|
The Mythical Reality of Rule of Law By Fela Hani
As the major beneficiary of a stolen mandate, considering that his election remains the most fraudulent and therefore the most controversial in the history of our country, President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua ingeniously crafted a slogan as a central crucible for his administration. He also came up with a Seven-Point Agenda which remains mere sophistry, a year after he took the oath of office.
The slogan, christened The Rule of Law, was conceived as a springboard to launch his government as a populist one, and to buy the citizenry in order to cushion the effect of the credibility problem which his regime was set to suffer. The Rule of Law as a concept connotes that everyone in the country is expected to obey the laws, including the high and mighty. Many people believed him, especially against the background of his history as someone who once professed a preference for the left side of the ideological spectrum.
The central concern of this piece is to raise a few questions with respect to the President’s compliance with the notion of Rule of Law, and to show that the slogan is no more than a well-crafted lie to confer a great profile on an undeserving regime. This conclusion is premised in the fact that if we increase the intensity of the concept of the Rule of Law, it simply means a belief in fairness, that everybody should be treated fairly, hence it behoves anyone who mouths such a slogan to act always with the most scrupulous conscientiousness of sprite and honour.
But Mr. President has not lived up to this principle, especially if we use the composition and tenor of his cabinet as a litmus test. For the cabinet is a receptacle of the very antithesis of both the Rule of Law and fairness. The recent failed attempt by Olusegun Adeniyi, his Special Adviser on Communications to rationalize the President’s cabinet, is an unpardonable assault on our sensibilities and a very rude attempt to use the proverbial slice of bread to pack the whole stew in the bowl.
Mr. Adeniyi, now a reminiscence of Hitler’s Goebbels, needs to be told that he is yet to show any shred of evidence that the President is sincere about enthroning the Rule of Law and all its adjuncts and imports going by the appointments into the federal bureaucracy. If the President is really sincere, he would not have constituted such an unfair and lopsided cabinet, placing Northerners in critical and ‘juicy’ Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) even in violation of Section 14 Subsection 3 of the Constitution - the ground norm of any democratic society. Even under the unfairly vilified Presidency of Olusegun Obasanjo, some of the MDAs considered the birth rights of Northerners were evenly ‘distributed’ and the Yorubas, President Obasanjo’s kinsmen, never got appointed into any of the critical MDAs. Yet Olusegun Adeniyi had the effrontery to aggravate our psychological trauma with his convoluted treatise about how Southerners are favoured by the vapid regime he serves.
Any administration that is sincere about enthroning the Rule of Law will not appoint someone who has patently and repeatedly violated his neutrality to be the Chief Law Officer of the Federation. Someone whose clients and associates have cases pending before the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). No wonder, the man went on rampage like a wounded lion to destroy the anti-graft agency while the President looked the other way. How can anyone who seeks to enthrone the Rule of Law vacillate on corruption so blatantly by his actions?
Where lies the dedication to the Rule of Law when people who looted the treasury and caused the collapse of financial institutions are being shielded from prosecution, simply because they bankrolled the President’s election or because they are close associates of the President? Has the President redefined the Rule of Law, or is he so fixated as to forget that the right of the people to be governed fairly (indeed, the Rule of Law) is infracted in the first instance by those who allegedly stole or mismanaged state resources? Why did the President remove Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, the former EFCC boss, in contravention of the Rule of Law he (the President) claims to be instituting? Is it part of the design to construct ratlines for corrupt state officials like a troubled governor who purportedly allocated 22, 550.000.00 naira for the entertainment of the President’s wife during a visit to his state?
Why would a President who stands for the Rule of Law close his eyes against allegations of corruption against his friends, cronies and some members of his family? And why did the enforcer of the Rule of Law allow an illegal account to be operated under his regime – I mean the Excess Crude Account from where 569.8 billion naira slated for the energy sector will be deducted. Has the President forgotten that all expenditure must be appropriated by the National Assembly? Is it not a desecration of the Rule of Law for the President to approve the creation of an illegal account and give approval for money to be spent from the same account without appropriation?
Should a President who professes belief in the Rule of Law appoint a partisan, anti-Niger Delta diplomat of same ancestry as himself to chair the secretariat of a proposed summit on the Niger Delta? Would an earnest apostle of Rule of Law send warships to an already traumatized region, from where cometh the resources which account for the bulk of his nation’s revenue? Why did the President also appoint an Ijaw man as Minister for Special Duties, only for the Minister to be stripped of his core mandates – the supervision of NDDC and the Ecological Fund – perfidies which never happened under the now criminalized former President Obasanjo? Nigerians will like to know: a Minister’s function is taken over by the Secretary to the Federal Government who now superintends NDDC and Ecological Fund hitherto the responsibilities of past Ministers for Special Duties? This is one other reason why Olusegun Adeniyi’s riposte on this “Northernisation” of the federal bureaucracy smacks of taunting buffoonery.
Should a prophet of the Rule of Law, a self-acclaimed Servant Leader populate the top echelon of the federal bureaucracy - the bastion of establishment - with his protégés, friends, family, cronies, in-laws and people from his region or of his ancestry? Is it not contradictory to the tenor of the Rule of Law for the President to approve four appointments in the federal bureaucracy in a fortnight and three of the appointees are from his region? Assuming we take the choice of the successor to Florence Ita-Giwa (former Presidential Liaison Officer on National Assembly matters) as the prerogative of the President, can we take the replacement of the Chief Executives of NTA and Customs also as affirmations of the Rule of Law?
Regrettably, the President dwarfed his status when he tried to defend these appointments during the Media Chat. Mr. President claimed the appointments were made to ensure continuity because those who would have been appointed would retire soon. I wish to ask the President how many years more does the new Customs helmsman have to retire? Or the newly appointed Head of Service, Ms. Amal Pepple? Has the President forgotten that Justice Alfa Modibbo Belgore, a Fulani man from Ilorin, was Chief Justice of the Federation for a few months? Why was Justice Idris Kutigi not sworn-in after Justice Mohammed Uwais, because Belgore had few months to retire? - (And this happened under the disparaged President Obasanjo). Is it also an accident that Katsina State, the President’s home state, has four directors in one of the security/intelligence agencies of the Federation, while a whole region, the South West, has only two directors in the same agency?
Instances of profanity visited on the Rule of Law, which Mr. President claims to defend and ensconce, are legion; but the discourse above would suffice to show that President Yar’Adua’s administration is deceitful. It stands to reason therefore that this regime is not different from the bulk of its bankrupt forerunners. It is evident that President Yar’Adua is an incurable aristocrat who rode on the springboard of Marxist sloganeering to power only to take Nigeria back to the era of nepotism, clannishness and ethno-regional irredentism which Obasanjo had de-constructed.
Therefore, under President Yar’Adua as under the ancien regime of his clannish folks who recently pronounced a thieving lunatic as sane, the state expresses a will to maintain a given system of class-relations through the use of coercive power as Harold Laski posited almost a century ago. Indeed, law exists as a body of rules which seek to fulfill the object of the state and the state in our circumstance is personified by President Yar’Adua, who is deploying the law to fulfill his whims and caprices.
Let Laski rest in perfect peace, because as he argued, “just as there is a crisis in the theory of the state, so, also there is a crisis in the theory of the law.”
POSTSCRIPT We can also see the perversion of the Rule of Law in the trial of Borisade, Fani-Kayode and Iyayi for alledged corruption. These distinguished Nigerians voluntarily testified at a Probe Panel in the National Assembly but they were arrested thereafter within the precinct of the hallowed chambers in spite of the extant global principles of parliamentary privilege. They were subsequently charged to court by Waziri’s credibility-deficient EFCC without formal charges and their bail application succeeded only after much official dilatory tactics, nauseating legalese and filibustering. The conditionalities for the bail granted by Chief Magistrate Lamido Kadiri were also as strangulating as the politics of the trial. Importantly, none of the key signatories to the said Aviation Intervention Fund has been arrested because they are sacred cows. This incident is also happening before our eyes and it is evidently orchestrated by a regime that claims to respect the Rule of Law.
Conclusively therefore, the Rule of Law which is applied discriminatorily and mischievously is more worthless than broken almond shells.
GOD HELP NIGERIA!
|