|
PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA Mantu and the third term agenda
In an interview with newsmen and with the BBC Hausa service following the Northern Senators’ Forum meeting over the weekend, Deputy Senate President Ibrahim Mantu seemed to have unequivocally denounced the on-going campaign for an extension of President Obasanjo’s tenure beyond 2007. “Frankly speaking”, Thisday of last Thursday quoted him as saying, “I see these people spreading the rumour of a third term as enemies of democracy. They are creating unnecessary tension in the land.”
Thisday, at least, saw Mantu’s interview as an about-turn by a man who, by his own admission, is one of the closest politicians to the president. “3rd Term: Mantu makes U-turn”, the newspaper said in the headline of its lead story.
At first reading it does look as if Mantu has indeed made a u-turn on the third term issue. A closer reading, however, shows that he has done no such thing. What he has done is to denounce, not the agenda itself, but those critical of it. “What is happening”, he told newsmen, “is that some people are suspicious because of their personal ambition. They have allowed their ambition to becloud their sense of reasoning. They are completely blinded by their ambition and anything that they suspect might come to stop them from realizing such ambition is suspect.”
What Mantu said in plain English was that those who want to be president come 2007 and fear that the incumbent will get in their way are those who have manufactured the “rumour” that the president wants to extend his tenure.
In dismissing speculations about President Obasanjo’s third term bid as mere rumour, Mantu did challenge anyone with evidence of his support for the bid to show it. “I challenge anybody in Nigeria”, Daily Trust of last Monday quoted him as saying, “to show me what I have done to indicate my support for Obasanjo’s third term bid in 2007.”
It may indeed not be easy to show concrete proof of the deputy Senate President support for the third term bid beyond his chairmanship of the constitutional amendment committee and his well-known deference to the president.
In any case the deputy senate president has never been a vocal advocate of the president’s third term bid a la the late Mohammed Waziri and characters like Greg Mbadiwe and Senator Arthur Nzeribe.
Even then Mantu has said enough to implicate himself as a supporter of the bid. Deny it as he may, it is enough to implicate him as a supporter of the president’s third term bid that he has dismissed it as rumour and denounced those who condemn the bid as rumour-mongers.
The deputy Senate president is not the only politician close to the president to dismiss the third term agenda as rumour. Others like Malam Lawal Batagrawa, former minister, former special adviser to the president and lately chairman of the Nigerian Railway, and Alhaji Abdullahi Adamu, the Governor of Nasarawa State, have consistently dismissed the speculations as just that – speculations.
The latest of the president’s men to denounce critics of the agenda is Chief Ojo Maduekwe, the selected secretary-general of the Peoples Democratic Party. In a characteristically truculent statement he issued on December 1 under the highfalutin title of “PDP Declaration of Principles Concerning Amendments of the Nigerian Constitution,” Maduekwe, dismissed critics of the third term plan as “ill-informed or plainly mischievous” noisemakers intent on mobilizing the public against President Obasanjo using a “phantom issue”.
Well, if the third term agenda is indeed rumour, then it can be said that the president’s men have done pretty little to make it go away. On the contrary they seem to have done everything to make it stick like a glue, so much so that even the president’s friends abroad, like Ghanaian President, John Kuffour, and the British government through its Nigerian High Commission, have voiced misgivings about any attempt to allow second term incumbents get extensions.
Among the things the president’s men have done to make the “rumours” stick, two stand out as very damaging to the government’s credibility and integrity. First, was the announcement by the new Inspector-General of Police, Sunday Ehindero, that the police will soon be acquiring armoured tanks at a cost of 1.3 billion Naira, ostensibly to combat the armed robbery that has since become a scourge nationwide. But, as the Nigerian Tribune said in its editorial of November 15, nothing can be more calculated to confirm fears that the federal authorities are determined to use all means, fair or foul, to achieve their third term agenda. “Many Nigerians” said the newspaper, “are bound to see a link between the tanks that were bought in 1980s and those that Ehindero plans to buy in the next few months. Elections are due in 2007.” Electoral frauds in the next elections, the paper said, will be more blatant than those of 2003. And the 2003 elections were widely adjudged as the most fraudulent in the country’s history.
Nigerians still retain a painful memory of how the police, under Sunday Adewusi, used the armoured tanks they were given in the eighties to help subvert the will of the people in the general elections of 1983. As the Tribune pointed out, tanks don’t stop robbers. Only good intelligence and good communications do.
As if the purchase of armoured tanks for the police in the run-up to the next general elections was not ominous enough, the same federal authorities decided to pardon Sergeant Barnabas Jabila Mshelia, alias Sergeant Rogers, and reabsorb him into army intelligence. Rogers was infamous in the days of General Sani Abacha’s tyranny as a, if not the, principal hit man of the regime’s much dreaded Strike Force. Having turned state witness in the on-going trial for murder of Lt. General Ishaya Bamaiyi, Abacha’s army chief, and of Major Hamza Al-Mustapha, Abacha’s Chief Security Officer, among others, Rogers confessed to the extra-judicial killing of Kudirat, Chief M.K.O. Abiola’s wife and a staunch advocate of de-annulling the June 12 1992 presidential elections that the chief seemed set to win. He also confessed to an attempt on the life of Alex Ibru, the Chairman of The Guardian Newspapers.
The rather surreptitious return of Rogers into the army is bound to lead to fears that the authorities are interested once again in pressing into service his expertise of eliminating their perceived enemies. The Punch couldn’t have been more right when it said in its editorial of November 23, that “The presence of Rogers in the military is a national embarrassment. It is an indication that justice and public morality have taken flight from the land.”
If Mantu and others who denounce critics of the third term agenda as rumour- mongers want the “rumours” to go away, surely they know what to do; they should know that they must be seen to mean what they say. Equally their actions must be seen to speak louder than their words.
You can issue highfalutin declaration of principles on constitutional amendments, as the PDP did last week, and you can call those opposed to such amendments any name you like, but when you buy armoured tanks for the police in the run-up to a general election or sneak a self-confessed killer back into the army, and when you also make brazen attempts to remove anyone who raises inconvenient questions about the third term agenda from office as was tried recently with the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Alhaji Bello Masari, when you do all these and more, you convince no one that any fears about a third term agenda are baseless.
If therefore rumours of such an agenda have persisted in spite of denials by the president’s men, it is precisely because they seem to have become not only masters of doublespeak, but, worse, they have all too often said one thing and done the exact opposite
|