing the cake, but they never talk of how the cake is baked.”
