Reichstag Fire

Reichstag Fire’s Smoke

Mahmud Jega

Last week’s culmination of sordid events in Ekiti State, contrived political crisis which was then seized upon by the Presidency to unleash an anti-democratic solution, easily recalls to mind a parallel in history, namely the infamous Reichstag fire of 1933.

There are many people in Nigeria who are inclined to take the Ekiti events in their stride and say, well, if one democratic state government is removed, however unfairly, at least there are 35 others still left in place. Well, if Germany’s experience with the Reichstag fire is anything to go by, there may not be many democratic structures left in place by the time the presidency is through with its program.

At 9.14pm on February 27, 1933, a small fire was noticed on the first floor of the imposing Reichstag building in Berlin, which housed the German Parliament of the Weimar Republic. Within minutes, fires broke out everywhere in the building, shortly followed by a huge explosion in the main parliamentary chamber, which was soon engulfed in flames. Policemen who arrived at the scene quickly found a half-naked man, the drunk, dim-witted Dutch arsonist and ex-Communist Party member Marinus van de Lubbe, standing in the corridors. Adolf Hitler, who became Chancellor of Germany less that a month earlier, soon arrived at the scene, together with other top leaders of the Nazi Party, including Propaganda Minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels and deputy party leader Herman Goering, who was also the President of the Reichstag. Hitler promptly declared that the fire was started by Communists and was the signal for a Communist revolution to start in Germany.

Hitler had become German Chancellor on January 30, 1933 at the head of a minority government, but his personal and party plan was to establish a Nazi dictatorship in Germany, not to govern democratically. He had already got the President of the Weimar Republic, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, to dissolve parliament and call fresh elections for March 5, 1933, in which he hoped to make electoral gains, but that wasn’t certain. His goal was to get a two-thirds majority in parliament in order to amend the Constitution and transfer the parliament’s powers to himself. And so, the night after the Reichstag fire, he got the President to sign a decree “for the Protection of the People and the State”. Using this law, thousands of Communists and Social Democrats were immediately rounded up, taken to the barracks of the SS and SA [the private militia of the Nazi Party], where they were beaten and tortured.

The Nazis unleashed a reign of terror in advance of the March 1933 elections, which enabled them to make some gains, capturing 44% of the vote. The Nazis were however still short of the two-thirds majority they needed in the Reichstag, so Hitler used the emergency decree to ban the Communist Party, arrest all its MPs [which made up 17% of the Reichstag], and arrest many Social Democratic MPs as well. When the Reichstag reconvened, without the Communists and without many Social Democratic MPs, the Nazis got a two-thirds majority, which passed into law the Enabling Act. This notorious law, which was officially called “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich”, was passed on March 23, 1933. It transferred the powers of Parliament to the Chancellor, and provided that Hitler could make laws “even if they deviate from the Constitution”.

Historically, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, his top aides and the state institutions available to him may not be able to measure up to Adolf Hitler in terms of grand ambition and ruthless Germanic efficiency, but they are at least trying. Hitler was only a corporal in the German Army during World War One. He wasn’t even a German, but an Austrian who rose to become German Chancellor. He had grand ambition, personal dynamism, great oratorical skill, superb organisational skills and a ruthless personal character. Besides, unlike the PDP, the Nazi Party had complete internal cohesion and it had the million-man storm troopers to match!

In contrast, Chief Obasanjo’s personal history, character, assistants and institutions may look rickety, but he has a grand ambition of his own, which is to rule Nigeria in perpetuity irrespective of the provisions of the 1999 Constitution. His own version of the Nazi storm troopers was the ill-disciplined army of third term campaigners whose main weapon was the Ghana Must Go bag. The two top commanders of the Third Term campaign, Colonel Ahmadu Ali and Chief Tony Anenih, are the historical equivalents of Herman Goering, who was a retired Air Force officer, and Heinrich Himmler, a former policeman and chicken farmer who became the Third Reich’s Mr Fix It.

Even though the Dutch man Marinus van der Lubbe probably ignited the fire at the Reichstag building with his shirt, it was clear that he had not the ability to set such a great edifice instantly on fire from many angles. It soon transpired that he was only used by the Nazis. Some storm troopers overheard him planning to burn the Reichstag. Thirty minutes before he did so, an SS detachment led by Karl Ernst sneaked into the Reichstag using a tunnel that connected to the official residence of the Reichstag President, who happened to be Nazi Deputy Leader Herman Goering. They placed chemicals and explosives all around the building, waiting for Lubbe to ignite it.

You see, when Speaker Friday Aderemi of the Ekiti State House of Assembly returned from detention in Lagos and began to organise for the removal of Governor Ayo Fayose, he had no idea that he was acting like Marinus van de Lubbe. Ekiti State, like the Reichstag building, had been ringed with explosive chemicals and incendiary devices. Mr. Aderemi only had to remove his shirt and start a small fire, and a conflagration would ensue. Agents of the EFCC who abducted the legislators and, in two short days, turned them from being pro-Fayose to anti-Fayose, are the storm troopers of this Republic. They sneaked into Ekiti using tunnels that lead from the State House in Abuja and hid dynamite sticks, kerosene gallons and methane gas tanks. It could well be that the Presidency’s plan did not work out very well, because there was no general break down of law and order with rioting all over Ekiti State. If that had happened, not many people will question the legality or propriety of the state of emergency, as was the case in Plateau State two years ago. This time though, many people are saying, “Ah, if the Attorney General and the President are saying that Fayose’s removal was done unconstitutionally, why not simply restore him to office, why the emergency?”

Will Mr. Aderemi and 22 other members of the Ekiti House of Assembly have done this if they knew that they would be cast aside and an old Army General would inherit all the executive as well as legislative and probably judicial power as well in the state? Well, it’s because they probably did not read about the fate of Marinus van de Lubbe. Even though he greatly assisted Hitler and the Nazis to achieve their political ambition of establishing a dictatorship in Germany, he was tried in a court, found guilty of arson, and on January 1934, he was executed via beheading with an axe.

As things stand, the 1999 Constitution’s provisions for a state of emergency have already been creatively expanded by the Obasanjo Presidency well beyond the original intention of those who wrote the constitution. A reading of the relevant sections shows no reference at all to suspending a governor or a state assembly. In fact, what the Constitution clearly envisaged was that Federal authorities will come to the aid of, and work in concert with, state authorities in an emergency situation, not supplant them. This much must be clear to Attorney General Bayo Ojo, but then, this man no longer sees his duty as defending the law, but of furthering the political aims of the Obasanjo Presidency. When he spoke last Tuesday and declared that Ekiti Chief Judge Kehinde Bamisele’s removal was improper, he was not setting the stage for reversing it; he was merely setting the stage for declaring the state of emergency. On whose side is he then, the law or lawlessness?

To all state governors and other Nigerians who see no need to speak up at this time, let’s remind them of the saying by Pastor Martin Niemoeller of the German Evangelical Lutheran Church, himself a victim of the Nazis. He said, “In Germany, the Nazis first came for the Communists, and I did not speak up because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak up because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak up because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak up because I was not a Catholic. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one to speak up for anyone”.