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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
Albishir Vs. Ali: With A Democracy Like Ours…
Thursday, November 13, Leadership carried an unusual full page advert by the Force CID of the Nigeria Police declaring Senator Usman Albishir wanted. The following day Daily Trust followed suit. Subsequently the Sun carried the same advert more than once. The police said it wanted Albishir for "Criminal defamation of character, conspiracy, intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace in Yobe State."
I have had only a nodding acquaintance with Albishir since I found out some nine odd years ago that he was a good friend of my former boss, former Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar. Before then I had heard stories that he was notorious for hardly ever fulfilling his side of contracts as a businessman. I never knew for certain whether those stories were fact or fiction before he became a senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in 1999. I still don’t know.
Even then I thought it was outrageous that the police could declare him wanted as a senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as if he was a common criminal. This was for no greater offence than that of slander, even if it was criminal.
Albishir has had a running battle with Senator Mamman Ali, the governor of Yobe State, which goes back to their days in the senate. Both were senators on the opposition All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) tickets. Albishir was the first Senate Minority Leader. For some inexplicable reasons he was later replaced by Ali.
The seed of rivalry that was apparently sown by this coup grew into a tree, metaphorically speaking, when both Albishir and Ali contested in the primaries for the ANPP ticket of the Yobe governorship last year. Ali lost to Albishir by a very wide margin.
Then the dubious Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) list of those it said were too discredited to contest for public office came out in the run up to the general election. Albishir was on the list. This gave some key officials of ANPP who were ill-disposed towards Albishir - notably its Chairman, Chief Ume-Ezeoke, and Secretary, Senator Saidu Kumo – the excuse they wanted to drop Albishir. Accordingly they wrote the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) substituting him with Ali. Thrice the ANPP caucus met and tried to countermand the ANPP letter to INEC because it had no basis in law. Thrice the caucus failed.
And so it was that Ali became the ANPP governorship candidate of Yobe State. He went on to defeat the ruling Peoples Democratic Party's (PDP) candidate, Alhaji Adamu Waziri, erstwhile junior minister of Agriculture, in the governorship election.
Since then Ali has had to fight on two fronts, one within his own party and the other against PDP, to stave off attempts to unseat him. So far he has triumphed at the courts. However, his rivals within and outside his party have accused him of manipulating the courts in Yobe and of using the Nigeria Police to intimidate and tyrannize the opposition in the state, a charge which is common place in this country
It was against this background that I felt it was outrageous that the Police would declare a senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria wanted over an offence that, for all anyone cared, may have been manufactured.
It has since turned out that the offence was not, strictly speaking, manufactured. Albashir's son-in-law, Hadi al-Mustapha who is a friend of Governor Ali, had accused Albishir of trying to kill him before a magistrate court in Kano. As the case proceeded, Albishir counter-charged the governor of also attempting to kill him through his son-in-law. In turn, Ali petitioned the Inspector-General of Police to investigate the matter. The investigation cleared the governor. This was in June. Subsequently, Ali decided to sue Albishir for criminal libel, etc. Thus the accuser became the accused.
Matters took a dramatic turn on November 6 when a large contingent of armed police stormed his residence in Abuja with intent to arrest him and take him to Damaturu, the Yobe State capital, on the charge for which the police has now declared him wanted. In the end the police left without carrying out its mission partly because they had no arrest warrant and partly because some well-placed friends of the senator intervened.
Both the police and Albishir had appeared earlier that day before a Federal High Court, Abuja, over the case.
Apparently alarmed at this sudden turn of events, Albishir petitioned the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Federation, Mr. Michael Aondoakaa, to intervene based on an injunction he had obtained in August from the Federal High Court in Abuja granting him leave to enforce his fundamental rights to liberty as guaranteed under section 35(1) of the 1999 Constitution. The Minister reportedly wrote on November 10 to the Inspector-General of Police, Sir Mike Okiro, asking for the case file.
The file was yet to be sent to the minister when the police declared Albishir wanted on the pages of several national newspapers beginning with Leadership on November 13.
In the course of writing this piece I spoke on the phone with the Director of Press of the Yobe Governor, Malam Abdullahi Bego. Beyond giving me his bosses' side of story, he got the boss himself to speak with me at great length. Both were emphatic that Albishir's long-drawn challenge of the governor's election had nothing to do with his trouble with the police. Given their bitter political feud and given also the record of the abuse of the police force by those in power, most people would find this hard to believe.
I certainly find it hard to believe. After all wasn’t it the political feud between the two that eventually led Albishir, in the first place, to accuse the governor of trying to kill him? And was it not strange that the police would want to prosecute an offence allegedly committed in Kano in Damaturu?
Several lawyer friends of mine I spoke to on this issue say the line between defamation as a civil offence, on the one hand, and as a criminal offence, on the other, is a thin one indeed. Therefore, in today's do-or-die politics in Nigeria, it is hardly outrageous to conclude that in declaring Albishir wanted for prosecution in Damaturu, the police had crossed that line – probably not without a little push from the authorities in Yobe.
Albishir was wrong to have accused Governor Ali of attempting to murder him when, as seems to be the case, he knew he had no proof. However, in a proper democracy, Ali would probably have been content to sue the pants off Albishir for civil defamation. Instead he chose to resort to criminal slander in which Albishir will be prosecuted by his attorney general. It is difficult to see how Albishir can get a fair hearing and decent treatment from the police in Yobe in a democracy like ours where disagreement with those in power is considered high treason.
Even then Ali's preference for criminal libel is understandable; has it not often been said that politics is war by other means? In any case did a former president of this country not declare our politics a "do-or-die" affair?
However, if it is understandable that Ali would fight his opponents with every weapon at his disposal, it is not so understandable why the police would want to cry more than the bereaved. True, democracy or no democracy, no one, whether senator or even the president, should be above the law. But when the police are overzealous in pursuing an issue as they seem to be in the case of Albishir versus Ali, it makes you wonder if with a democracy like ours any one needs fear tyranny.
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