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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
Obasanjo’s War on “Crooks”
Penultimate Tuesday, President Olusegun Obasanjo told a national seminar on the 2007 general elections that Nigerians must use all lawful means to ensure that no crook ever ruled their country again. Speaking on the theme of the responsibility and commitment of Nigerians for a free and fair election next year, he said among other things, that “These criminals and crooks, persons of dubious character, the corrupt and the corruptors and those whose track record are so blemished that no amount of whitewashing or propaganda or reinvention of personal profiles can cover up their dirty past must be prevented BY ALL LAWFUL MEANS from further corrupting, contaminating and compromising our democratic process.” (Emphasis mine).
Naturally, most Nigerians share the president’s sentiments against politicians with a crooked past. I certainly do. Even then I have at least one big problem with his strong words, sensible as they are.
This is the matter of using only lawful means to stop crooks from power, hence my highlight of the phrase “by all lawful means” in the quotation above. His government, it seems to me, is so obsessed with stopping “crooks” from coming to power it is prepared to use even unlawful means. The justification seems to be that lawful means, when they are effective at all, are painfully slow. Apparently the president believes that the end invariably justifies the means.
This can only be the explanation of recent raids that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has carried out against some banks and firms with suspected links to Vice-President Atiku Abubakar and General Ibrahim Babangida. Such raids require search warrants but it is not clear that the EFCC had bothered with such niceties. Similarly, this apparent belief that the end justifies the mean can only be the explanation for the raid which operatives of the State Security Service carried out on Vice-President Atiku Abubakar’s presidential campaign office penultimate Tuesday. During the raid the operatives reportedly took away computers and files and even briefly detained an Arab-American intern working in the office on suspicions that he was a terrorist!
The Nigerian Bar Association, while rising from its annual conference for this year in Port Harcourt last week, condemned the EFCC for what the association described as its “gestapo tactics” in carrying out its brief. Chief Gani Fawehinmi, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria and a human rights activist, disagreed. The EFCC, he said, is to be congratulated for its war on corruption rather than criticized for its tactics.
Fawehinmi’s support for EFCC’s tactics should not surprise anyone who has observed him closely. During the regime of General Muhammadu Buhari in 1984/85 when the general dealt harshly with politicians, Fawehinmi stood alone among his lawyer colleagues in support of Buhari’s decrees and military tribunals with their somewhat lax requirements for proof of guilt.
While Fawehinmi’s record suggests impatience with the slow pace of the war against corruption, his concern for human rights should advise him that the means matter as much in this war as the objectives. Indeed they matter even more. For is it not said that those who go to equity should do so with clean hands? Is it also not said that the morality of law is such that it is better for the guilty to escape than for the innocent to suffer?
No matter how convinced we are that certain individuals are crooks, it is important that we use only lawful means to keep them away from public office. Otherwise we would be operating the laws of the jungle.
When Obasanjo speaks persistently against crooks in politics it is apparent that he has presidential frontrunners like Vice-President Abubakar and Babangida in mind. Yet until recently the same president had dismissed repeated accusations of corruption against Babangida as baseless. Those who made such accusations, he often said, should bring proof.
If, therefore, anything has happened since then to make the president change his mind about the character of Babangida and his Vice-President, it seems to have little to do with democracy or with the welfare of the people. Instead, his change of mind seems to have every thing to do with the fact that the two played vital roles in aborting his third term agenda and are also likely to do so again should the same agenda resurrect in other guises.
And if any evidence was needed that the president’s persistent diatribe particularly against Babangida was more personal than principled, such evidence was there in the presidency’s all too enthusiastic attempt to resurrect the execution of Major-General Mamman Vatsa for his alleged role in the failed coup of 1986 against Babangida. The aim of revisiting the Vatsa case is clearly to portray Babangida as vindictive and malicious. Yet even the blind can see that raking up Vatsa’s execution could only open the Pandora’s Box of military coups in Nigeria from which few military officers who have held political offices, including, some would even say, particularly Obasanjo himself, can escape unscathed. It is a measure of Obasanjo’s desperation to nail Babangida that he seems blinded to the danger he has exposed himself to in waking up the sleeping dog of military coups.
An even more damning evidence that Obasanjo’s diatribe against Babangida and Abubakar is personal rather principled is the fact that Obasanjo’s much touted economic reform is essentially the same as Babangida’s much maligned Structural Adjustment Programme. Both reforms have been about retrenchment, privatization, deregulation, cronyism, the lot. The difference, this time, however, is that the face of the reform is even more hideous than Babangida’s which Obasanjo once condemned as a reform without a human face. That Obasanjo’s reform has a more hideous face is obvious from the high level of insecurity which has become pervasive in the country. Worse still, Obasanjo’s government has had far more resources than Babangida’s, or any other government for that matter, to cushion the pains of his reform.
Again even as the president condemns the corruption of past governments, his own has not shown any more transparency in its management of our resources. Right under his nose people like Chief Bode George, the Deputy Chairman (South) of PDP and apparently the president’s bouncer in the South-West, who the EFCC has implicated in a large scale fraud, have continued to parade themselves as the paragons of political virtues. Even more damning is the president’s own shares in the TransCorp which reek of conflict of interest in spite of claims that they have been held in a blind trust.
One can go on and on but the point, I believe, is made that Obasanjo’s objections to Vice-President Abubakar and Babangida is not based on principles. Rather the objections are based on the fact that the two are his greatest obstacles to his self-perpetuation in office.
When recently Chief Chukwuemeka Ezeife, a former political adviser to the president, suggested the idea of an Interim National government in the likely event, he said, that a free and fair election proves impossible next year, many people saw it as Obasnjo’s third term agenda in another guise. Predictably it was widely and roundly condemned.
The president, somewhat implausibly, has added his voice to the spate of condemnations of the ING. It is, he told his audience at the INEC seminar, “undemocratic and has no redeeming political and other values.”
Not many Nigerians, I am afraid, will believe in the sincerity of his condemnation of the ING. In the last seven years he has said one thing and done the opposite so many times that not many people are likely to give him the benefit of doubt. It is all so eerily reminiscent of Babangida’s eight-year transition programme whereby the more vehemently he asserted that he will go, the less Nigerians believed him.
Perhaps it was a Freudian slip, but it spoke volumes of what Nigerians think of Obasanjo’s credibility that a nephew of General Vatsa, Jonathan, would compare Obasanjo with Babangida. Jonathan made the comparison in a lengthy interview with some members of Vatsa’s family which The Nation published last Saturday. Said Jonathan, “Whatever you see Obasanjo doing today, he was copying from what IBB has laid down… IBB did not want to go…”
Obasanjo can fulminate against crooks in politics as much as he wants, but unless he fights them as president with equity and uses only lawful means, most Nigerians would find it hard to resist the temptation of comparing his fulminations to the well-known Aesop’s fable of the dog in a manger. |