Unsolved Murders

Unsolved Murders: The Nigerian Quagmire

Kayode Oladele

According to Napoleon, the greatest difficulty with politics is “that there are no established principles”. Politics and principles are two antitheses in they are hardly counterparts and if there is any correlation between them, it is usually in the form of exceptions rather than the rule. Principle may be distorted to suit a political objective or as a means to an end. Nonetheless, it is very much doubtful if Napoleon had anticipated that politics would become as gloomy as we have it today in Nigeria. Our politicians observe their principle in accordance with the rules and regulations invented by Niccolo Machiavelli in his best-known work, ‘The Prince”. The Italian born politician had posited in his work that politics had nothing to do with ideals, ethics, and religion, and that it is incapable of observing all the rules of morality. He believes that when given the opportunity, one must destroy completely, because if one does not he will certainly be destroyed. His viewpoints gave rise to the well-known adjective machiavellian, now a synonym for political maneuvers marked by deception, treachery, betrayal or bad faith.

The Machiavellian inclinations of many Nigerian politicians today have made political power to be unshareable, zero-sum, and have smacked of a military terminology of mobilization, rapid response and elimination to the extent that the dividing line between politics and crime has become very obscure, if not nonexistent. As Prakash Singh, former Director, National Police Academy, and Director- General, National Human Rights Commission, Indian commented, “historically, it has been like the unfolding of a Shakespearean tragedy. Act one was characterized by a pursuit of politics bereft of principles. Power became an end in itself. Act two was marked by politicians taking the help of criminals to capture power. Act three witnessed criminals making a foray into politics.” The striking feature of Act four, the stage we are passing through in Nigeria today, “is criminalization of politics and politicization of crime. One shudders to think what the final denouement might be.”

Writing on crime and politics in Colombia, Michael G. Roskin, a professor of political science at Lycoming College, Pennsylvania and former USIA Foreign Service officer, described the lethal intersection of politics, crime and the state thus: “very early, the state gave birth to twins-politics, the means of influencing the state, and crime, the means of avoiding the state. The three have always been related. Those with great influence on the state may not need much crime; they get their way chiefly by politics. Those with no influence are naturally drawn to state-avoidance options. For what Latin Americans call los marginados (the marginals), crime may be a rational economic choice. When it suits them, groups may combine politics and crime, using some of one and some of the other. The combination of all three, the interface of the state with politics and crime, is called corruption.”

“Politics and crime grow from the same impulse, namely, the drive to quickly obtain money and power. Neither is wedded to violence-it is inefficient and costly-but when pushed or threatened, both quickly turn violent. Politics and crime know and understand each other quite well, forming an almost symbiotic relationship. Politics needs money to win elections and influence and pays little attention to the sources of this money. And crime needs the protection of politics to continue its enterprises.” At times, politics and crime semipublicly fuse into a single corrupt state” as we currently have in Nigerian state.

Talking about a country where politics, crime and unsolved politically motivated assassinations have suddenly become a desideratum and banqueting with the state today, we need not look far for such a country. The level of violence and political assassinations Nigeria continues to experience is alarming and unacceptable. The essence of politics and politicization is to ensure good governance. Good governance would in turn curtail crime even though the society would still have to content with one form of crime or the other. According to Singh, “so long as crime is kept under control and within limits, it can be said that society is getting good governance”. Unfortunately, in Nigeria today, crime and politics are twin-brothers. Crime is on rampage ravaging even law and order. Tragically, even though the existing laws are adequate to tackle the menace, the government does not have the political will to investigate let alone prosecute these politically motivated murders because most of the perpetrators are embedded in the state machinery. So, the only way to find who did what is to look into the mirror.

The Country is fast growing into a state where the government cannot perform the minimum task of a state, being unable to control unruly elements and offer citizens a modicum of security and order. This is why politics, because it is unrestrained, corrupt, unprincipled and is dominated by unsolved murder mysteries will continue to witness more violence and dastardly acts. And because criminals have little nothing to fear from the state, its elements ignore state power and its machinery. In short, under the present political dispensation, there is a gradual collapse of the criminal justice system as the state has demonstrated helplessness even in dealing with political bandits and nincompoops. Our national security is on total disarray. The country has a national security council with all its accolades but we are yet to see an iota of strategic security policy or at least, a semblance of it. The council has yet to evolve any working policy for ensuring internal law and order in the wake of recent political violence. This is a time when efforts should be geared towards ensuring internal security in the country, but we have too many assurances without any insurance.

It is more rewarding in Nigeria for one to be a hired assassin than to be a burglar because the police are more likely to quickly resolve a burglary case (if at all) than an assassination case and a person who stole a goat is more likely to be arrested than a thug who tortured a human being to death. While property is valuable in Nigeria, life is meaningless and worth a farthing. This is also due to the complicity of the government and massive cover ups or complete ineptitude by law enforcement officials in most of these heinous crimes. There is no statute of limitations on murder but every unresolved murder is abandoned with reckless disregard while bereaved families are left to leak their wounds.

Those who commit these crimes know that the murder of a top politician is not likely to cause more than outrage, pain and some condemnation. In the most spectacular assassination, people would simply pay their tributes, express their horror, make some bonfires on the streets and the government would pledge to “track down” the killers, as they always do when one of their numbers is assassinated. However, the reality is nothing would be done because they know that the assassination of a politician, no matter how high ranking, is unlikely to be more than yet another addition to the list of the country’s unsolved murder mysteries. Nigeria will never disintegrate, break up or collapse because of it and the struggle for power and money will continue unabated.

It is a fact that crimes in Nigeria have exploded since 2000 and currently, the rate of political violence rate has reached an unprecedented level. This is blamed on money, power and politics. There is no security and without security, there cannot be rule of law. Without rule of law, there cannot be guarantee of liberty and rights. Without liberty and rights, no democracy can flourish.

Political assassinations will continue unabated for as long as previous cold murders remain unsolved and money continues to dominate our political circle. Careful analysis has also revealed that the root of our political failures is our winner-take-all electoral system. The incentives of our winner-take-all system have made it impossible for us to have a free and fair elections and the humility to accept defeat. A winner-take-all system can be reduced down to either holding office and thus having power or being in opposition and having none. The syndrome offers powerful carrots for the winner and crust for the loser.

This is different from the situation in other countries where political parties and politicians function in a way that contributes to policy formation and permits minority parties not part of the ruling party to play a role. In Nigeria, the winning party awards and takes all the contracts, fill all political appointments, shares all the oil blocs and even reduces the minority members in the legislative houses into mere spectators.

When Ghana became independent in 1957, Ghana’s first leader, Kwame Nkruma, said: “Seek ye first the political Kingdom!”. His advice has been followed methodically not only by the Ghanaians but also Nigerians who have turned it into a statement of bad faith. The few who got to the top of Nigerian oily political pole have seized it and would hold on tight, usually until disgraced out of office b y any means possible.

Political power is regarded as a zero-sum game thereby increasing the glorification of power and the importance of winning elections at all cost. No effort is ever made to balance power, promote the goals of national development or policy agenda or pursue bipartisan political agenda. Politicians and political parties simply take adversarial stance towards each other both within and without. Intra-party clashes are as rampant as inter-party squabbles as party loyalty and discipline have fallen to the forces of money, power and greed. This is so true to the point that those who are in power see themselves above the law and administer the affairs of the country with atmosphere of impunity.

Writing on the problems of winner-take-all politics in Africa, Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society said: “Africa’s winner-takes-all politics lay at the heart of everything that has gone wrong with the continent. It is the reason why it has fallen behind the rest of the world economically, the reason for its wars and poverty. Its roots go back to the creation of African states themselves, the lines drawn on maps by the European colonial powers at the end of the 19th century. The process eventually produced fifty-three states overlaying some 10,000 pre-existing societies and political entities.”

“Nigeria is a prime example. It has three big tribes and more than 400 ethnic groups, yet its people have to elect one president and one government. By comparison, imagine a Europe whose larger tribes (Germans, French, British) and twenty-five European Union states were united by force (not referendum); where the French are Muslim, the Germans Catholic, the British Protestant; where the only source of income (oil) is under German control; and where, if anyone mentions putting their own people first or forming an alliance with another ethnic group, they are accused of being “tribalist” and endangering the future of the state……. If you want power, you play the ethnic card or smear your religious rivals. When you achieve power, you bring your own people into government and even more important, into the army. The state treasury becomes your private bank account. When you run for election the entire state structure and all its officials are at your disposal. If anyone inside the continent says anything you accuse them of interfering in internal affairs. If anyone outside Africa criticizes you, you accuse them of racism and neo-colonialism.” How else can we describe the current situation in Nigeria?

Today, the country is at cross roads as unsolved politically motivated murders trail our democracy. The country is thorn between good governance and winner-take-all money politics. The side effect of this is that everybody now lives in fear, call it perpetual or temporary. The rich and powerful are not as secure as they used to be while the poor are getting poorer and becoming more potent weapons for dastardly acts. We are doing a poor job of managing ourselves. Instead of building trust, we are creating environment of hate and crime. This portends very grave danger to our democratic development and unless the current trend is checked, our political system will ever be dominated by mediocrity as it does not have the capacity to produce higher standards for democratic development.