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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
The New Political Convictions of IBB
Never a stranger to controversy, former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, provoked yet another round last week when he said he has now become a convert to the idea of state police as against the unified police command that has existed since the army first intervened in politics in 1966.
The occasion was the third United Nations Peace Day lecture under the auspices of General Abdulsalami Abubakar Institute for Peace and Sustainable Development in Minna, the Niger State capital, on September 23.
General Babangida spoke extempore but the effect was no less far reaching than if he had spoken from a prepared text; the following day most of the national dailies reported his self-declared conversion on their front pages, a few of them as their lead story. The newspapers thus relegated the main menu of the day which was a speech on “Constitutional Review as a Mechanism for Peace and Stability” by the Governor of Niger State, Dr. Muazu Babangida Aliyu, to the background.
The general’s new found advocacy of state police was not the only controversy he stirred. Without using the same words he reportedly said he has since become converted to what advocates of Sovereign National Conference often described as “fiscal federalism”, i.e. a reversal of the status quo since 1966 where the central government virtually monopolized much of the functions of State and held the national purse string; and naturally kept the lion’s share of public revenue.
The central government, he said, has consequently become too powerful and overweening, dabbling, as it were, into areas that should have been the preserve of state and local governments, areas like primary and secondary education and even primary health care. Not only that, the former military dictator said he now believed the central authorities should conduct only presidential and National Assembly elections and leave the remaining to the state electoral commissions.
Last but my no means the least, the general said the principle of federal character in the recruitment of public servants has served its purpose and should now be replaced with merit. Decades after its introduction, he said, there is no longer any part of the country that has not produced enough candidates to compete for any position purely on merit.
Coming from any one any single one of these positions was bound to provoke controversy. The combination of all these coming from the Maradona of Nigeria’s politics himself was guaranteed to generate not only controversy but a very heated one. Little surprise then that several respondents have been quick to dismiss the man as a hypocrite who waited until what seemed like the twilight of his political career – eight years of an unsuccessful attempt to “step back” into power in mufti after he “stepped aside” 16 years ago and with age no longer on his side as he celebrated his 68th birthday on August 17 suggest the fire in the man’s belly is no longer burning like before - to champion the curtailing of the powers of central government.
It is, of course, perfectly legitimate to enquire into a man’s motive but suspicions about motivations should never be an excuse for dismissing one’s argument. To do so is akin to throwing away the baby with the bath water.
Whatever the motive behind the general’s new conversion to liberal and plural democracy, it is more important and more useful to examine its merit or otherwise. I believe his new positions, if not the conversion itself, are not without basis.
Take for example his new-found support for state police and for state electoral commissions and “fiscal federalism.” In a true federation like the United States or Switzerland or Canada or even to some extent colonial Nigeria where it were hitherto independent or semi-independent entities that met and agreed to surrender some of their powers to a central authority, it is logical and consistent for the units to retain much of their autonomy.
In Nigeria the intervention of the army in politics abolished the autonomy of the “federating” units for all practical purposes and transformed the center into the Big Patron that delegated power to the units which, to begin with, were arbitrary creations of the center. To talk of real autonomy in such a circumstance is essentially to indulge in wishful thinking.
It could be worse. If the way the state police commands and the state electoral commissions now behave as if they are mere appendages of Government Houses in the states because of how they have come to depend on governors for their day to day operations is a taste of the general’s new federalism, then God help us all.
Yes, we could have a “fiscal federalism” whereby the revenue allocation formulae in which the central government takes more than half the share of the Federation Account is reversed to favour the states and local government. But anyone who thinks that a federation like Nigeria where military intervention seemed to have irrevocably reversed the flow of power between the center and the constituents in favour of the center can be run like a classical federation, that person truly has another think coming.
The death of a journalism musketeer
My good friend and senior colleague, Chief Peter Ajayi, former managing director of the defunct Sketch group of newspapers, died last Sunday aged 73 after a not so brief illness. Peter was one of three reporters in the country that came to be famously known as “The Three Musketeers” partly because of their closeness and swashbuckling approach to journalism but mainly because they lived and breathed journalism even where, as was the case with one of them, Aremo Segun Osoba, erstwhile governor of Ogun State, they had stints outside the profession.
If Segun was the quintessential reporter of the three and Felix Adenaike, who once managed Tribune during his journalism career, the intellectual, Peter was a combination of the two. Above all, Peter was a decent man who believed any one whose primary consideration is to make money has no business being in journalism.
Critics would say he carried this creed too far when after several years as Chairman of Owena Bank, he could still barely make ends meet up to the time he died. But the decent man that he is I am sure he died without regrets. Were it that most Nigerian journalists were like him. |