PEOPLE AND POLITICS

Impeachment saga: the media and Obasanjo’s watery defence

Mohammed Haruna

Dr. Olotunji Dare, former Mass Communications lecturer at the University of Lagos, one time editorial board chairman and columnist at the The Guardian and lately a guest columnist with The Comet, is arguably the country’s most pre-eminent satirical columnist. Over two years ago, he took a satirical dig at the members of the National Assembly in a piece he titled Dis democracy sef. Written in the narrative format and with great humour, the piece was essentially about how Dare presumably believed the National Assembly has been a drag on Obasanjo’s efforts at delivering the so-called dividends of democracy to Nigerians.

“Obasanjo”, said the article, “would like to move the country forward at a gallop, but is constrained to inch along at the legislators snail speed. He is a hostage to the assembly’s dilatoriness. But he cannot dissolve the legislature. He cannot suspend the constitution, and he cannot abolish it”. This was in The Comet of May 2, 2000.

A few weeks before Dare’s piece, Reuben Abati, The Guardian’s leading columnist, had written a characteristically caustic piece along the same line. Titled If Abacha were president…., Abati’s piece in The Guardian of April 14, 2000, unequivocally blamed members of the National Assembly for Obasanjo’s apparent failure yet to deliver on his promises. The National Assembly, he said was “not quality opposition: it is something else”.

Even then, said Abati, Obasanjo should blame himself for handling the National Assembly with kid-gloves. “If Abacha were president”, he said, “the National Assembly would not have needed to debate any bills”. Obasanjo’s soft handling of the National Assembly, he went on, had allowed its members to carry on as if the National Assembly was “an alternative military: they issue orders and they expect the president to jump”.

“Nobody”, he concluded, “should pity Obasanjo, however. He asked for it”.

I do not know if Obasanjo read these pieces by Dare and Abati, but two years on, anyone with even the most casual acquaintance with Nigeria’s politics cannot fail to conclude that he shares their sentiments, as leading Nigerian journalists who happen to be his kith and kin, on the supposed character of the National Assembly, i.e. that it is, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, a bunch of self-seeking rogues – or worse.

Obasanjo, of course, has his own mind and does not wait on any journalist, no matter how highly rated, to make it up. There is little or no doubt, however, that Dare’s and Abati’s pieces, which were (and still are) typical of the views of the dominant Southern media in this country, have served to reinforce Obasanjo’s know-it-all and go-it-alone attitude, insofar as he probably believed that such views reflect popular opinion.

Perhaps, if the mass media had not contributed immensely in reinforcing Obasanjo in his apparent belief that the National Assembly is only useful as a rubber-stamp and deserves to be treated with the greatest contempt, perhaps we would have avoided the current impeachment threat against the president, a threat which has succeeded in heating up the polity unnecessarily.

And because the dominant media has instinctively come to Obasanjo’s defence, instead of pulling back to do an objective assessment of the National Assembly’s case against the president, the signs of a peaceful resolution of the impeachment crisis are nowhere, in sight. Like Obasanjo himself, most of the media do not see what wrong he has done to deserve impeachment. Even those that admit he has done some wrong cannot understand why he should not be left alone to still muddle along, until, I guess, he succeeds in crashing the ship of state.

Such self-righteous attitude can hardly help in resolving a problem in which obviously there are rights and wrongs on both sides. But whatever the wrongs on the side of the National Assembly, it no doubt held the moral high ground because it demonstrated a willingness to enter into a dialogue with the Executive merely by putting the presidency on a two-week notice of its (the National Assembly’s) intention. Instead of coming down from his self-righteous high horse, the president simply dismissed the National Assembly as a bunch of jokers.

And what is the merit of all the defence that much of the media have offered on behalf of Obasanjo? Pretty little, I am afraid.

The National Assembly says, for example, Obasanjo has violated the constitution by refusing to implement all the budgets since 1999 in accordance with its appropriations. The retort from both Obasanjo and the media has been that budget implementation is subject to availability of resources and that the president has some latitude to re-order the budget’s priorities within the Assembly’s appropriations.

There are at least two problems with this retort. First, with nearly 2 trillion Naira in its kitty in the last three years, the Federal Government can hardly be called poor. Second, the government has been fond of spending money on items that were never appropriated for, in the first place – items like the National Stadium, the National Identity Card project and a new presidential aircraft.

Between May 1999 and to date the Federal Government’s income, as I have just pointed out, has been nearly two trillion Naira. No Federal Government has ever come close to having such a mind-boggling income. This income is more than enough for all but the most extravagant government to lift its subjects out of abject poverty. But three years after the Federal Government spent it all and even more, i.e. after three years of persistent budget deficits, Nigerians, according to the United Nations Development Programme, are poorer today than they were before. Three years ago, says the UNDP, nearly 50% of Nigerians lived below the poverty line. Today the number has increased to 70%. Question is, where has all that money gone?

Outside the issue of arbitrary budget implementation, there are the issues of revenue allocation, privatisation and the merging of certain financial institutions without the necessary legal backing.

On the first issue, president and his supporters say that, following the Supreme Court ruling on the Resource Allocation case, which, among other things, declared as unconstitutional the deduction of 7.5% special funds as a first line charge, the president had no choice but to issue an Executive Order amending the Revenue Allocation Act to reflect the judgement. Not only did he not have a choice in the matter, say the president and his supporters, he was within his constitutional right to do so.

These arguments clearly lack merit. First, the president had a choice in matter. He himself had set up a committee to look into it and there was no compelling reason to anticipate its report. Second, as Professor Ben Nwabuese has argued convincingly in The Guardian of August 30, the spirit of Section 315(2) of the Constitution, in which the president sought refuge for his action, gives him no blank cheque to rewrite the substance of our laws. The letter of that section may have done so, obviously inadvertently, since only the legislatures have the powers to write and rewrite laws, but, again, as Nwabueze pointed out, there was nothing in the constitution to which Obasanjo’s Executive Order changing the Revenue allocation needed to conform.

“There is”, as Nwabueze observed correctly, “no provision of constitution that fixes the Federal Government share of the money in the Federation Account as 56% or any percentage for that matter”. Therefore, it was patently illegal and unconstitutional for the president to seek to take back through the back door, using his Executive Order, what the Supreme Court has taken away from him by the front door. Obviously then the president was trying to be too clever by half in insisting that inspite of his order, the Federal Government’s share of the Federation Account “remains at 48.5% as the 7.5% was applied by the Federal Government to the purposes for which the funds were originally intended.” The 7.5% should have gone to the Federation Account to be shared by all three tiers of government and not back to the Federal Government alone.

Similarly, the president’s position on privatisation of NITEL is a weak one indeed. Somewhat similar to the misappropriation charges on budgets against the president, it is obvious that he had no power to lend NITEL money from the Federation Account without legal authorization from the National Assembly. Nitel had a board which had powers to borrow money to fund its activities within the limits of the laws governing company borrowings. Whatever may have been the president’s good intentions, he had no right to abridge due process. Certainly he had no right to borrow money from the Federal Account without the knowledge of the other claimants to the same account.

He himself seems to have admitted as much by pointing out that “The FAAC (Federation Allocation Account Committee) was informed about the loan and its approval duty sought.” The question the president did not answer was, did FAAC give its approval? More important still does FAAC have the power to give such approval?

This issue of privatisation has gained added weight from the emerging scandal surrounding the purported sale of Nigeria Airways by the Minister of Aviation, Dr. Kema Chukwe. Without holding brief for Nasir El-Rufai, the boss of our privatisation programme, whose abrasive style many people, including myself, find offensive, it is crystal clear that he is right to accuse Chukwe of fraudulent conduct in selling our airline. The privatisation decree vests the exercise solely in the National Council on Privatisation through the Bureau of Public Enterprise, which El-Rufai heads. The Minister therefore, had absolutely no business selling any institution under her ministry. Yet she has told the world that she had the president’s approval. Well, we wait to see what defence the president and his men will offer for this latest act of illegality.

Finally, the president denies the merger of the Family Advancement Programme, the Peoples Bank and the Agricultural Bank into a new Nigerian Agricultural and Rural Development Bank. He also denies the merger of Nigerian Bank for Commerce and Industry, the National Economic Reconstruction Fund and the Nigerian Industrial Development Bank into a new Bank of Industry. These denials are in response to the charge that the president has merged the old institutions into one without repealing the laws backing them and replacing them with the appropriate new laws. “To repeal the law establishing an organisation before knowing what will replace it” said the president in self-defence, “is like putting the cart before the horse and will cause untold hardship to the staff of such an organisation”.

The president’s intentions here, are no doubt noble. But once again it must be reiterated that noble intentions are not enough reasons to abridge due process. Surely with the Bank of Industry and the NARDB in place, with new boards, new management and all, it is not exactly true for the president to say he does not know what has replaced the old institutions.

The president has been blaming inadequate information and miscommunication for the friction between the National Assembly and the Presidency. He has a point there. However, it still begs the question why there has been the information gap and the miscommunication in the first place. The answer lies in the president’s utter contempt for the National Assembly, encouraged, as it were, by a press in whose eyes Obasanjo can do no wrong because of where he comes from.

If he and his supporting cast want a peaceful solution to the impeachment saga, they must accept that, whatever the shortcomings of the National Assembly – and these are many – it deserves to be treated with more respect than Obasanjo has so far been prepared to give it.