PEOPLE AND POLITICSAkanbi at WarByMohammed Harunakudugana@yahoo.com
A little over five years ago, Time magazine did a cover story on Kenneth Starr’s single-minded pursuit of President Bill Clinton over his alleged sexual liaison with Monica Lewinsky, then a 21 year-old 1995 graduate who went to work in the White House as an unpaid intern. “Starr at War”, was the title Time gave the story in its edition of February 9, 1998. In one of the story’s companion pieces, the magazine asked “Is this Texas son cleaning up the corridors of power or waging partisan war on the President? The Clinton/Lewinsky story is all too familiar to need recounting. We all know that Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives and nearly lost his job over the whole sordid affair. As a result, Kenneth Starr could claim that he was merely cleaning up the corridors of power. By almost all counts, however, most Americans didn’t think so. Poll after poll during the Lewinsky affair suggested that even though most Americans believed Clinton had problems keeping his zipper up, they also believed Starr was essentially waging a partisan war on the president because most Americans believed Clinton was doing a pretty good job where it mattered most – the economy. Certainly, the Clintons themselves believed in the witch-hunt theory and not without good reason: Lewinsky was actually not the first time the Clintons would cross swords with Starr. Back in 1994, during Clinton’s first term in office, the Texan ha been named independent counsel to investigate Whitewater which was a building project in Arkansas, Clinton’s home state where he had served as governor twice. The Clintons had invested in the project, which later collapsed. There were rumours, however, that they had profited from the collapse, rumours which eventually moved totally inaccurate. For two years Starr dug away at the story but could find nothing to implicate the Clintons. Still, the story refused to go away completely, thanks to the American media culture which had come to thrive on scandal-mongering since Watergate. In the words of Gene Lyons, author of Fools for scandal: How the Media invented Whitewater, since Watergate, “few reporters wish(ed) to appear insufficiently prosecutorial particularly not when the suspects are the president and his wife.” The New York Times, and to a lesser extent the Washington Post, had, Lyons said, created the Whitewater story and having invested their prestige in the scandal, they didn’t want to hear that there was none. With few exceptions, said Lyons, the rest of the media obediently followed the Times and Post. It was as the newspapers were struggling to get out of the quicksand their scandal-mergering had landed them into that Lewinsky rode to their rescue in 1995/1996. Predictably both the media and Starr switched their gaze from Whitewater to the more potentially damaging presidential illicit sex-in-White House story. The rest, as they say, is history. Given their experience with the media and with Kenneth Starr since Whitewater, it was understandable that the Clintons believed that there was a vast right-wing conspiracy against them to undo the results of Clinton’s two electoral victories. I don’t know if Justice Mustapha Akanbi, like Kenneth Starr, is the son of a cleric but the controversy that has surrounded his three-year leadership of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission, must make one ask, like Time magazine, if the bearded retired judge, like Starr, is merely intent on cleaning up the corridors of power or waging partisan war on behalf of President Obasanjo. If he is – and there are many people, including, of course, most federal legislators who believe he is – then he seems to have succeeded very well, going by the near universal and unqualified condemnation of the National Assembly over its February 26 decision to overhaul the law that established Akanbi’s ICPC three years ago. It is a measure of
Akanbi’s success that the Senate Committee on ICPC
has had to buy two pages of advertisement in several newspapers to state
what it says is its own “perspective and explanations” on the new
anti-corruption law. “The
Senate”, the committee said, “has watched with utter amazement and
surprise, the amount of energy and resources the Executive Branch of
government and the Independence Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC),
represented by the chairman, has brought to bear to suppress the truth
about the amendments made to the ICPC law by the Senate. All modes of
propaganda, including the mobilization of the press, market women,
students, as well as the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), to castigate
the Senate position on the ICPC law was embarked upon.” Almost
to the last, all those who have condemned the Senate’s decision to
amend the ICPC law as ill-motivated, have done so with little or no
thought to the charge that the ICPC, far from being President
Obasanjo’s battle-axe against corruption, has been his weapon, in the
words of the Senate, “for fight(ing) perceived and real enemies
through blackmail, harassment and witch-hunting.” In other words
whereas in Kenneth Starr’s case, Clinton was the quarry, with
Akanbi’s ICPC, Obasanjo has been the hunter. It is in this almost
total lack of consideration by most critics of the Senate for the charge
of the presidential abuse of ICPC that lies the success of Akanbi’s
battle against the Senate. Yet
any fair-minded and balanced view of the Senate’s amendment of the
ICPC law must take this charge into consideration. And no one, not even
Akanbi, can deny that ICPC has been rather very selective in its fight
against corruption. Naturally,
Akanbi has often reacted angrily to any suggestion that he has been used
by the presidency to fight its battles, but he himself had admitted in
an interview with The
Comet published on
March 8 that “The president himself has never sent me any complaint
against any minister. Agagu (the former minister of Power and Steel) was
sent after he had resigned, by someone”. It
is, of course, not Akanbi’s fault that the presidency has never
complained to him about the innumerous cases of corruption in the
executive arm of government. Cases like those of Dr. Makonjuola, former
permanent secretary Ministry of Defence, who, along with three others,
were indicted in the stealing of the ministry’s over 400,000,000
Naira. Or such an obvious case of stealing of hundreds of millions of
Naira of PTF funds by some of those the President had appointed to wind
it down. One
cannot blame Akanbi for not investigating such cases because the ICPC
law says it can only act on complaints not initiate them. But
shouldn’t it have worried the ICPC chairman that a government that had
sworn to do battle with corruption was not beaming its anti-corruption
searchlight on the arm of government which controls the nation’s
purse-strings? And is it not fair for people to wonder, as The
Comet did on November 27, 2002, why ICPC moves more quickly on certain cases
than on others? In
the specific case of the Senate President, Chief Anyim Pius Anyim, when
Akanbi says in the same interview with The
Comet, “From what I have
known of Anyim, I feel terrible that he ever became the President of the
Senate” does it not betray a level of personal animosity which was
bound to be prejudicial to ICPC’s objective investigation of Anyim’s
case before it? Is this personal prejudice not also betrayed by his
remarks that he wished he had time to attend the whole session of the
Senate “so that I can expose everything about some of you”? Does
the ICPC chairman realize that what he has blurted out about what he
thinks of of Anyim is a serious indictment of President Obasanjo’s
sense of judgement in conspiring to replace Dr. Chuba Okadigbo with
Anyim as Senate President? Conversely, does Akanbi’s remarks not
suggest that the president actually believed he had a dunce on his hands
that he could manipulate at will, only to discover that even dunces can
take only so much and that once this “dunce” showed he was not as
stupid as he looked, the president decided to dump him? Akanbi
is entitled to get angry at suggestions that his ICPC has been used by
the presidency to settle scores with its enemies, but what else can any
reasonable person make of the rather selective manner in which his
commission has waged its crusade against corruption? How else is anyone
to think, for example, of President Obasanjo’s firing of Mr. Vincent
Azie as the nation’s Auditor-General simply because he is said to have
chosen to publish his embarrassing audit report before the
Accountant-General has seen it? The Secretary to the Government of the
Federation, Chief Ufot Ekaette, has argued that it is wrong to say Azie
was fired as Auditor-General. What had happened, says Ekaette, was
simply that it would have been unconstitutional for the president to
have extended Azie’s six months as acting Auditor-General without
Senate’s approval. What the SGF obviously forgot to mention was that
the president had the option of confirming Azie in his post but, for
obvious reasons, chose not to ask the Senate to do so. The
politics surrounding Azie’s audit report apart, consider also the
presidency’s use of the police in the now celebrated case of Malabo
Oil against the government. As we all know, one of President
Obasanjo’s first acts in office was to cancel the oil blocks allocated
to some oil companies by his predecessor. Malabo Oil, whose apparent
principal owner is Chief Dan Etete, the oil minister under General Sani
Abacha, was among the victims. In time Etete decided to take his case
before the National Assembly, which obliged Etete by arranging for a
public hearing on the matter. His allocation was revoked, he said,
because he rejected presidential requests, through the president’s now
famous handyman, Chief Fasewe, for the transfer of half of Malabo Oil to
the president and his vice. The next thing Etete knew, he was being
declared persona
non graia
in Nigeria by the police. Before you know it, the Inspector General of
Police, Alhaji Tafa Balogun, had issued instructions to the security
services to watchlist and “arrest (Etete) at sight and within our
national border on account of criminal complaint bid against the
subject”. No details of the complaint were given but as a result of
the orders, Etete could not testify in person when the Senate hearing
came up. Now
if the presidency would show no compunction in its use of the police
harass to a complainant, or to interfere with the independence of the
Auditor-General, why should Akanbi take it personally for anyone to
suggest that his ICPC is open to presidential interference? Does
the natural, and in Obasanjo’s case, the demonstrated, inclination of
the presidency to abuse its power justify Senate’s attempt at blunting
of ICPC as a weapon for fighting corruption? Obviously, no.
Does it explain the Senate’s attempt to do so? Obviously, yes. More
importantly, does the Senate’s overhaul of the ICPC law actually
amount to blunting the commission as an anti-corruption weapon? The
universal outcry against the Senate suggests the answer is yes.
Certainly to whittle down its investigative powers and take away its
prosecutorial powers in the way the Senate proposes to do, is to render
the commission virtually useless. However, most criticisms of the Senate
seems focused on its decision to remove the powers of composing the ICPC
from the presidency and vesting it on the judiciary. Such criticisms
have sounded as if Obasanjo is indispensable for a successful war
against corruption. The truth, however, is that the president’s selective use of ICPC in the war against corruption has made it part of the problem rather than the solution to the problem. There is little or no doubt that if the president has been as hard on corruption in the executive arm of government as he has been on others, especially the legislative arm, which by definition, has much less money to play around with than the executive, the Senators would not have even dared to contemplate overhauling a law which they passed barely three years again. |