PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHMAMMED HARUNA

The Press, The President, Oputa And The Generals

Last Monday at least two newspapers, The Guardian and The Vanguard, started the serialisation of the hitherto secret report of the Human Rights Violations Investigations Commission (HRVIC), otherwise know as the Oputa Panel, (OP), after the name of its chairman, retired Supreme Court judge, Chukwudifu Oputa. In publishing the OP report, the two papers merely followed the lead of The News weekly newsmagazine, which used the report as the cover story of its December 6, 2004 edition.

Top of the highlights of the report for both The News and Vanguard, was the OP’s severe censoring of former heads of state, Generals Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida and Abdulsalami Abubakar, for rejecting its summons. The Guardian did not do any story but merely announced on its front page that it was beginning the serialisation of the OP report in the day’s edition. In addition to its own story, which was on the front page, Vanguard also started the serialisation of the OP report.

Between The News and Vanguard, the newsmagazine cast the mere sensational headline. “IBB Banned,” it screamed on its cover which carried a pensive looking picture of General Babangida. The bold headline was preceded with the rider’s, “Oputa Panel’s Verdict,” followed by the kicker, “The report OBJ wants to kill.”

In announcing its decision to serialise the OP report, The Guardian captured what was supposed to be the essence of OP. It also mentioned how long government has sat on its report. “The Justice Chukweudifu Oputa-led Human Rights Violations Investigations Commission,” said the newspaper, “was a cardinal plank of the Obasanjo administration’s effort to resolve the causes and nature of human rights violations in the country and reconcile aggrieved parties in an effort to find peace. Two years ago, in May 2002, the panel submitted its report and recommendations to the government. Beginning from today, The Guardian publishes the summary of the report… Pages 23, 24, 41 and 42.”

What both The Guardian and Vanguard did not do was to join The News in accusing President Obasanjo of wanting to bury the report. Now that it has been published, at least three questions may be raised on and about the report. First, what is the legality and morality of what The News and Company have done? Second, how useful was OP and how useful will its report be in curbing human rights abuse and bringing about national reconciliation among our ethnic and religious groups? Third, what implications does it have for the political fortunes of the three generals it severely censored?

In the preface to its cover story, The News itself raised the first question. “Is the publication of this document, before it has been officially made public, not against the laws of the land?”, it asked. The simple and straightforward answer is that it is. Fourty-four years after out independence our law books still carry the Official Secrets Act which criminalizes the publication of any document or information government deems secret. More than two years after OP submitted its report, the government kept it as a secret. Indeed it pointedly ignored repeated calls, including from the chairman of the panel and Father Mathew Hassan Kukah, one of its prominent members, to publish the report.

So going strictly by our books, The News and Company are in breach of our laws and if President Obasanjo is so inclined he can easily prosecute them./ He will however not do so either because he is complicit in the publication of the report, or because it would be a foolish thing to do. Not that his administration has not done more foolish things, but right now, with his letter exchanging episode with the chairman of his party, Chief Audu Ogbeh, still hanging fire, he needs all the peace he can get.

If the publication of the OP report by The News and Company is illegal, it is far from immoral. On the contrary the media had a moral duty to have published, not only the OP report, but such other similar reports, long ago. OP sat in public. The public therefore had a right to know its findings and recommendations. Even if OP did not sit in public, government still owed the people the publication of its report for without such publication its objectives would be impossible to achieve.

The moral of all this? The National Assembly should immediately repeal the Official Secrets Act from our books. In a democracy it is an idiot law, given its sweeping nature. It also contradicts the Freedom of Information Bill, which has been crawling its way through the National Assembly all these five years. In any case the law has since become so moribund, that even the military never bothered to use it – they simply banned any publication they didn’t like without reference to any existing laws – and has only served as a Sword of Damocles over the heads of Nigerians. Even as a moribund sword, it should be discarded if we want to strengthen our democracy.

All of which takes us to the question of OP’s usefulness as an instrument for curbing the abuse of human rights and reconciling our warring ethnic and religious groups. This may sound unkind, but beyond its therapeutic value for petitioners and beyond the collective therapy it provided for the public while it sat in public – during those sessions the public regaled in seeing the wings of the high and mighty being clipped – the panel seems to have served little purpose. Government itself proceeded to abuse the rights of its citizen in places like Odi, Delta State , and Zaki-Biam, in Benue State even as Oputa sat. And Nigerians themselves continued to kill each other along tribal and religious lines in places like Plateau, Nassarawa, Adamawa states and the Delta region. Also government did not feel deterred by OP from muzzling several newspapers and magazine, including most recently, Insider newsmagazine, for publishing stories government regarded as seditious or even merely awkward.

If OP has not deterred government from abusing the rights of citizens and if it has also not stopped ethnic and religious violence in the country, the reasons are not difficult to see; OP was essentially about revenge and politics. OP, as I said on these pages on November 7, 2001 , was a personal thing for President Obasanjo. He had felt wronged by General Sani Abacha for framing and sentencing him to death, later commuted to life, as a treasonable felon. He was saved from spending the rest of his life in prison only by divine intervention in the form of Abacha’s sudden and mysterious death. One needed a large heart to resist vengeance and it is well-known that even as a self-proclaimed Born-again Christian, a large heart is not one of Obasanjo’s virtues.

Not only was OP for Obasanjo more about vengeance than human rights and national reconciliation, it was also essentially a tool for keeping potential political opponents in check. OP was essentially vengeance and politics for the president for at least five reasons. First, unlike South Africa’s commission which OP sought to emulate, it was set up in undue haste; Nelson Mandela took four years and lots of public debate to set up his own while Obasanjo was barely two weeks in office when he set up his. Second, the emphasis of Oputa, regardless of what its members, and its media consultant and Daily Trust columnist, Ujudud Sherrif, have said, was identification and punishment of abusers of human rights, not reconciliation. This much is evident from what has been the highlight of its recommendations, i.e the ban of Buhari and Company from public office for life.

Third was the panel’s hardly-any-holds-barred procedure, which invariably led it to become more of a carnival than a commission. Forth was the composition of the panel itself; out of a panel of seven, only one was a Muslim. Ordinarily this should not have mattered. And personally I don’t think Obasanjo was after General Abacha, Buhari, Babangida and Abubakar necessarily because of their tribes and religion. Even then it was clearly insensitive of the president to have ignored religion as a factor in composing OP when it was obvious that allegations of religious persecution would come up before the panel. The predictable result was that while the panel’s report talked about discrimination against Hausa Christians in the north, it said absolutely nothing about the plight of Muslim minorities in the South East and South-South or of even the voiceless Muslim majority in the South-West.

Fifth, even though Obasanjo set up OP barely two weeks into his presidency, it was unable to sit for over two years, leaving himself open to suspicions that he wanted its report to be as close as possible to the 2003 presidential elections.

Now, given the president’s apparent reluctance to publish the OP report, it sounds illogical to accuse him of wanting to use it as a tool for vengeance and politics, especially when the report had terrible things to say about his potential political opponents. The simple answer to this is that, because of its complexities and complications, politics is all too often blind to logic. However, to the extent that even (political) madness has its own logic, it can be argued that it was more useful for Obasanjo to let the public speculate about OP’s potential damage to his opponents than to publish its report and expose it as a paper tiger, or worse,, as a double-edge sword.

For more than two years the public was left to speculate about what damage the OP report would do to the political ambitions of the generals the panel had censored. Now that we know its recommendations in this respect, it seems to me that the dangers were more apparent than real. Indeed the dangers seem potentially more damaging to the president than to the generals.

Easily the most potentially damaging recommendation of OP against the generals is that they should be banned from public office for life. “We recommend to the federal government,” said OP, “that all the former Heads of State be considered to have surrendered their right to govern Nigeria and Nigerians at any other time in the future. It is left for Nigerians to judge.”

If OP, as I have said, is essentially vengeance and politics for Obasanjo, for the members themselves this recommendation suggests sheer vindictiveness. It is vindictiveness because the crimes of the generals is no worse than their rejection of the panel’s summons.

Justice Oputa himself and Sheriff, have described this rejection as an act of impurity. But was it? When they were first summoned, the generals variously requested to appear through their lawyers mainly because the public sitting had degenerated into a circus. For some inexplicable reason, the panel insisted on their personal appearance. Naturally the generals sought and obtained court protection, obviously to the great annoyance of the panel. Oputa may disagree with the decision of the court but it beggars belief that a former Supreme Court judge would condemn someone protected by the courts as acting with impurity.

By allowing themselves to be blinded into recommending a life-ban on the generals, OP has now succeeded in putting Obasanjo in a quandary. If he obliges the panel, he will be infringing on the fundamental rights of the general, something they are bound to challenge in court and are likely to win. If he does not oblige the panel, he will be accused by the more vocal sections of the country as insincere.

For Obasanjo OP has turned out a double-edged sword that he has to swing very careful. Perhaps this largely explains why he has been reluctant to publish its report.