PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Election 2007: Making for the Monkey…

Last week the Sultan of Sokoto, His Eminence Alhaji Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III, spoke the minds of all Nigerians when he strongly deplored the apparent ill-preparedness of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for next month’s general elections. The occasion was a summit of traditional rulers of the North which he chaired. Its subject was the role of the traditional rulers in the region in the elections.

“We cannot”, the Sultan said in his opening remarks, “sit down, fold our arms and say everything is ok.” The fact, as we all know, is that hardly is anything ok with INEC’s preparations for the elections. First, inspite of the much touted magic of INEC’s Direct Data Capturing Machines, Nigerians still do not have a comprehensive and reliable voters’ register. The reason is obvious; the machines were too few, too unreliable and were brought in too late to capture data satisfactorily.

Second, barely a few weeks to the elections there are no signs that INEC is recruiting, never mind training, the hundreds of thousands of polling staff needed for the elections. Third, there are also no signs that INEC is ready to erect the hundreds of thousand of polling booths for the elections. Fourth, instead of facing these basic jobs, INEC has busied itself going to the courts to defend its unjustified and unjustifiable banning of opposition candidates from the elections.

The most notorious case in this respect is that of Vice-President Atiku Abubakar. INEC’s chairman, Professor Maurice Iwu, has argued that it is the Constitution and not INEC that has barred Abubakar by virtue of its Section 137 (i). The section says anyone who is indicted for any of number of offenses by an administrative panel or a tribunal or a court is disqualified from contesting in an election. Atiku Abubakar, says Iwu, stands indicted by a recent administrative panel under Professor Ignatius Ayua, the Federal Government’s Solicitor-General. The Ayua panel looked into the vice-president’s handling of the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF).

The most charitable thing one can say about Iwu’s argument is that it is very disingenuous. Iwu has chosen to rely on the Ayua panel instead of the earlier but similar one under the Attorney General of the Federation, Chief Bayo Ojo, because even a fool can see that the Ojo panel was worse than a kangaroo court if only because all its members were ministers serving at the pleasure of a president that had openly vowed to stop his deputy from ever becoming president. So apart from the obvious fact that the Ojo panel was the accuser, judge and jury all role into one, technically speaking, it was an executive, not an administrative, panel.

However, while the Ayua panel may be administrative, even that cannot avail Iwu. This is simply because Ayua’s indictment of Abubakar was based on the self-same PTDF case which the courts had ruled as inadmissible.

Iwu says the Constitution, by virtue of its section 137(i), automatically disqualifies Abubakar along with other candidates in situations similar to the vice-presidents. Yet it is elementary knowledge that constitutions do not execute themselves. If they did they would never have needed the courts to interpret them.

Surely Iwu, who lays claim to scholarship, should know that Section 137(i), or any section of the Constitution, is not a blank cheque for any arm of government, least all the executive, to fill in as it wished. Iwu surely knows that there are legal tests for what can pass as an administrative panel proper and anyone with half an eye can see that the Ayua panel cannot pass such tests.

So when the current edition of Newswatch puts Iwu’s picture on its cover with the headline “Maurice Iwu: The Executioner,” few readers would question its editorial judgement of casting Iwu and his INEC in the role of the ruling party’s atomic weapons for imposing itself on Nigerians.

Inspite of the Sultan’s unhappiness with INEC’s ill-preparedness for the next election, he still seemed willing to give it the benefit of doubt. “We need an assurance from the INEC Chairman,” he said in his remarks, “that they are ready and they convince us so that we can now confidently tell our people that elections are holding on April 14.” With the greatest due respect to the Sultan, I must say he was barking up the wrong tree. Iwu may have been a willing and ready tool for the ruling party and its self-chosen life-leader, but the problem is not INEC as such but the PDP and, even more so, its life-leader, President Olusegun Obasanjo. For when all is said and done it was the president, and not the INEC leadership, who deliberately programmed the election to fail in order obviously to realize his ambition to stay in power forever. So blaming Iwu and his INEC is like making for the monkey instead of the organ grinder.

Afterall it is the same president who would not give INEC enough money in good time to buy sufficient number of reliable computers for voter registration or carry out its other basic functions that has since found the money to buy tens of thousands of arms and millions of ammunition for the police, ostensibly to help INEC maintain law and order during the elections. However, as a justifiably cynical text making the rounds of the mobile phone networks in the country has aptly put it, “Yes, INEC is ready. Battle ready.”

Anyone who doubts how battle ready the suborned INEC or, more accurately, its principal, is for the forthcoming elections, should refer to the riot act which presidential spokesperson, Mrs. Remi Oyo, read to the Nigerians last Friday. The Federal Government, she said, will not “tolerate any attempt from any quarter to willfully create conditions that will make it impossible for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to conduct free, fear, transparent and credible elections as scheduled on April 14 and April 21.”

As a classic case of blaming the victim, it is hard to beat this presidential reading of the riots act. Here’s a case of a president who has made it impossible to have a reliable voter’s register ahead of a general election, a president who is making it difficult, if not impossible, for INEC to recruit polling staff and erect polling booths, and a president who has instead chosen to arm the police to the teeth ostensibly to maintain law and order, but in reality to clamp down on the protests that such willful manipulation of the electoral process will inevitably provoke. In short, here is a president who has created the very conditions that will make it impossible to conduct a free, fair, transparent and credible election, and yet the same president turns around to blame the potential victims of his actions before they can even cry out.

Iwu and his INEC must bear responsibility for allowing themselves to be used as tools for frustrating the will of the people in the next elections, but the ultimate responsibility for the probable failure of the forthcoming elections lies squarely with President Obasanjo.

Truth be told, all the problems of the elections can be traced to the fact that the man has enjoyed power so much he seems to now find it difficult, if not impossible, to imagine life without it. Equally he has abused it so much he is clearly terrified of the possible consequences of life without it.

Chris Okolie: The (almost) unsung hero of investigative journalism

When the story of Chief Chris Okolie’s death on March 4 first broken out, I expected at least the print media to inundate their readers with his obituary for days if not weeks. Instead, only one or two newspaper carried stories of his death in any great detail. None, as far as I knew, carried any tribute until The Nation on March 14. Two day’s later Thisday carried a more fulsome tribute. So far these two are the only newspapers I know that have paid tribute to someone who, without doubt, was a hero of Nigeria’s investigative journalism. Not only was Okolie a hero of the country’s investigative journalism, he also pioneered newsmagazine journalism with his NewBreed bi-weekly which he started in 1971.

Between 1971 and 1977 when NewBreed was banned by military Head of State, General Obasanjo, because, if my memory serves me well, of a story the magazine did on Biafran rebel leader, Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu, then still in extile in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, NewBreed was the bi-word for investigative journalism. Even after the 1977 ban Newbreed remained a leader in investigative journalism until it started to fade out in the late eighties.

All journalism by definition should, as far as I am concerned, be investigative if journalists should lay any claim to being professionals. In other words, journalism should not merely be a transmission belt for fact and opinion but a profession which digs for the facts and opinions that should bring progress to society.

Such journalism, however, is easier preached than practiced. Before Okolie, few newspapers and magazines in the country practiced investigative journalism in the consistent manner in which NewBreed published stories that afflicted the powerful and comforted the weak, edition after edition.

Again long before him, there were magazines like Drum, Spear, West Africa, Africa and Afriscope, but these were either soft-sell or essentially opinion and newsfeature magazines. It was NewBreed that pioneered Nigerian newsmagazine journalism as we know it today.

However, the greatest virtue with which Okolie pursued his journalism career was not his professionalism. His greatest virtue was his integrity. As many of the journalists who passed through NewBreed, including my friend, Chief Ikechi Emenike, himself a successful publisher and presently the ANPP governorship candidate of Abia State, and Uche Ezechukwu, publisher of the New Sentinel, would tell you, the greatest crime any reporter would commit in Okolie’s eyes is to trade the pages of NewBreed for money or any other benefit. Journalism for him was like Justice. It therefore always had to be blind to power and wealth.

After the ban of NewBreed in 1977, the magazine never fully recovered its old investigative prowess. In time Okolie himself lost interest in journalism and moved on to politics. But here too he brought his personal integrity to bear. Again he clashed with the power-that-be and although his people chose him to be their senator in General Ibrahim Babangida’s Third Republic, the authorities barred him from politics for “security reasons” which were never spelt out.

In writing this obituary to a great journalist, publisher and politician, I searched the libraries in Kaduna for the past editions of the NewBreed for reference. To my great consternation none, not the National Library, nor the Kaduna State Library, nor Arewa House, nor even the National Archives, had any in store.

The greatest tribute the journalism organizations in the country, namely the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria, the Nigerian Guild of Editors and the Nigerian Union of Journalism can pay him is to put together and preserve in all our archives and for all our journalism schools a collection of all the past editions of NewBreed and its companion, The President, which pioneered economic and business magazine reporting in the country.