PEOPLE AND POLITICS

Akanbi at War

By

Mohammed Haruna

kudugana@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.