PEOPLE & POLITICS

The Patriots and other matters arising (II)

Mohammed Haruna

In the first part of my rejoinder two weeks ago to Sunday Vanguard columnist Dele Sobowale’s rejoinder to my article on The Patriots’ recommendations of turn-by-turn politics and five-year single term as a solution to the country’s political instability, I tried, successfully I hope, to defend myself against his accusation that my critique of The Patriots’ recommendations were not based on the facts. I also tried to defend myself against his accusation that my opinion of how the southern press will respond to The Patriots were, again, not based on the facts.

I was to have completed my rejoinder last week, when the tragic Miss World riots in Kaduna and Abuja over the weekend, decided otherwise. Instead, I said, God willing, I will, this morning, respond to his views that (1) I was wrong to have jumped to the conclusion that The Patriots’ October 15 intervention was aimed at saving President Obasanjo from impeachment and (2) I was wrong to argue that The Patriots’ recommendations would only lead to political chaos instead of political stability.

The reader will remember that I also promised to reply the accusations by brother, Tunji Oseni, President Obasanjo’s press chief, in his widely published rejoinder to several of my articles on his boss, titled “Mohammed Haruna’s Obsession”, that I was neither factual nor thorough in my articles and that, in any case, I was generally rude to his boss.

In keeping my word this morning, let me first dispose of Sobowale’s accusations. First, he said he was amazed that in my original article I could jump to the conclusion that The Patriots’ October 15 intervention in the impeachment saga was aimed at saving President Obasanjo from the National Assembly’s impeachment threat. Well, far from jumping to any wrong conclusions about The Patriots, I merely rephrased their self-proclaimed objectives in seeking to intervene in the face-off between the legislators and the presidency.

“Nevertheless”, the group said in their statement read by their leader Chief FRA Williams, “taking into consideration… the political tension generated as a result of the public controversy over the impeachment proceeding, THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OUGHT, IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST, TO TAKE A POLITICAL DECISION NOT TO PURSUE THE PROCEEDINGS TO THE END. IN PARTICULAR, A MOTION BY THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY THAT THE COMPLAINTS BE INVESTIGATED SHOULD NEITHER BE MOVED NOR PASSED”.

On his own part, said The Patriots, the president ought to reconsider his second term bid, even though the group acknowledged that he was perfectly within his constitutional right to seek for it. The group then said it believed the long term solution to the seemingly unending feud between the legislators and the presidency was to resort to turn-by-turn politics and five-year single term presidency and governorships. It was these recommendations that I described in my original piece as a recipe for political chaos, or a “bananas democracy”, if you will, a description to which Sobowale strongly objected.

“It is not” he said, “an amendment to the constitution that turns a nation into a bananas republic: neither is it one or two terms that will guarantee good governance; it is the people themselves”.

I agree completely with Sobowale that the most crucial factor in making a constitution work is the people themselves, or rather, their attitudes. This is why I have always wondered why anyone would imagine that a Sovereign National Conference, however composed, would automatically solve the nation’s problems. A constitution, needless to say, is only as good as the willingness of its authors to make it work.

Even then, there are good constitutions and there are bad. And just like a good constitution will fail if people have the wrong attitude, if, say, they implement it in bad faith, so also will a bad constitution never work even with the best of intentions. The problem with the Nigerian Constitutions since the military first intervention in politics in 1966, is that they have been drawn up essentially in bad faith. And my contention is that The Patriots’ recommendations of turn-by-turn politics, if not the five-year single term, can only make it worse.

For me, the test of good faith in drawing up a Constitution is that it should be concise and brief and should stick to first principles. The Nigerian constitutions, especially since 1979, have been anything but brief and concise. It is indeed a sign of bad faith that we have had three and a half constitutions within 20 years from 1979 – the half being that of 1995 that was never implemented. In sharp contrast, the Americans who have inspired our own constitutions since 1979, have had only one constitution since 1787.

The original constitution is probably the briefest and the most concise in the world; it contains barely more than 5,000 words at a rough count. At over 200 years old, the constitution has obviously served the Americans well with only 22 amendments, including the one of two term limits of four years each for the presidency. At a rough count, these amendments are under 4,000 words long.

Altogether then, the American Constitution, including its 22 amendments, is only about 9,000 words long. Compare this to our current constitution, whose table of content alone is roughly over 1,528 words long. The Constitution itself is more than 58,000 words long.

Even without the amendments suggested by The Patriots, our constitution is already too detailed as a statement of principles. It has become too detailed precisely because its authors had elevated too many issues of tactics and strategies into issues of principles. Basically this is the problem with The Patriots’ recommendations of both turn-by-turn politics, and five-year single term limit, albeit less so with the tern limit.

Democracy is about freedom of choice. Such freedom, cannot, of course, be absolute, lest it becomes licence. However, in qualifying the freedom of choice, we must make sure that the qualifications are necessary to check individual abuse of such freedom and that they do not destroy or undermine the very essence of the freedom to chose. Both turn-by-turn politics, which the Americans were sensible enough o shun, and tern limits for the presidency, which many Americans have come to regard as a mistake, are unnecessary limitations to one’s freedom of choice. In the case of turn-by-turn politics, it is, in addition, an idea that can only promote mediocre leadership and, at the same time, encourage ethnic xenophobia.

As someone who is obviously familiar with the history of the American constitution, Sobowale must be aware of the fact that the 22^nd amendment of that constitution, i.e. the amendment on two term limit of four years each, was initiated by the Republican party as a desperate measure to stop the Democrats, as the more populist of the two dominant parties in the country, from repeating Franklin Roosevelt’s record of four straight presidential victories, as a Democrat, between 1933 and 1945. Since that 1951 amendment, attempts to also limit the terms of federal legislators have been frowned at by American public opinion and shot down as unconstitutional by the American Supreme Court.

In the light of all this, it seems to me that the suggestion that we should limit our presidential tenures to one term of five yeas so that the ethnic groups in the country can each take its turn to rule this country is merely to elevate expediency into principle. It is, indeed, short-sighted, to say the least.

One last point about Sobowale, before I move on to the charges by my brother, Tunji Oseni, the president’s press chief. Sobowale says I should not question the timing of The Patriots’ amendments because all sorts of countries amend their constitutions all the time, citing the U.S., the U.K and Canada as examples. What I questioned was not the timing of the group’s amendments, but its suggestion that the amendments should be retroactive by changing Obasanjo’s current four-year term to five.

That Sobowale, himself, agrees that something is wrong in principle with retroactive amendments is obvious from his column, penultimate Sunday, i.e. November 24, when he wrote about a “the Perpetual Swindle Party (PSP)”, which he said was “the party that changes its rules of the game while the game is in progress”. Surely to make a five-year single term effective from the last presidential election, i.e. from 1999, is to make the amendment retroactive.

Having entered my defence against Sobowale’s charges, we may now turn to those by my brother, Tunji Oseni. First, he says my description of his boss as schizophrenic because he (the boss) had described the impeachment threat issued by the National Assembly as “a joke carried too far”, in my article of September 4, was “itself disrespect carried too far”. Tunji is wrong to say that I described his boss as schizophrenic merely because the president had dismissed the legislators as jokers. He was, of course, wrong to be dismissive of the legislators, but my main reason for saying he was schizophrenic was that he seemed to believe his problems were always the handiwork of his enemies and never due to his own errors of judgement.

I do agree with Tunji, however, that to describe anyone, not to talk of the president of a country as schizoid, is rather harsh and I must say that I feel sorry that my language was too harsh on the president.

Tunji also says he was convinced I had finally parted ways with what he said was my usual analytical riguor and have turned into a mere propagandist, when I said in my October 2 article, that his boss has threatened that there will be civil war if the National Assembly went ahead to impeach him. “President Obasanjo”, he said, “did not and would not say there would be civil war because of an impeachment threat”.

Well, if by merely rephrasing what virtually all the newspapers reported the president as telling the members of the executive council of the Nigeria Institute of Public Relations (NIPR) who visited him in the wake of the impeachment threat, Tunji believes I have I have turned into a propagandists, then I should point out to him that I was hardly alone in smelling a hardly disguised threat of war in the president’s reported remarks; a paper like the Nigerian Tribune, which has often risen stoutly in defence of the President, also seems to have shared my impression.

In case Tunji missed it, I will like to refer him to the paper’s edition of September 24. The very title of its editorial on that day – “The alarm on Civil War” – says it all, the text, itself, even more so. “In a manner clearly suggestive of an impending doom”, said the paper, “President Olusegun Obasanjo dropped the hint of a civil war while commenting on events of the past one month, following the resign-or-be-impeached resolution of the House of Representatives, during a courtesy call on him by the executive of the Nigeria Institute of Public Relations (NIPR)”.

Not only did the paper see the president’s remarks as a threat of civil war, it clearly disapproved of it. In making the threat, said the paper, the president might have been thinking that his kith and kin would see the impeachment threat as “a political onslaught on the Yoruba”, who, presumably, would then rally round him, or the threat “could very well be the hollow, desperate cry to base sentiments by a man who had leaned too heavily upon his own counselling and understanding in bungling a golden opportunity”. A careful reading of the editorial shows quite clearly that the paper was inclined to believe the latter was the case.

Tunji also says I was unfair to accuse the president of lacking the will to fight corruption when, indeed he was the first president in Nigeria to initiate the “toughest” law on corruption not just in Nigeria, but anywhere in the world. Rally? Is Obasanjo’s anti-corruption law any tougher than those of the Chinese who have been executing corrupt officials long before anyone heard of the Akanbi panel? In any case, what use is a “tough” law when it is widely seen as highly selective in its application? Does it not speak volumes about the president’s commitment to fight corruption that the panel’s chairman, Justice Mustapha Akanbi would say that “nobody has given me any name in the executive to investigate” in all of its nearly four years of existence and in the context of the president’s own claim that he dropped some ministers because they were corrupt? (See Akanbi’s interview in the Saturday Vanguard of November 24).

Finally, Tunji says nowhere did I do my professional integrity so much damage as in my article of October 9, wherein I questioned the authenticity of president’s interview with the political editors of some newspapers in which he denied that he ever signed a deal with the Northern Caucus of the ruling PDP in exchange for their support of his presidential bid in 1999.

“I eagerly await his affirmation” said Tunji, “that the political editors’ interview never took place and was merely the product of a ‘prepared presidential text’, or his apology that he was wrong on that score”.

Whereas Tunji deserved my apology on the issue of my use of strong language on the president, he certainly does not deserve one on this issue for the simple reason that I never said no interview ever took place. The relevant words in my article in this respect were “it is fair to suspect that the newspapers were merely handed a prepared text” to use as each paper deemed fit.

Clearly, the operative word was suspicion not certainty. And given the explanation offered by one of the interviewers, Jide Ajani, of the Vanguard, for the wide discrepancies in the questions and answers carried by the five newspapers involved, discrepancies which I pointed out, there was every reason to suspect that there was something very funny about the interview. But the discrepancies were not my only reason for being suspicious. One, the invitation of the editor of New Nigerian, the government’s own newspaper, to the interview, was cancelled on the very day of the interview, presumably because the presidency was unsure of the loyalty of a paper published in Kaduna. Two, I have it on good authority that Thisday was deleted from the list of the papers for the interview by a senior presidential aide because it was regarded as a hostile publication.

And what was Ajani’s explanation? He said he went to the interview with two state-of-the-art recording machines, a digital Olympus recorder and a Sony BM 575 microcassette recorder. It was reasonable to assume that the remaining four editors also went to the interview with state-of-the-art recorders. Ajani also said he was seated only two seats away from the president. And since there were only five of them on the panel, it was reasonable to assume also that all of them were close enough to the recorders for their voices and that of the president to have been picked loud and clear.

For Ajani to then argue that “in any situation where you have more than one person conducting an interview, the reproduction can never be verbatim…” hardly makes any sense at all, at least not to me.

Yes, the president’s interview with the Ajani and Co. may have taken place, but I maintain that it was a very funny kind of interview. If anything, my suspicions have since been heightened by confirmations that the president did, after all, sign a deal with his party’s Northern Caucus, confirmations which he is yet to deny.