PEOPLE & POLITICS

Jerry Gana and the next general elections

Mohammed Haruna

In his denunciation of The Patriots over their intervention in the on-going impeachment drama threatening to consume President Obasanjo, our eloquent Minister of Information, Professor Jerry Gana, speaking for the presidency, described the group’s action as “unconstitutional”, among other things.

“The legal right and the constitutional right of every Nigerian to present himself or herself before the electorate should not be violated and I believe that we should, as it were, work towards a free and fair election. Allow the people who are the repository of political power to decide. Why are people afraid of election? (emphasis mine).

As we all know, The Patriots group had intervened in the impeachment drama recently by calling on President Obasanjo to be content with a single term of five years in return for the National Assembly calling off their threat to impeach him over a long list of constitutional violations. Last week I expressed reservations about the key elements of this formula, even though I agreed with The Patriots that the political tension in the country will virtually disappear if Obasanjo – and the governors – would accept to do a Mandela. The key aspects of this formula, as we all know, were (1) the extension of the presidential and gubernatorial terms from four years to five and (2) the entrenching of presidential and gubernatorial rotation among national and state geo-political zones. These key elements, I said, would merely enthrone expediency over principles, namely the principles of genuine democracy. And expediencies, unfortunately, have a way of complicating life in the long run.

Implicit in Gana’s denunciation of The Patriots is the thinking that impeaching the president seeks to deprive a candidate of his right to seek for the peoples’ mandate, at the same time that the exercise also limits the peoples’ choice of who to govern them. Also implicit in Gana’s denunciation is the thinking that anyone who supports the exercise supports illegality and unconstitutionality. Needless to say the honourable minister of information is wrong on both counts. True, Obasanjo, like every Nigerian, has a right to ask for peoples’ mandate, but no right is ever absolute because absolute rights are obviously an invitation to chaos. What is important, therefore, is not the setting of limits to rights but the basis for setting those limits. What the proponents, at least most of them, of the impeachment of Obasanjo are saying is that the limit to Obasanjo’s right to seek for a second term, indeed his right to serve out his current term, namely the limit that he must demonstrate fidelity to the Constitution in the eyes of the National Assembly, is a perfectly legitimate limit.

However, to protect the president from arbitrary behaviour by the National Assembly, those who framed the Constitution were careful not to give the legislators a blank cheque. Rather, they set out an elaborate procedure that puts a judicial inquiry into the allegations of the legislators at centre of the procedure. Anyone familiar with the Constitution knows that it is well-nigh impossible for the legislators to short-circuit this procedure, even if they were to try. It is amazing therefore, how anyone can accuse the legislators or their supporters of behaving unconstitutionally by trying to impeach the president.

Gana, however, not only thinks it is unconstitutional to impeach the president, he apparently also thinks there is a fundamental conflict between impeaching the president and “work(ing) towards a free and fair election”. “Why”, he asks, “are people afraid of election?”.

First of all there is no conflict between impeaching the president and working towards a free and fair election. Indeed, the whole objective of impeaching a president who seems to have scant regard for the Constitutional, as Obasanjo does, is to guarantee free and fair elections. So when Gana asks why people are afraid of elections, the answer should be obvious even to the honourable minister himself – in the lat two years, at least, the presidency has done just about everything possible to make a free and fair election impossible.

First, even before the president is half-way through his current term, we are told by his Man Friday, Chief Tony Anenih, the super minister of works, that “there is no vacancy in the Villa”. Next, the president himself tries to rig the electoral law and is only stopped by the vigilance of some legislators. Next, the presidency, working hand-in-glove with some legislators, tries to extend the two year mandate of local governments by one year to facilitate a grand presidential conspiracy to reverse the normal bottom up order of the general elections. This was only frustrated by an independent minded judiciary, acting on the not-so-uninterested vigilance of the state governors.

Next, having failed in trying to reverse the normal order of the general elections, we now hear that plans are afoot to reverse the order of party primaries and to rig the presidential primary itself by loading it with All The President’s Men like ministers, ambassadors, his special advisers, board members, the lot.

Next, it is plain that all stops are being pulled to square or squash the mass media as society’s watch-dog. Actually, going by the media’s showing in the impeachment drama, it is obvious that, far from being a watch-dog, even the supposedly more outspoken print media, has become more of a lapdog. It has indeed been very interesting to watch the print media transform itself from an attack dog during the years before Obasanjo’s return to power, into a lapdog in the last three years.

If the national print media has become a little more than the presidency’s lapdog, it is difficult to find the word to describe the behavior of the federal-owned electronic media, namely the NTA and the FRCN. It speaks volumes of their independence that their bosses would accept to serve as members of President Obasanjo’s campaign team.

Next… the list of the attempts to rig the next polls goes on and on, but those mentioned above are enough to make anyone except the president’s courtiers fear that the elections will be anything but free and fair.

It is bad enough that the presidency has been doing everything possible to make a free and fair election impossible. There are indeed fears, as I pointed out on these pages not too long ago, that the president may use the pretext of a possible war over Bakassi to suspend the polls indefinitely. All this is made worse by the fact that the president’s record in office has been a very dismal one.

A little over two years ago Gana, in an interview with The Comet (September 23, 2000), gave seven reasons why Nigerians had every reason to be hopeful and absolutely no reason to be despondent about Nigeria’s future under Obasanjo’s rule.

“A few months ago” he said, “we didn’t have any hope of good governance in Nigeria. It was all darkness. Now at least whether anybody likes it or not, there is a very clear sense of direction for good governance, transparency, accountability, human rights, the rule of law, the freedom to speak …. That alone has a liberating power, that is one. We are for the first time, as the second point to note, taking a very decisive step against corruption…..Right from the very top there is a resolute will to say this corruption must be stopped.”

Without going through Gana’s list of the seven reasons why Nigerians must trust Obasanjo to deliver hope rather than despair, most people would be surprised if, two years on, the honorable minister can look the public straight in the eye and repeat his claims. It is obvious to anyone with half an eye that what we have had in the twilight of Obasanjo’s first term is anything but transparent and efficient governance. When, for example, the president claims to have sacked some of his ministers for being corrupt but fails, at the same time, to charge them to the anti-corruption tribunal, it should be obvious that something is wrong with his anti-corruption crusade. By the same token when his government fails to deliver on its promise to rebuild our terrible roads and transform the energy sector, when it delivers on his promise to eliminate petrol queues only at the unsustainable cost of massive imports and decrepit refineries, that government can hardly be praised for efficiency.

So when our honorable minister of information asks why we are afraid of the next elections, he should be able to see why. First, we are almost certain the elections will not be free and fair. Second, it is not too difficult to imagine what four more years of Obasanjo’s dismal record would do to Nigeria’s political economy. Third, and most importantly, if a president who knew he would still want to go for a second term could give the constitution and public opinion such short thrift as Obasanjo has given them in the last three years or so, only God knows what he will do when he needs no one’s vote anymore.