PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Post-Election Violence: A Word for the President

ndajika@yahoo.com

Your Excellency,

Let me begin by congratulating you on your victory at penultimate Saturday’s presidential election, an election which is already being dubbed by many, including much of our local media, as the freest and fairest in the country’s history. Sir, I do not mean to denigrate or begrudge you your victory, but to say your election is the country’s freest and fairest does not mean much given the historically low standard of our elections. Certainly it does not necessarily mean the election itself was indeed truly free and fair.

For any contest to be free and fair it should be played on a level playing field. Hardly has any election in Nigeria, more so those conducted by incumbent civilian leaders, been played on a level field.

Your own election, I am sorry to say, was no exception. On the contrary in no election in the country has the weapon of incumbency been deployed without any restrain as in yours.  Public policy, the treasury, government media, the chief executives of state and local governments, even traditional rulers, were all held hostage to the goal of returning your party to victory at all levels of government. Perhaps the only agenda comparable to the determination of your party to hold on to power at all costs in this year’s election was the Third Term Agenda of your esteemed benefactor, former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo.

The difference between your effort and that of Obasanjo was, of course, that yours has succeeded whereas his own collapsed like a house of cards in the face of nation-wide outrage at his attempt to remove the constitutional two-term limit for chief executives at all levels of government.

Your courtiers and supporters will tell you your success was because you were seen by virtually all Nigerians as a symbol of hope for the “transformation” of their country – to quote your campaign slogan. Sir, you should swallow such flattery – which is what it is – with a spoonful of salt.

Nothing you have done since you became substantive president following the death last year of your predecessor, Umaru Musa Yar’adua, suggests your government is any different in style or substance from previous ones – not the lack of fiscal restraint, not the selective war against corruption, not the cronyism and ethnic bias in appointments and contract awards, you name it.

If anything it seems the dictates of winning this year’s elections has even made matters worse in all these aspects of governance. Witness, for example, how your administration massively eroded both the country’s oil windfall account and its foreign reserve since you took charge of the store with little or nothing on the ground to justify the erosion.

Sir, whatever anyone would tell you to the contrary, your victory at the polls was essentially due to sentiments and the power of your incumbency.

However, whether you won fair and square or not Nigerians have no choice but to hope that your campaign slogan of “transformation” is not merely a facade for some sinister agenda of alienating any section of this country. All Nigerians have no choice but to hope that the slogan is born out of your deep conviction that only justice and equity can bring lasting harmony, peace and progress in this country.

In this respect I must say I find the tone and the innuendos of the riot act you read to Nigerians on April 20 over the violent reactions across the North which followed the announcement of your victory very troubling.

Those riots, especially the killings of several members of National Youth Service Corp in Bauchi, were totally reprehensible and unacceptable. So also were the systematic targeting of the persons and property of leading members of your party. No less reprehensible were the indiscriminate targeting of anyone with any sign of affluence or authority, whatever his creed or ethnicity.

You were right, therefore, to have condemned the riots in the strongest language. What, however, was troubling were your innuendoes and your combative tone.

“These disturbances,” you said, “are more than mere political protests. Clearly they aim to frustrate the remaining elections. This is not acceptable. If anything at all, these acts of mayhem are sad reminders of the events which plunged our country into thirty months of an unfortunate civil war. As a nation, we are yet to come to terms with the level of human suffering, destruction and displacement, including that of our children to far away countries, occasioned by these dark days.”

Sir, anyone with even half an eye can see the objective of these words was to set the Christian Igbo against the Muslim so-called Hausa-Fulani. This was as unfortunate as it was a disservice to your exalted office.

Needless to say, it was based on a gross misrepresentation of the history of our civil war and its aftermath. Everyone knows that the araba riots of 1967 which led to our civil war followed the virtual decimation of the political and military leadership of the North by the essentially Igbo coup of January 1966. Everyone also knows that while the then Northern regional government took custody of all Igbo property in the region during the civil war and made sure they were returned to their owners after the war with all the rents that were collected from tenants, in the region you come from we had a misnomer that was called “abandoned property” of the Igbo.

Your Excellency, in trying to sound tough you said quite rightly that enough was enough. “My fellow countrymen and women,” you said, “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.” Earlier you had said that as President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces you had ordered the deployment of security personnel to troubled parts of the country and had also “directed all state governors to take personal responsibility for (the) security and safety” of all youth corps members serving in their various states. Sir, I was worried not so much by your tone, which was a dictate of its circumstance, as by its apparent selectivity and dictatorial undertone.

As Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces you have the power and the authority to direct the security forces to protect life and property of Nigerians wherever they reside. However, as President you have neither the power nor the authority to “direct” any governor to do anything. Under our Constitution, as you know very well, States governments are not subordinate to the central government; they are its co-ordinates.

Your Excellency, the apparent selectivity of your combativeness seems obvious from the fact that while the security forces moved in quickly and commendably to secure life and property from miscreants in predominantly Muslim areas, they seemed to have been conveniently slow in doing the same in predominantly Christian areas. The result has been the predictably under reported massacre of at least 300 people in Southern Kaduna and the internal displacement of over 60, 000 residents from the area, according to the Red Cross and the National Emergency Relief Authority (NEMA).

Again, virtually all the miscreants arrested so far are from the predominantly Muslim areas. And reports from the various locations where they are being held speak of their brutalization by members of the security forces.

This apparent selectivity may have resulted from the quality and the integrity of intelligence advice you get from your security forces arising from the sometimes lopsided composition of those forces at all levels of government. For example, in Kaduna State which was the worst affected by the riots,  none of the security organisations – the armed forces, the police, the State Security Services (SSS), etc, is headed by a Muslim. It’s not difficult to imagine how vehemently the Christian Association of Nigeria would have protested against this if the reverse were the case. And it would be right to so protest.

Indeed your benefactor, Chief Obasanjo, to his eternal credit, made exactly the same point two days before he declared a state of emergency in Plateau State in 2004 over the sectarian and ethnic violence that occurred under Governor Joshua Dariye. On the occasion of his meeting with traditional rulers in the country at the Presidential Villa in Abuja on that day he told them that the lopsided composition of the security forces in the state had lead to his being misinformed about the facts on the ground. Henceforth, he directed, the composition must be balanced, such that where, for example, the commissioner of police is a Christian, the director of SSS must be a Muslim. Sir, you need to go back to that policy for the peace and progress of this country.

Your Excellency, you may or may not have seen an advert in Thisday of last Friday by someone who called himself simply CITIZEN N. The advert entitled “ADVICE TO PRESIDENT-ELECT GOODLUCK JONATHAN,” beseeched you to seek God’s face.

“Your name,” said Citizen N, “says Goodluck but I call you Godswork. We have all collectively prayed and I believe that God has answered our prayers fully. The mandate given to you is sacred. Turn to the one who has given you this mandate. Seek God’s face! Seek God’s face!! Seek God’s face!!!

“This is the time to drop all human vices and be completely focused on the task at hand, in order to write your name in Gold in the annals of Nigerian history.”

Your task as president for the next four years from May 29 cannot be stated more simply and more clearly than this. This means being just and equitable in your policies and programmes as they affect all Nigerians whether they voted for or against you.

It means being cautious in listening to those who no doubt would advise you to behave, not as a statesman, but as a conqueror. History is too full of the graves of conquerors who thought their power was a licence to do as they wished for you to listen to such short-sighted and self-serving advice.