PEOPLE AND POLITICSThe danger of an imperial president (I) By Mohammed Haruna
Three weeks ago I drew the readers attention to a lecture the
then General Olusegun Obasanjo gave in Ibadan 18 years ago in which he
argued that what mattered about government is not how it came about but
whether or not it delivered. He said then that we should stop regarding
military rule as an aberation so long as it delivered. Some of us
thought that was dangerous prattle and said so.
That was all in 1985. Four years later he seemed to have shifted ever so slightly from endorsing military dictatorships – provided they delivered – to advocating one-party dictatorships. In a book he published in 1989 titled Constitution for National Integration and Development, he told his readers why he preferred the one-party system to multi- and even two-party systems. “Multi-party bickerings,” he said, “ is definitely a luxury we cannot afford. Our discussion so far has shown that reducing democratic practice to the operation of two parties is wrong... With the single party system, mass mobilization of the masses who have been held down and crippled by years of degrading oppression and servitude can be done without the inhibitions of ethnic jingoism.” Earlier, as if in answer to the question why, as Head of State, he did not impose a one-party or two-party rule in 1979, he gave three reasons. First, he said, his government did not want to make any major amendment to the draft constitution presented by the 1978 Constituent Assembly. Second, he said, a two-party system would only have excerbated the North-South dichotomy. Third, any party system, he said, “should come through evolution and not through legislation.” Fourteen years on it seems what he did not want to impose on Nigerians by fiat, his political bouncers, if not himself, now want to impose on the same Nigerians by rigging. His attempts in the last four years to square or squash the National Assembly and his party, the PDP, and generally to use every means to stay in power, showed quite clearly that the man never truly believed in liberal democracy – that is if he ever believed in any democracy at all. Certainly if he did not impose a one- or two-party system on Nigerians 24 years ago it was not because of the three reasons he gave. First, it was not true that his regime did not want to make any major amendment of the Constitution, for, he did make some major amendments, not least of which was the insertion of the controversial Land Use Decree in the Constitution. There are, indeed, people like Chief Rotimi Williams, the Chairman of Obasanjo’s Constitution Drafting Committee, who considered this amendment a most disagreeable veto of the people’s will by the military. Second, as we have seen during the Third Republic under military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, a two party system does not necessarily have to establish itself along the North-South divide. Indeed, as Babangida himself often argued, a two-party system could provide an ideological cure to such a dichotomy provided it was not imposed as Babangida tried to do with the SDP “a little to the left” and the NRC “ a little to the right.” Third, from what has now passed for elections recently, it should be obvious by now, if it wasn’t twenty-four years ago, that the president never really believed in the evolutionary process of party formation. Otherwise, he would not have condemned the registration of 30 political parties the way he did when he went to cast his vote during the Houses of Assembly elections on May 3. So many parties, he said in effect, are a waste of everybody’s time. “Out of the 30 registered parties”, Thisday of May 4 quoted him as saying “14 of them did not contest election, then what benefit are they if they could not contest election?” The paper went on to quote him as saying that he believes “that once we have a choice of one or two that should be enough.” Perhaps the president realised on second thought that one is not a choice and two is a limited choice, but he went on to say that he saw nothing wrong with us “having three or four parties”, beyond which it would be nothing but “confusion”. Thisday quoted the president as supporting his argument with examples from Britain and America which he said had only three and two party system respectively. With due respect, the president couldn’t have been more incorrect. In both countries, there are only-God-knows how many parties. Three are dominant in Britain and two in America, but there had always been many, many parties in both countries since Adam. One reason for this, of course, is that you don’t need to register with anyone to form a party just like was the case in Nigeria during the First Republic. Another reason is that you form a party to pursue a cause and not simply because, like Obasanjo apparently believes, you do so to contest and win elections. Obviously what happened in this country between April 12 and May 3 is the logical outcome of a powerful executive president who has always believed a multi- or even a two-party system is a nuisance. It is a logic that should be deeply disturbing for every true democrat. The great tragedy for this country is that even those institutions like the press, labour and religious institutions and other civic institutions which should be kicking against and screaming at the recent rape of democracy have either been applauding it, or at best, they have quietly acquiesced to it. As a result, some of those behind the gang rape are having a field day adding salt to our collective injury. Two such people are Chief Ojo Maduekwue, our Transport Minister of the bicycle fame and Chief Richard Akinjide, of the twelve two-thirds fame. In an interview with the Vanguard on May 10, Maduekwue joined PDP Chairman Audu Ogbeh in telling the new members of the National Assembly that they are there merely to rubberstamp the wishes of the president. “One wants to believe,” he said, “that they will learn the lessons of some of their former colleaques who could not come back to the National Assembly because they had to pay an electoral price for CHALLENGING A MAN PLACED BY GOD TO LEAD THIS NATION TO THE PROMISED LAND” (Emphasis mine). Ogbe had, in effect, earlier told a meeting of the new and old PDP legislators in Abuja that the only question they are permitted to ask when the president tells them to jump is, how high? Obviously it does not bother Maduekwue that for a man placed by God to lead Nigeria to the Promised Land, the president has been anything but a success. On the contrary, his record has been dismal on almost every count. Even Maduekwue seemed to admit as much without apparently realising it. “Whether in business, religion or academics,” he said in the same interview in question, “we are not yet a rule governed society. THE DICHOTOMY BETWEEN WHAT WE SAY AND WHAT WE DO IS STILL VERY STRONG. WE CANNOT TAKE POLITICS IN ISOLATION…….. what seems to impress most people is the end product – success.” (Emphasis mine). Little wonder then that the ruling party used every means, fair and foul, to stay in power. The sad thing about it all was that it was all so gratuitous. No doubt, in a free and fair election based on its record in the last four years, the ruling party would have been thrown out of power with ignominy. This was a government that earned the highest income any government in this country has ever earned and yet presided over an economy that shrank and an infrastructure – roads, refineries, universities, power supply, you name it – that simply went to the dogs. It was also a government that promised to wipe out corruption but again presided over the worst corruption in the history of this country. Last but, by no means the least, here was a government that came in with a promise to heal the wounds inflicted on the country by the dictatorships of Buhari and Babangida regimes and by the brutality and venality of the Abacha regime, but which ended up combining the worst of all three, in the sense that, bar our three-year civil war, the country has never witnessed the kind of ethnic and religion-inspired violence and extra-judicial killings experienced in the last four years, thanks to the leadership’s apparent policy of divide and rule. Given such dismal record the ruling party was a guaranteed loser in any truly free and fair election. But then the last elections were never fought on anyone’s record in office. They were fought on religious and ethnic sentiments. On that score, Obasanjo stood a better chance to win than General Muhammadu Buhari, as the leading contender to the throne, for the simple reason that whereas the South and Christians were generally united behind Obasanjo, the North and Muslims were divided between Buhari in ANPP and Vice-President Atiku Abubakar in the ruling party. For some strange(?) reason, however, Obasanjo’s fixers got a little too scared of the opposition and decided apparently not to take any chances with a free and fair election, even one based on sentiments rather than reason. It seems people around the president like Maduekwe and the likes of Chief Richard Akinjide, not, of course, leaving out the Fixer-In-Chief, Chief Tony Anenih, persuaded the president that, come what may, he simply must not lose the election, presumably as someone ordained by God to lead Nigeria to salvation, to paraphrase Maduekwe. Needless to say, Maduekwe is not alone in this game of flattery which can only lead the country into the quicksand of an imperial presidency. In this, the transport minister shares the good company of Chief Akinjide who described Obasanjo in an interview in The Guardian of May 3 as the Julius Caeser of Africa. “Let me say this,” he said, “Obasanjo is to Africa what Julius Caeser was to Rome in those days. Julius Caeser was a very great statesmen. He was a great military tactician, a general and a great author. Obasanjo has those three attributes. He is a great author, and a great military tactician. So what Julius Caeser was to Rome, that is what Obasanjo is to Nigeria, and indeed Africa.” In case they didn’t know already, someone ought to be telling the Akinjides and the Maduekwues of this world who are apparently hell-bent on flattering Obasanjo into wearing the destructive toga of an imperial presidency that what we need in Nigeria of the 21st Century is not a Julius Caeser who, as we all know, was hoisted by his own over-ambition and literally stabbed in the back by some of his very flatterers. Neither do we need any Messianic leadership. What we need is someone without any delusions of grandeur, someone who respects the wishes of the people, someone who means what he says and says what he means. APOLOGY
Last week I said the Supreme
Court gave a ruling recently that overturned the victory of the NPN in
the 1983 governorship race in Niger State in favour of the opposition
NPP. I said so in the context of an argument by Chief Akinjide that it
was impossible to rig our recent general elections.
I have since confirmed that
the Supreme Court gave no such ruling and that in fact the NPP petition
before it against the victory of the NPN candidate, Alhaji Awwal
Ibrahim, who has since become the Emir of Suleja, became overtaken by
the December 1983 coup. Consequently I wish to apologize to His Royal Highness, Alhaji Awwal Ibrahim, for whatever embarrassment my remarks may have caused him.
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