Is Atiku Abubakar Hiding Something

Is Atiku Abubakar Hiding Something?

Babayola Muhammadu Toungo

A silent power play is unfolding right now in Yola, Adamawa state – the spate of arrests done in the past ten days or so of people purported to have photographed the various properties of the Vice President, Atiku Abubakar scattered all over the state attest to this. Various people have been rounded up and locked for the offence of “photographing the properties of the Vice President without his permission”. The detainees’ ages varies between twenty four years to an elderly retired civil servant of sixty three. The arbitrary arrests and disregard for court orders as exemplified by the governor’s reckless discharge of a construction company’s vehicles attached by a competent court are sadly becoming a way of life for the poor people of Adamawa state. Earlier in April 2003, after the famous 4/19 elections, the state Government Printer and the state Chairman of the ANPP were arrested for the offence of “inciting the public”. It was later to be revealed that the law under which the duo were held can only be found in the statute books of Adamawa state in the whole country. The government printer and the politician spent about three weeks in detention before they were released.

The printer was later dismissed from service – his offence? The government press was commercialised a long time ago and is therefore expected to take printing jobs from any source to sustain their operations. ANPP as an aggrieved party to the 4/19 elections commissioned the government printer to print flyers and posters protesting the outcome of the elections and exhorting the citizenry not to recognise the Boni Haruna administration, a child of the 4/19 elections. The government printer collected the job as any commercial printer would and was only discharging his duties as a responsible chief executive trying to keep his company afloat. But the man ended up in jail. Equally as well, the ANPP Chairman, as an opposition politician has the constitutional right to contest the outcome of the elections in as much a peaceful manner as possible. And posters and flyers are one of the many peaceful avenues of protesting.

And now the arrests have started all over. These new waves came just when the state chapter of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) is at daggers drawn with the governor over the latter’s insensitive and ill-advised misadventure to the state High Court complex. What the governor did in civilised societies is what is known as obstruction of justice. But in Boni’s Adamawa it may be called “I have arrived”. The alleged mastermind of the photographic expedition is a sixty three year old retired civil servant and part-time politician who must, of necessity go out daily in order that his family is fed. The others are a poor photographer and an immigration official who may have unwittingly gave out his motorbike. A pattern of executive recklessness is unfolding in Yola now. A federal high court sitting in Yola granted bail to the retired civil servant detainee and granted the applicant’s prayer for a stay of proceedings against him by the police pending the determination of a case he filed against the police. But in defiance of the court order, and in conformity with the current norm in Adamawa state regarding court orders, the police arraigned the detainees before an upper area court judge. The judge, in my opinion, is a disgrace to the judiciary if he could disregard a brother judge’s order and a senior one at that by refusing to release the detainees on bail giving the spurious reason that the police are in the process of recovering evidence, two weeks after the initial arrest.

My understanding of the whole episode is that of a Vice President, much loved by his people to the extent that they resorted to photographing his properties for ‘keepsake’. I may be naïve, but I believe there is nothing wrong there. For all I care, I can post all my worldly possessions on internet for the whole world to see. I do not have anything to hide and neither does the Vice President. If the Mr. Atiku Abubakar doesn’t have anything to hide, I don’t think he would send his ‘kill and go’ to arrest and detain his poor “admirers”. He would gladly open the doors to the inner sanctity of his house to these poor sods rather than keeping them in police dungeons. Or is the Vice President afraid that the palaces and mansions they are erecting all over the place will be exposed and contrasted side by side with our decaying infrastructure?

In Greenwich Village in England, a tradition that dates back centuries ago still exists. Any elected official must climb the weighs on the day he is sworn in and at the expiration of his tenure. If the two weighs varies and the politician tilts the scales more at the expiration of his tenure, then he must account for the excess weight. I think the villagers have the best idea of reigning in their elected officials. We may adopt this same strategy with a slight modification to use in Nigeria. Apart from weighing in, public officials must be made to publicly declare their assets before and after leaving office.