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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
The Politics of "Come and Chop" and Matters Arising
Politicians are universally notorious for saying with their tongues what is not in their hearts. Last week the leadership of the biggest opposition party, the All Nigeria Peoples Party, took this notoriety a notch higher when it accepted the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party’s invitation to “come and chop.”
The PDP’s invitation to the opposition parties to join its government was itself one more proof of the absence of the conviction politics among the generality of Nigerian politicians. Barely eight months ago, former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, had derided all the opposition parties as worse than useless. Speaking at an emergency meeting of PDP’s National Executive Committee on November 21 last year, Obasanjo had said in effect that the failure of the party to win this year’s general election could spell doom for Nigeria.
Consistent with his belief that what is good for the PDP’s ruling clique is the only thing good for Nigeria, Obasanjo proceeded to organize the most fraudulent election in Nigeria’s history. Given the former president’s claim that the opposition parties had nothing to offer, President Umaru Yar’adua’s invitation to them to form a government of national unity could only have been an invitation to “come and chop”. The objective, obviously, is to buy the new president and his party the legitimacy that the government so glaringly lacks because of the massive and comprehensive rigging through which it came to power.
Of course Yar’adua is not Obasanjo, but even the blind can see that so far it is still the old man who has been calling all the shots. First, he imposes himself on the party as chairman of its board of trustees with new powers to dictate policies and programmes to the new president. Next, he appoints himself as chair of a nebulous and hitherto non-existent body to oversee PDP’s national legislative agenda. Before then he had, of course, decreed the composition of the leadership of the national legislature. Last, but by no means the least, he makes sure the cabinet-in-waiting is dominated by his protégés, many of them supporters of his Third Term Agenda.
That the leading opposition party, the ANPP, would accept to join the government of a party that had dismissed it as worse than useless, once more, speaks volumes of the serious deficit in principles among the generality of Nigerian politicians. Here was a party which had objected to its presidential flag bearer’s decision not to bother challenging the outcome of the election in court because of the travesty of justice he had suffered in doing so over the dubious outcome of the previous presidential election in 2003. Instead of going to court, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, the party’s presidential candidate, had preferred to take his protest to the streets.
In the end the party succeeded in dragging him, kicking and screaming, from heading towards the streets into the courts. For this same party to now turn around and, for all practical purposes, abandon its court case, is the height of betrayal of its presidential candidate. It is also a demonstration of the shamelessness of the party’s leadership. Nothing could be more definitive as proof of this shamelessness than the fact that this same leadership lined up its leading members and their relations and cronies for the jobs on offer by the PDP.
In contrast to ANPP’s shameless and dishonourable behaviour, the second largest opposition party, the Action Congress, rejected PDP’s offer to “come and chop”. Addressing the press on Thursday, its National Secretary, Alhaji Bashir Dalhatu, said his party rejected the offer because accepting it would have amounted to turning Nigeria into a one-party state. “We have reached this consensus,” he said “because we believe in democracy and the people are hoping in us to deliver them from the stranglehold of the one-party system and dictatorial tendencies.”
This may sound rich coming from a party whose founder and principal financier, former vice-president Atiku Abubakar, was himself the principal architect of PDP’s 2003 electoral fraud. It may sound rich also because the vice-president left the ruling party less over principles than because it frustrated his presidential ambitions. Even then the party’s statement is not to be completely scoffed at because it shows at least that even among thieves there could be some honour.
If the politics of “come and chop” between the ruling PDP and the leading opposition ANPP bodes ill for the prospects of democracy as a means of transforming the nasty, short and brutish lives of Nigerians into prosperous and happy ones, recent remarks by some of the Senate’s leading lights make such prospects even worse.
A little over a year ago, Saturday Punch (June 3, 2006) reported Senate President, retired Brig-General David Mark, as saying if it was up to him no Nigerian who does not have a military background will ever became a president of this country. “Do you know the history of America, the mother of all democracies?” he asked. “Who among the presidents did not wear uniform? Go and look at the percentage. Do you know that one of the things that would have worked against Clinton was that he did not wear uniform? If I have my way I will say whoever does not have a military background should not be made president.”
Even without checking out the accuracy of this claim, it can be argued that any politician with such an attitude is dangerous for the growth of democracy in Nigeria, the more dangerous where the politician becomes the leader of a country’s legislature.
No less dangerous were remarks made by Senator Kanti Bello, the Senate PDP Whip, in an interview on the BBC Hausa Service in its morning broadcast last Saturday. No one who is not a card carrying member of the ruling party, he said in the interview, would be appointed a minister or to similar political jobs. As if this was not a bad enough misrepresentation of the presidential system, the distinguished senator attributed his opinion to the country’s Constitution.
Just to be sure that he did not misunderstand the senator, the BBC reporter drew his attention to the president’s constitutional prerogative of appointing ministers and advisers, etc, from any sector of the society. The senator rejected the reporters’ correction and insisted that, far from expressing an opinion, he was merely repeating what the Constitution has stipulated.
I have searched the Constitution for Bello’s version of who the president can offer ministerial and other jobs to. No where in all the six sub-sections of Section 147, which spells out how the president shall form his cabinet, does it say that a ministerial nominee must be a member of the ruling party or even a politician.
However, with senators like Bello as the chieftains of the ruling party, I was shocked but not surprised that a ministerial nominee from Kebbi State, Mrs. Fatima Balaraba Ibrahim, was dropped less than 24 hours after her name had made it to the Senate following her screening by the security services.
Anyone who knows Mrs. Ibrahim could not have expected her not to have made it to the Senate. As an executive director at the National Deposit Insurance Corporation she was equally feared and admired for her moral perpendicularity and professional competence.
Her crime, it seems, is that she is a sister to retired Col. Dangiwa Umar, who has been a tireless critic of government. A few years back, Obasanjo not only rejected her nomination as a Deputy Governor of the Central Bank, he ordered that she should be sacked from NDIC for no worse crime than being Dangiwa’s elder sister. It took the intervention of some senior government officials who pointed out to the president that politically she is as blind as a bat to restore her to the NDIC job.
This time she is being dropped as a ministerial nominee because, according to characters like Senator Kanti Bello, she is not a politician, and worse, not a PDP member.
Over a month into the ninth year of the Fourth Republic, the prospect of democracy delivering the goods to the long suffering people of Nigeria still doesn’t look too good – thanks in large measure to politicians with an attitude like our Senate president and thanks also to politicians like Senator Kanti Bello who do not even seem to understand the very Constitution that they have sworn to uphold.
Correction Last week I said on these pages that Chief Bola Ige, President Obasanjo’s attorney-general, was murdered in December 2003. This was a mistake. He was murdered on December 23, 2001. The error is regretted.
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