PEOPLE AND POLITICS

Letter to the President: There are no bad losers without bad fixers

By

Mohammed Haruna

kudugana@yahoo.com

Dear Mr. President,

Eighteen years ago I wrote you an open letter in the London-based West Africa magazine, then very much alive and kicking. The letter was in response to your “Ibadan Declaration”, which was a well-publicized lecture you gave at that year’s Annual Conference of the Agricultural Society of Nigeria. The lecture was in early August just before the overthrow of the draconian regime of Major-General Muhammadu Buhari by his then army chief, Major-General Ibrahim Babangida.

In that lecture you argued that people should be interested only in the substance of governments and not in their form. Nigerians, you said more specifically, should, for the next generation, be concerned more about “the ability to perform rather than the means by which government is brought about”. In that lecture you did criticize certain policies and actions of the Buhari administration, but the main thrust of your speech sounded to me like a somewhat disguised endorsement of Buhari’s dictatorship. Hence my open letter in which I strongly disagreed with you.

Your rule in the last four years as elected president suggests that your philosophy of government has really never changed. It seems to me that you still believe that substance is everything and form is nothing. This can only be the explanation for the meticulous way in which you and your fixers, notably Chief Tony Anenih, tried to fix the current general election, which for practical purposes, is all but over, INEC having declared you the winner of the penultimate weekend’s presidential elections. Obviously you, Anenih, and his motley crowd of fixers, believe your government is the best thing that can happen to Nigerians.

When I wrote about the elections last week, I said, in effect, that there was no widespread intimidation of voters by security agents or party thugs, except in the South-East and South-South. I wrote then from my experience as a Returning Officer in Kaduna metropolis. Since then it has become obvious to me that my experience was far from typical during the elections. From reports all over the country, the general elections, although much more peaceful than anyone envisaged, has been a monumental fraud in too many places for the election to be declared as free and fair in any sense of the word. It seems the goal of PDP in fixing the election is to turn Nigeria into a de-facto one-party state, something which you have said you are a staunch believer of. This may be a step away from your belief in military dictatorship but it is a very small step because, you will, I am sure, agree with me that the difference between the two is like the difference between six and half-a-dozen.

Sir, naturally, you do believe the election has been free, fair and peaceful. You said so after the first round of the National Assembly elections on April 12, which your party “won” handily. You repeated your conviction in your acceptance speech on April 23 as the declared winner of the presidential election. Among other things, you said that you were “profoundly overwhelmed by the magnitude of the mandate in which the voting pattern has cut across ethnic, regional, religious and even partisan lines”.

Your Excellency, as was the case 18 years ago, I beg, once again, to disagree with your position. With the greatest respect, this election, apart from being by and large a monumental fraud right from the beginning, is the most divisive election this country has ever seen. And if it has produced those you have referred to as bad loosers in your interview with CNN, it is precisely because it has been the handiwork of bad fixers. Very bad fixers.

Next week, in sha Allah, I shall explain why I believe the elections have been badly fixed and is the most divisive in the country’s history. Today I thought I should reproduce my West Africa letter as a background, if only because your paths and those of General Buhari seem somewhat intricably interwoven, going all the way back to when he was your regime’s military governor of Borno State and later minister of petroleum resources, right through to when he became your side-kick in your effort to end Babangida’s elongated transition programme, ending up in your parting of ways when he decided to serve General Abacha at a time when Abacha had thrown you in jail on apparently trumped up charges of treason. Buhari, you will recall, once described his regime as an off short of yours i.e. the Murtala/Obasanjo regime.

The letter, carried in the West Africa magazine of September 18, 1985 read:

Sir, I write this letter to you reluctantly. I do so first because I doubt that you will read it at all. I have it on authority, your authority, that you no longer read Nigerian papers. Remember when Dele Giwa, editor-in-chief of Newswatch magazine, and  myself came to your farm sometime in April or May? I tried to persuade you to break your silence since stepping down as head of state in October 1979, and talk to the New Nigerian. You declined courteously but indicated little regard for the Nigerian press, even though you apparently have very high regard for individual pressmen like Giwa.

You will agree with me that a letter is as good as useless if it is not read. Still I go ahead. Since it is an open letter, someone near you will probably read it and persuade you to do the same. Besides this magazine is strictly not part of the Nigerian press, its Nigerian ownership and editorship notwithstanding.

The second reason for my reluctance is the mood of the season in the country. The authorities have warned against political debate. My reading of the warning is that it was directed specifically at the latter-day confederates which some actions of this government seem to have spawned. I am no longer so sure, not after the recent briefing of media executives by the Chief of Staf, General Idiagbon, where he said the ban on political discourse is blanket.

If I write to you at all, in spite of the danger that I may offend the political sensibilities of the authorities, I do so because, first I am in good company – yours. Your lecture or what one would like to call your “Ibadan Declaration” at the Annual Conference of the Agricultural Society of Nigeria early in August, and the occasion for this letter, is anything but apolitical. Now, I do not think it will cross the mind of anyone to put away an ex-head of state because he chooses to speak his mind. And since I am only commenting on what you have said, I presume my transgression will be forgiven.

I write this letter also because the head of State General Muhammadu Buhari, has himself given his word that those who offer constructive criticisms are safe. It is, of course, not for me to determine that my comments are constructive. I want to believe, however, that I mean well. I can only hope that the authorities agree.

So here we go. You said in your lecture that you are more interested in the substance of government rather than its form. Nigerians, you went on, should, for the next generation, be concerned more with “the ability to perform rather than the means by which government is brought all about”. In other words, it makes little or not difference whether government is democratic or military as long as it performs. With due respect, sir, I disagree.

I will concede to you that you have a sound basis for your conclusions. Your regime was military, but it was far more tolerant and efficient than Shagari’s. And I speak from first-hand experience. When as head of state you visited the U.S in October 1977, I wrote a caustic attack of our policy towards the country (New Nigerian, October 24, 1977). Among other things, I said our role in the Shaba crisis in Zaire, in which the U.S played a key role in sustaining the corrupt Mobutu regime against invasion by Zairean dissidents, “smacked of subservience to American interests no matter the protestations to the contrary by officialdom and by ‘realists’ ”. I said more uncomplimentary things.

On another occasion, I took on your Ministry of External Affairs. I said, giving specific instances, that since Angola, your foreign policy was “more concerned with being in the good books of the West that in our own good”, (New Nigerian, January 31, 1978).

The nearest thing to a rap on the knuckles I got from your government was a call from your pres secretary, Alex Nwokedi, to talk our differences over, and an invitation to External Affairs Ministry at Marina, again for talks, at the end of which General Joseph Garba, then the Minister gave me a rejoinder to my article with words that I was free to publish or not. Of course, I knew it would have been unwise for me to refuse, but the point is that it was all persuasion not coercion.

Things changed for the worse with Shagari’s coming. The opposition papers, Tribune in particular, did say a lot of nasty and libelous things about him and it was to his eternal credit that he ignored the abuses knowing, presumably, that to silence the opposition papers the way many of his lieutenants urged him, would involve some abuse of power.

Shagari’s tolerance gave a semblance of free speech. Trouble was that speech was not so free with one’s own proprietors, especially government proprietors. I should know. I was acting editor of the New Nigerian for almost a year from late 1981 and was deputy editor until July 1983 when I was transferred to the commercial department of the company because I insisted on a measure of editorial independence. Things were far worse with the state papers which, unlike the New Nigerian, did not have a tradition of editorial independence to inspire any resistance.

The point of all this is that a civilian government is not necessarily more tolerable than a military government. And given the degree of waste and corruption of the last civilian government, a waste and corruption which is now proverbial, a civilian government is also not necessarily more efficient. There is therefore a basis for you to conclude, as some sage has said, that it is only fools who contend for forms of government.

Still, as I said, I beg to disagree. It is not only wise, I think, it is also imperative to contend for forms of government. Obviously those of you who regard form as irrelevant or at best a luxury, equate good merely with efficiency. So long as government delivers, the argument goes, what does anybody care whether it is in office through the barrel of the gun or the ballot box? My answer is that if people do not care, they should. It was precisely because the Germans did not care about the fascist nature of Hitler's government, seeing it was efficient, that he was able to unleash a global war. And see the deep division and the guilt complex that his brutish handiwork has now saddled the German nation with. Therefore to dismiss form as irrelevant is a most ahistorical position to take.

True governments should worry about efficiency. But those over whom they govern should also be concerned with more. They should worry about how governments come to power.

They should do so because power acquired other than through the ballot box is absolute and as the saying goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Again it is true that some military regimes have successfully resisted the temptation to abuse power just like some elected governments have submitted to similar temptation to abuse even their rather circumscribed power. The difference,  however, is that with civilian government, the public is not helpless to check such abuse at least in the medium and long term. This difference is a most fundamental one. In any case there is a dialectic between form and substance which makes a strict separation of the two rather simplistic.

Because of the foregoing, I disagree with you, sir, when you argue that we should no longer "regard military administration as an aberration". You take this position because, as you said, military rule has lasted longer than civilian in our 25 years of independence. The logic of this argument is that we should legitimize say, prostitution, since it is as old as mankind. No sir, military rule is an aberration, no mater how long we are saddled with it. Rather than accept it, we should be looking into why it keeps coming back like a bad dream and finding the appropriate solutions.

Apart from forms of government, you also dwelt extensively on the contentious subject of federal character, the economy, education and agriculture. A thorough discussion of your positions on these, especially on the last three, would require more knowledge than I possess in the fields, if not more space than this magazine’s editor can afford considering the magazine covers West Africa and not only Nigeria.

Which brings me to one of my main worries in writing this letter to you. This is that your weighty wisdom as an ex-head of state will be greeted by silence in the Nigerian press. General Idiagbon has said his administration does not consider your lecture as political. But one wonders if that is not because of your status. Afterall, Bukar Zarma, the editor of New Nigerian, the federal government’s own paper, and Alhaji Sule Katagum, a former chairman of the federal public service commission, have been taken away by security agents for questioning over the latter’s interview with the paper in which he said things that were far less politically explosive than yours. Only a foolhardy editor would miss the lesson of the difference.

If silence does greet your lecture, it would indeed be sad because a fulsome debate on the issues you raised could not have been but immensely beneficial. It is also sad, perhaps tragic, that the lesson of your liberal conduct, as the only ex-head of state to retire in peace, as General Buhari, no less, has observed, seems completely lost on a regime which says it is an offshoot of yours. I bet wherever Shagari is now, he must be chuckling away at the Nigerian press which thought some of his lieutenants, if not himself, were miniature Hitlers.