PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

An Inauspicious August

ndajika@yahoo.com

 

August as in, say, “August visitor,” is, a dictionary says, someone or something “full of solemn splendour and dignity.” Solemn perhaps, but in Nigeria the month of August this year which takes a bow today has been anything but splendid and dignified. On the contrary it’s been awful, to put it mildly.

First, last Friday the 26th of the month, witnessed a most senseless bombing of the United Nations Building in Abuja for which the now much dreaded Boko Haram Islamic sect has since taken credit. That attack was as cowardly as it was senseless; it took 23 lives at the last count and wounded scores more, all of them completely innocent of the persecution of its members its leadership  has often accused the authorities of, albeit not without some justification.

Certainly compared to the Nigerian Police Headquarters, Abuja, which they had bombed months earlier, the United Nations Building couldn’t have been a softer target.

The attack was also senseless because it’s impossible to see how it could further the cause of Islam as a religion of peace. On the contrary, it could only put Islam in Nigeria on the defensive in a world where its profiling by Western propaganda as a religion of violence has become virtually a global article of faith in spite of the fact that the West’s production and use of the weapons of mass destruction has been unmatched before and since America, as its leader, recklessly nuked the Japanese at the end of World War II.

The country was still reeling from the shock of the bombing of the UN Building when violence broke out last Monday in violence-prone Jos, Plateau State, between some Muslims celebrating this year’s Eid el-Fitr, and Christians. There were no official figures of casualties as at the time of this writing but reports talked of several dead and many more wounded and hundreds of the worshippers’ vehicles destroyed.

However, unlike the bombing of the UN Building, the authorities in the state apparently saw the Sallah day violence coming; security officials and religious and community leaders had met to discuss strong rumours of possible reprisal attacks on worshippers for last year’s unprecedented Christmas bombing in the town which had been blamed on Muslims. In the end their plans to avert the violence came to nought partly because a group of the Muslims decided to celebrate Sallah a day before the security arrangements agreed upon could be put in place, but more so because the authorities in the state continue to discriminate between creed and tongue in carrying out their responsibility to protect citizens in the state.

Both last Friday’s bombing of the UN Building and the Jos Sallah violence show that beyond mouthing the usual knee-jerk rhetoric of giving no quarters to terrorists, the authorities are yet to get down to the hard task of identifying the right but difficult mix of carrots and sticks that can bring an end to the deepening insecurity in the country.

For me the main obstacle to identifying this mix is the self-interested politics of our leaders. I believe between the attitude of our leaders and the appropriate rules of the game, attitude is far and away more important if democracy and good governance is to take root and grow in our society.

It is because our leaders, as a rule, lack the right attitude to democracy and governance that things have hardly worked in this country. Instead they seem to have an attitude of ignoring any fact or logic, and of subverting any rule that gets in the way of their goals, even if the rule is as well-intentioned and as unambiguous as can be.

In the case of the Boko Haram menace, for example, the facts and the logic of the involvement of the former Governor of Borno State, Alhaji Modu Sherrif, with the sect’s leadership before the extra judicial murder of its leader, Mohammed Yusuf, provide a clue to its possible solution. Yet because the former governor played a key role in securing much of the votes in the North East for President Goodluck in the last presidential elections, all indications are that Abuja has neither the will nor the intention to pursue that clue.

Instead the authorities have been too keen on pursuing the easier scorched earth policy of collective punishment of the residents of Maiduguri, the Borno State capital, when it is obvious that such a policy is no solution to the problem.

If this country has had two visitors on the security front this month that are anything but August, what has happened on the judicial front during the month are, in a way, worse, except of course, for the loss of innocent lives and the scope of destruction of property that resulted from the bombing of the United Nations Building and the Jos Sallah violence.

I am, of course, talking about last week’s sacking of Justice Isa Ayo Salami, as the President of the Court of Appeal by the now departed Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Aloysius Katsina-Alu, clearly with the connivance of President Jonathan. Salami’s alleged crime was that he perjured himself when he accused the former CJN, who retired last Sunday, of instructing him to direct a panel of the Court of Appeal sitting in Sokoto to dismiss an appeal against the state’s governor, Alhaji Aliyu Magatakarda Wamakko. Salami’s key witness and now the CJN, Justice Dahiru Musdapher, had testified on oath than nothing of such had happened. Mustapher, according to Salami, was the third party when the former CJN so instructed him to favour Wamakko.

Salami’s sack was the culmination of what has clearly been a proxy war between the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the leading opposition party, the Action Congress (AC), a war which begun when the Court of Appeal replaced most of the PDP governors in the South-West that had come to power in the 2007 general elections with those of AC ahead of this year’s elections.

Naturally the court’s judgements did not go down well with the PDP; several of the party’s kingpins in the region went on to accuse the court of accepting bribes to answer AC’s prayers.

For the PDP it seems Sokoto State was the limit when all indications were that it was about to lose the state to the opposition DPP’s governorship candidate, Alhaji Muhammadu Maigari Dingyadi, following his appeal against the decision of the Court of Appeal to allow Wamakko to stand in the re-run of the 2007 governorship election which the court had annulled on the grounds that Wamakko was not initially qualified to run for the office.

There are, I believe, rights and wrongs on both sides of this unfortunate proxy war. I believe, however, Salami is more right than the former CJN. First, the former CJN may or may not have instructed Salami to rule in favour of Wamakko, but he certainly instructed him to keep the judgement the Court of Appeal was about to deliver on hold and reconstitute the panel. However well-intentioned the former CJN may have been, he knew he had no power to have so intervened.

Second, the Constitution seems to have given the CJN almost absolute power in the composition of the National Judicial Council, the disciplinary organ of members of the bench. Of its 25 odd members, only four – himself, the number two in the Supreme Court, the President of the Court of Appeal and the Chief Judge of the Federal High Court – are ex-officio. The rest are appointed entirely at the CJN’s discretion.

It seems to me in settling his score with Salami, the former CJN deployed his near absolute power with little or no discretion that of the use such power requires.

Above all, the NJC was obviously wrong to use the outcome of the report of the panel it set up to look into the quarrel between the CJN and Salami as a basis for accusing him of perjury and proceeding there from to recommend his sack in the guise of “suspension” to the president. Perjury is a matter for the courts to determine and the NJC is no court.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case it is now as clear as daylight that the politicians, as I said when I wrote about this issue on these pages for the second time on February 16, have succeeded in dragging the judiciary into their fight for power in a way that cannot auger well for democracy in this country.

Then as now I believe the ultimate responsibility for restoring the judiciary’s honour and independence following this squalid affair lies with the members of the bench themselves. It was their fault that they allowed themselves to be dragged into the war of the politicians. They owe themselves and the country to do everything lawful to drag themselves out of it.