PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

The Many Self-Contradictions Of Akinjide

Kudugana@yahoo.com

For me Chief Richard Akinjide, SAN, General Secretary of NCNC in the old Western Region, Minister of Education in the First Republic, Attorney-General in the Second, three-times national president of the Nigerian Bar Association and one of Nigeria’s most prominent politicians has been a most fascinating study in the self-contradictions, deliberate misrepresentations and glib talk that is all too often the stuff of politics everywhere.

I first met Chief Akinjide in his Ibadan chambers some thirty-odd years ago as one of the respondents in a series of interviews by the New Nigerian on the main issues in the draft of the 1979 Constitution. The newspaper’s management had picked a random sample of members of the Constituent Assembly( C.A.) that were to produce the final Constitution and given me the job of interviewing them at their towns of residence from Sokoto to Port-Harcourt and from Kano to Lagos and everywhere in between. My interview with Akinjide was the sixth in the series of 14 that the newspaper published in late 1977 ahead of the inauguration of the C.A.

One of the things that struck me most during my interview with the chief was the zeal with which he defended the fundamental shift the military authorities made from the country’s parliamentary system of democracy to the presidential. Of all those I interviewed he was the only one that listed six seemingly unassailable reasons why the shift was justified while at the same time waiving off fears that the new system could easily degenerate into an imperial presidency.

Thirty-odd years on, the gentleman has been singing a completely different song. In an interview with Vanguard last month, he dismissed both the presidential and parliamentary systems as incompatible with the political culture of Nigeria. “We should”, he said in Vanguard of January 14, “go back to the drawing board and look for a system that is indigenous to us”. Unlike Nigerians, he said, the Americans have no chiefs. It was therefore wrong, he argued, to have adopted their system when it had no role for the chieftaincy system which is important in Nigeria’s political culture.

But not only did Akinjide argue in effect that the failure of our presidential system was inevitable because it was incompatible with our political culture, he went on to link it with the level of corruption in the country. It has so much fostered corruption in the country, he said, that we have “gone beyond the Olympic gold standard.” Nigeria’s level of corruption, he said, has since reached “platinum and super-diamond.”

Listening to Akinjide’s argument, you would be pardoned to think emirs, obas and obis, etc, never existed in Nigeria thirty years ago when he strongly advocated the replacement of the parliamentary system of democracy with the presidential. You will also never know that the Babangida Constitution of 1993 provided for the membership of leading traditional rulers in the country’s Council of State, its highest advisory body.

You may say that this role was merely nominal but in any democracy properly called, it cannot be otherwise. As long as democracy means government by popular election, you simply cannot have monarchs calling the shots. That is why even in Britain where everything is done in the name of royalty, the queen only reigns but does not rule.

In short Akinjide’s call for an “indigenous” political system is nothing but the usual facile politicians’ argument for re-inventing the wheel. Democracy may come in different shapes and different colours but it seizes to be one the moment the powers to make, execute and interpret the law is vested in one person or clique.

And one needs no better proof of the emptiness of Akinjide’s glib talk than the fact that no where in his interview did he describe, even in outline, the content and form of his “indigenous” political system. He didn’t because no such content and form exists.

As for the connection between the presidential system and corruption, the logic of Akinjide’s argument is that corruption thrives only in the presidential system. Try telling that to the Indians whose country is the world’s largest democracy or even to the British whose country is the oldest. Both are parliamentary democracies and financial sleaze in those countries is no less common than in America.

The fact is that corruption is by far more a matter of personal conduct than of the political system, including monarchy, that people are governed by. True, institutional safeguards may help check corruption but democracies are no more guaranteed to produce honest leaders than monarchies are doomed to produce dishonest ones.

In short the answer to the country’s historical socio-political and economic mess does not lie in tinkering with or overhauling or even throwing away the current presidential system. It lies essentially in overhauling our attitude to public trust, individually and collectively. This is something that no amount of national political reforms conferences, sovereign or otherwise, can bring about.

Now if Akinjide’s glib talk about the poverty of our politics is a cause for worry because it typifies the generality of our politicians, his deliberate misrepresentations and self-contradictions are even greater cause for worry because when politicians contradict themselves and misrepresent facts and issues and get away with their behaviours, as Akinjide seems to, the country gets stuck with repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

The man once told a newspaper that corruption was exclusively a Northern habit but arguably his most notorious misrepresentation of the politics of this country was his claim in the now defunct Comet of September 27, 2000 that “The number plate of one of the states in the north reads: ‘Born to Rule’….They believe they are just born to rule whether they are fit or not.”

Akinjide’s remark was obviously a reference to the number plate of Niger State, the home state of former military heads of state, Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Abdussalami Abubakar. If he had only cared to cross-check his claim as even a rookie lawyer should, not to talk of the Senior Advocate of Nigeria that he is, he would have found out that the number plate reads Power State not Born to Rule. And if he had checked further with the Federal Road Safety Commission, he would have found out that this refers not to political power but to the fact that the state hosts all four hydro-electric dams in the country.

What, I for one, however, find most annoying in his press interviews - and I have read quite a few – is his penchant for self-contradictions. The self-contradictions are annoying simply because they insult one’s intelligence. That he seems to get away with his habit is a sad reflection on the span of our memories, individually or collectively.

One of his many self-contradictions was his criticism of Chief Obafemi Awolowo for what he said was Awo’s inability to unite the Yorubas. In the same breath, however, the man tried to justify his own role in undermining Yoruba solidarity. “I was,” he said in the Vanguard interview in question, “doing in the West what the UPN and AG were doing in the North. Joseph Tarka … from the Middle Belt was working with Awolowo. Imam Kashim is from Borno, he was working for Awolowo. If they were able to work with Awolowo, why should you blame me too if I, a Yorubaman was working with other people in the north, or other people in the East… And Aminu Kano… he was working with Zik in the east… What is good for the goose must also be good for the gander.”

Not too long ago, Akinjide used to paint Obasanjo in superlative terms. “When issues concerning Africa and Nigeria come up in years to come,” he said in The Guardian of May 3, 2003, for example, “the name of Obasanjo will be written in gold.”

In the same interview he further said “in the South-West we will need Obasanjo than he needs us… I can tell you categorically that Obasanjo is a democrat.”

Barely four years later, the same Akinjide has been telling any one who cares to listen to him that Obasanjo is the worst tyrant and the greatest disaster to befall Nigeria. Yet there was nothing Obasanjo did after the Comet interview that he had not done before.

If the politics of this country suffers from serious poverty, it is mainly because we, especially those of us in the media, allow our so-called leaders to get away with their many self-contradictions, deliberate misrepresentations and glib talks.