Obasanjo: Impeachment and its Narratives

By 

Abdullahi Bego

abego5@yahoo.com

If president Olusegun Obasanjo was having sleepless nights trying to deflect the impeachment dagger thrown at him by the House of Representatives, several other Nigerians, including many public affairs commentators, are trying either to make sense of the confusion to which politics and governance in Nigeria were further subjected as a result of the impeachment threat or to justify (or identify with) one or more of the many positions of interest surrounding the impeachment saga.

The picture that emerged is a complex tapestry of different narratives advanced by what Chudi Okoye called the ‘Nigerian Chatteratti’. We may identify these narratives by the loci of their arguments. They broadly include the rule of law, ethnicity, Tazarce, power shift and survival of democracy and national stability.

The rule of law voices are in the House of Representatives, the Senate, a number of Civil Society groups and among Nigerians strongly given to the supremacy of the nation’s constitution. This gospel believes that the President, as outlined in the list of 17 impeachable offences prepared by the House of Representatives, has violated several constitutional provisions. These violations, the gospel seemed to argue, have stunted national development (as in non implementation of budgetary provisions), torpedoed the principle of the separation of powers and even cost the lives of a number of Nigerians (as in Zaki Biam and surrounding villages in Benue state). Since the President did not appear remorseful to seek for absolution from Nigerians through the House of Representatives for these violations, the impeachment process, this gospel argued, should be carried to its very end to safeguard democracy in Nigeria from being hijacked by the executive.

The gospel of ethnicity is located in the ‘Yoruba nation’. Since the unfolding of the impeachment drama, most Yoruba are understandably on the side of the President. Emerging from historical wrongs to which they always said they were subjected, such as in the annulment of the June 12, 1993 elections in which a Yoruba son was clearly the winner and also during the reign of General Abatcha, these Yoruba felt that impeaching President Obasanjo, another Yoruba son, was tantamount to another personal affront on the Yoruba as a people and a ‘joke carried too far’. Not unexpectedly, they therefore issued warnings and threats that the sons and daughters of Oduduwa shall respond appropriately if Obasanjo was not left alone to execute his mandate to its logical conclusion. 

The Tazarce argument is spun around Obasanjo’s declared ambition to continue in office beyond the terminal date of his current administration. Those who felt that the President had performed below expectation, had misplaced priorities and had squandered the confidence reposed in him by Nigerians when he was elected in May, 1999 support the impeachment threat against him because they don’t like to see what they called a ‘failed’ President returned to office in 2003. This argument however sounds simplistic because it discounted the fact that even without impeachment, Obasanjo’s continuation in office beyond May, 2003 is a matter solely to be decided by Nigerians at the polls and not a  fait accompli.

Power shift ideologues on the other hand are to be found within the so-called Lagos-Ibadan axis press and among academics and opinion leaders who believed that power had resided for so long in the ‘north’ and that it was logical and timely to ‘shift’ it to the South. Columnists and writers of this gospel want everyone to know (and believe) that certain ‘invisible hands’ were behind the House attempt to invoke the impeachment clause against the President and thus truncate the turn of the South at the leadership of the Nigerian enterprise. An elderly state governor in the South even went as far as laying claim to knowing those who have ‘bought’ members of the House to initiate the threat about impeachment. Stripped of certain elements, this gospel is closely related to  the taxa of ethnicity identified above.

And finally, though not the least, is the argument employing survival of democracy and national stability as the loci of its focus. Proponents of this position hold that, even if warranted, impeachment at this time would not be a necessary and sufficient cause for the alleviation of the consequences of the offences President Obasanjo was said to have committed.  So rather than stretching the impeachment debate too far and thus overheat the polity, especially given that the first term of the President is coming to a close, both the President and members of the National Assembly should confer to find a workable solution that would ensure the survival of democracy and national stability.

All of these positions, it is clear, have their grounds to feel strongly about their own readings of the impeachment debate. As Tehranian, a professor of political economy, noted, ‘we are the stories we tell’. If anything, the impeachment saga had exposed weaknesses both of the nation’s developing democracy and of the political class. For the most part, major actors in the drama appeared more concerned about political survival (with eyes and noses on 2003) than about the quitessential merit of the debate on the long term entrenchment of democracy in Nigeria as the logical result of the commitment and struggle of the people to get healed from the rapacious affliction that were years of military rule.

Yet given the present sorry state of the Nigerian economy with its concomitant effects on standards of living, the fact that after nearly four years of a return to democratic governance political actors from the Presidency to the National Assembly and others were not able to make good most of their campaign promises, to make social services that governments provide available and affordable to all Nigerians etc, I am inclined to the argument that impeachment at this material time is clearly a non sequitur.

This though is not to acquiesce that the threat against the President was a ‘joke carried too far’. I am pursuaded, for instance, by some of the House arguments that the President did in fact violated some constitutional provisions, even if inadvertently, as he became obsessed with foreign junkets while the home front was crying for greater attention. That impeachment may not be a sound idea at this time is also not because some ethnic champions, opposed to the President ab initio but now basking in the rarefied atmosphere of their own being at the helm, have threatened fire and brimstone if Baba was impeached. Nigerians have since got used to this Ihunka Banza.

I think the President, the National Assembly and the rest of the political class should paint over the impeachment issue and carry on with the business of governance and service to the people because in material praxis service is what the voting public truely and dearly wants. There are so many lacunae between what Nigerians expected from the politicians in May,1999 and what they got thus far that ordinary Nigerians, like myself, don’t really bother about some elite altercation mainly over form than substance.

But I also think that the beauty of the impeachment debate, if it be seen from the prism of aesthetics, is the fact that the major actors involved are quite aware that Nigerians and the world are watching them. And that history is there to record them in black and white. Especially in 2003.

Abdullahi Bego writes from Tehran, I R Iran (email abego5@yahoo.com)