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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA Come On! Mr. Senate President Sir, Last Saturday, Sun carried what was perhaps your most extensive interview since being anointed Senate President this month. Among the things you talked about were (1) how you got back to the senate for the third straight time, (2) how former President Obasanjo was never against “June 12” and how he so much loves Nigeria and (3) how you too were never against June 12. What you said on all three subjects reminded me of George Orwell’s famous essay about Politics and the English Language. As one of the smartest military officers this country has produced, I am sure you are familiar with Orwell. At least you must be familiar with his even more famous 1984 which was a satirical novel on political tyranny and hypocrisy. That novel, as you probably know, gave birth to the phrase Orwellian expression which essentially means saying one thing but meaning something else, sometimes even the exact opposite. I am sorry if I seem rude, but your interview with Sun sounded to me like a classic case of Orwellian expression. You will recall that his one word for such an expression was “doublespeak”.
Sixty years after Orwell wrote these words, another linguist, Steven Poole, wrote to disagree somewhat. Poole, whom you may also be familiar with, argued in his recent book, Unspeak: Words are Weapons that contrary to what Orwell thinks of the efficacy of propaganda, people can see through politicians if they think through their language hard enough.
I am sorry sir if, so far, I sound like beating about the bush. But you will presently see why all this was a necessary prelude to an examination of your Sun interview as a classic case of a politician’s doublespeak. Let us begin with your role in the military president, General Ibrahim Babangida’s cancellation of the historic June 12, 1993 presidential elections. In the Sun interview you categorically denied having a hand in the cancellation. On the contrary, you said, you condemned it.
Sir, the problem people have with you and June 12 is that hardly anyone remembers you speaking up against the cancellation. On the contrary, most people, including this reporter, can vividly recall the role you played in the attempt by General Sani Abacha to bury June 12 for good. I personally remember how, in the course of reporting Abacha’s coup against Chief Ernest Shonekan’s interim national government on November 17, 1993 for the defunct Citizen magazine, I was able to establish the role you played as a key actor in Abacha’s clique in persuading the then Senate President, Chief Eme Ebute, who is Idoma like you, not to reject the coup. Ebute’s cooperation was to have been in return for your group not disbanding the National Assembly and for releasing him from the house arrest he had been placed under, a release which was negotiated between Brigadier-General Bashir Salihi Magashi, the commander of the Brigade of Guards, on the one hand, and Senators Amadu Ali and Isa Kachako, who were retired colonels, on the other. I remember that a day after Ebute delivered his side of the bargain with a bland statement about the Senate not being in a position to comment on the unfolding coup, your clique issued a terse statement dissolving the National Assembly along with the existing political parties and banning all political activities. The next time Nigerians heard from you was about five months later after you apparently went on self-exile from where you gave an explosive interview to Newswatch. In that interview carried in its edition of April 11, 1994, you literally took Abacha to the cleaners. However, the interview also exposed your role in Abacha’s coup. It showed that your interview was a clear case of sour grapes. You claimed in the interview that you and 16 other officers, most of them prominent members of Abacha’s clique, were sacked ten days after his Nov. 17 coup because you supported democracy and “were totally opposed to another extended period of military intervention.” Yet when Newswatch asked you point blank whether in your anxiety to return democracy to the country, you considered reversing the annulment of June 12, your answer was a categorical “No”. Newswatch: Why? Mark: Because after Diya consulted with the Yoruba leaders of thought they unanimously and unequivocally agreed to forgo June 12 and instead opted for a military government. Earlier in the interview you had given a detailed account of how your clique met and considered three options on how to end what you claimed was Sonekan’s inability to stop the country from “drifting precariously”. None of the three options included reversing the annulment of June 12. The options were (1) giving teeth to Sonekan to conclude Babangida’s transition by the year’s end, (2) having a full military regime for six months to conduct a fresh presidential election and (3) having a mix grill of soldiers and civilians for no more than a year to conduct fresh elections at all levels of government. “After a stormy debate”, you said in the Newswatch interview,
Clearly if you opposed Abacha it was not because you differed over June 12. If you felt so strongly for democracy you would have done what a more principled junior colleague of yours, Colonel Dangiwa Umar did – resign your commission in the face of Abacha’s apparently insurmountable intransigence. In resigning his commission Umar not only sacrificed his bright military carrier, he also risked his life as commandant of the army’s School of Armour. Truth be told, sir, you were sacked not because you championed democracy but because you lost out in the cloak and dagger game a number of you as army officers played with June 12, each in pursuit of his private agenda. Back to the Sun interview. You said your mentor President Obasanjo has never been against June 12 and that nobody can disagree that he loves Nigeria. Really? If he was not against June 12, why did he tell the world that Chief M.K.O. Abiola, the putative winner of the June 12 elections, was not the messiah Nigerians were waiting for? Obasanjo may be right that Abiola may not have been Nigeria’s messiah. Certainly Abiola was not the hero of democracy his supporters painted him as, considering his own admitted role in previous coups as a close friend of the military top hierarchy and, even more so, considering his own invitation to Abacha to throw out Shonekan. Even then Obasanjo’s derogatory remarks about Abiola were clearly aimed at persuading his foreign friends to forget about June 12. As for loving Nigeria, what kind of love is that which pushes a leader, along with a chosen few, to amass so much personal wealth at the expense of his people at a time of so much oil windfall, expose the same people to so much insecurity from armed robbery and other violent crimes, and, above all, rob them of their inalienable right to chose their leaders? Can you, sir, in all honesty deny that this was essentially what Obasanjo did to Nigerians in the last eight years? Finally, your account of how you became the Senate president. “God”, you told the Sun,
God, as someone once said, is the last refuse of every scoundrel. I am by no means saying you are a scoundrel. Far be it for me to call the No. 3 citizen of this country a scoundrel. Even then this almost knee-jerk and vain invocation of God by any politician who seems to have a credibility problem stretches the credulity of most of us ordinary mortals almost to breaking point I am sure, sir, you will easily remember how one of our predecessors as Senate president, Adolphus Wabara, similarly invoked God when he had credibility problems with his election in 2003. “I always believe in Exodus 14:14 that the Lord shall fight for you and you shall keep your peace,” he said in Thisday of June 15, 2003. “I am sure,” he concluded in that interview, “the judgement of the Almighty God will prevail. God that has done this for me and my people will sustain it.” Wabara, as you know very well, had a problem similar to yours, only possibly not as bad. Most people knew he didn’t win even the primaries in his party, not to talk of the senatorial election, but he still went on to become Senate president. In your own case you may have won the primaries in your party but, unless it had done so since you started reading this open letter, INEC never formally announced you as winner of your senatorial election as mandated by our electoral law, like it did in Wabara’s case. Last thing I heard you were trailing behind your ANPP opponent with 98,029 votes to his 172,636. This was after INEC itself had announced results from seven of the nine local governments in your senatorial district and had announced a re-run in the remaining two which had been cancelled because of irregularities. Then one of those mysteries for which Nigerian politics has since become infamous happened. The Returning Officer who had the sole prerogative to announce the result was recalled to Abuja. Nothing more was heard of your election until Chief Philip Umeadi, Jnr, a national INEC commissioner and who, as a senior lawyer and son of a former attorney-general of the country, should know better, purported to have announced the results in Abuja, contrary to the law which says all such announcements must be made in the senatorial headquarters. This was the state of affairs when your mentor, President Obasanjo decreed that you must be the next senate president. It therefore baffles me how you could look the Sun reporters in the eye and tell them that all this was the work of God. Most readers, I suspect, would share my bewilderment. Sir, this God that we invoke to cover our sins is, you know as well as I do, a very patient God. Even then, as again you know all too well, His retribution can at times be swift. I don’t need to tell you to ask Wabara whose tenure as president came to a swift and disgraceful end. Sir, you may disagree with Orwell that politicians like you are past masters at doublespeak and dissembling, but you will do well to remember that no matter how hard anyone tries to camouflage propaganda it can never be the same as the truth. Yours Sincerely Mohammed Haruna |